Learning WordPress development starts with a lot of key questions, including this one: “What language is WordPress written in?” Another common one is “Should I learn PHP or JavaScript first?” WordPress programming languages is a big topic, but we’ll cover all you need to get started.

Want to know how to include a JavaScript file onto your WordPress site? Here, we explain and demo an awesome WordPress function called wp_enqueue_script() that is the correct way to include JavaScript files in WordPress.

What’s better than an online conference with some of the best speakers in WordPress? I’ll get there in a second. Here are the schedule elements that caught my eye:

I learned a few things today: first, that WordPress has a built-in colorpicker called Iris, and second, that you can use it on the front end of your website if you need custom colorpicker functionality.

Over on Thoughtful Code, I wrote about why even in 2018 I’d choose PHP to make a new software application in. The heart of my reasoning is the conclusion:

A common piece of advice when it comes to optimizing the browser performance of your website is to concatenate and minify your CSS and JavaScript. There are many reasons and place you’ll see this recommended but Google PageSpeed Insights was the one that spurred me to action. And for me, I settled on a WordPress plugin called “Autoptimize” to make it easier for me to do it on this site. Autoptimize, if it’s not obvious, is a combination of the words “automatic” and “optimize”, and that’s just what it is, easy optimization of thing that are hard for non-developers to do.

Enqueuing is the WordPress way to add a stylesheet or JavaScript file on a page. We already published a Quick Guide about including your JavaScript in WordPress. This time, though, we’re adding an extra wrinkle: how do you only enqueue a JavaScript file on certain pages of your WordPress site. That’s the focus of this here Quick Guide.

Recently at the essential Post Status podcast, the essential JavaScript educator Zac Gordon sat down with Brian Krogsgard to compare JavaScript frameworks and libraries in a WordPress context.

It’s a big week in WordPress education: we just launched the Second Edition of Up and Running, which is awesome, and Zac Gordon is accepting enrollees for his JavaScript for WordPress Master Course.

WordPress developers are officially supposed to learn JavaScript. Not only because it’s homework from Matt: also because the REST API is chugging along in Core, and now we can do everything from build much smoother plugin interfaces to use WordPress as the backend for web and mobile apps. But we need JavaScript to do it.