We (here at WPShout) are thinking hard about making a complete paid course that gets anyone interested in WordPress development totally up to speed on PHP. And so far on the site, we’ve covered to the most important PHP data types, objects and arrays.

Your first million dollars. The game-winning catch. A guest post in Smashing Magazine. These are life’s moments of pure success, and David had one of them this week. We’ll keep you posted on the other two.

We’re going to cover creating a working WordPress options page, without using the Settings API.

Learning WordPress development starts with a lot of key questions, including this one: “What language is WordPress written in?”

Regular expressions or regexes—custom formulas for complex string pattern matching—are very useful, but also extremely opaque if you’re not used to reading or writing them. Just to show you how deep the nightmare goes, here’s the officially approved PHP regex for evaluating whether a string is a valid email address:

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.

I truly love WooCommerce, but there’s one thing I don’t love about it: breaking changes. Working mostly in WordPress, breaking changes generally feel like something scary and challenging that I expect people in other environments to have to deal with—a bit like, say, cobras. The exception is WooCommerce, which brings the cobras right into my house.

Note: We’ve revised and expanded this article on the WordPress Options API as part of Up and Running, our multimedia guide to the principles of WordPress development.

You know who’s really great? Pippin Williamson.