Welcome! WordPress themes are one of the first and most important topics that one must understand to be good at WordPress development. Themes underlie the entire visual half of WordPress site, but often grow to do even more. We’re hoping your find these free content very helpful, as we think it covers some of the most important concepts in doing WordPress theme development for yourself.

This article introduces one of the most important topics in WordPress development: the WordPress template hierarchy. It’s one of the most important concepts in all of WordPress theme development. (We have a full free course on the topic, check it out.)

If you read my recent article about the template hierarchy, you may have caught this tidbit. If not, you may not have learned that we here at WPShout recently purchased WPHierarchy.com and have been working to update it.

We’ve talked about the WordPress template hierarchy before on WPShout a few different times. Here are the highlights:

Three major changes in WordPress 4.7 jump out as having the power to significantly transform how I do my work every day.

I’m a bit behind the eight-ball on this. But I’m pretty excited by some of the new theme features that are in the works for WordPress 4.7. The most interesting to me is the new get_theme_file_uri() function, which will be a child-theme aware method of easily linking to your theme resources. Got that? It’s cool because:

The template hierarchy is one of my favorite features in WordPress. It not only makes child themes possible, but it also makes the whole ecosystem better because more code can be written to sit in smaller and smaller chunks. This is great. What’s also cool about it is that it’s all enabled by a few relatively small chunks of code. But staring at them starts to expose us to some of the most interesting parts of WordPress.

I have a confession to make: for a long time I’ve been scared of Genesis.

Today we have a very esteemed guest author: Josh Pollock! Josh is the co-founder of CalderaWP, which authors top-quality WordPress plugins. They’ve just released a new plugin: Easy Queries, an awesome new visual editor for WordPress queries.

(Click to go straight to the hack »)