This article is an in-depth WordPress shortcode tutorial. We cover what shortcodes are, when to use them, and how to register your own, with full-code custom shortcode examples.

This article explains how to use WordPress’s HTTP API, a set of PHP functions from within WordPress’s function library, to make remote HTTP requests to external resources, such as JSON REST APIs.

The WP_Query class is an exceptionally powerful tool in WordPress. As you may know, every WordPress site contains a database that stores many posts (of many post types) that make up the bulk of that site’s content, and WP_Query is the best way to fetch or retrieve a given selection of those posts for processing. So your theme files use it on regular basis, and a lot of plugins on your WordPress site will it.

This WordPress plugin development tutorial captures the steps I went through on a real project, including the mistakes I made and how I debugged them.

One of the most-used functions in my life with PHP is foreach. Partly, this is because it’s just an exquisitely named function, and it maps well to how I think. Partly this is because it’s kind of the backbone of a webpage: iterate through a set of things, operating on some selectively, and then display them all.

When I learned math, I didn’t really understand the modulus function. In fact, it was until I learned PHP that I understood the value of a remainder from division. PHP’s role in making websites makes the modulus operator (or modulo) much more important than it ever was in math class for me.

In this video and text Quick Guide, we present a basic use of WP_Query inside a WordPress shortcode, to show the post titles of the five most recently published posts. We’ve designed this Quick Guide to be a simple intro to using WP_Query in general, as well as to using WP_Query to display post titles and other post data inside a shortcode specifically.

Our focus today is PHP math. Or “PHP maths,” if you prefer British English. We’re not going to teach you the basics of mathematics itself, but just explore some of the common ways we use math in our PHP code and some of the less-clear things that end up super-valuable for web development using the PHP programming language.

In PHP, conditions are the core of conditional statements such as if-statements, and of certain other control structures like while() loops.

In this text and video Quick Guide, we’ll explain how to deactivate a WordPress plugin via FTP.