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 is not a new resource, but I just rediscovered and found it still incredibly relevant. Back in 2011, Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko put together a little diagram that shows the difference between three of the most common ways of dealing with getting posts in WordPress, a new WP_Query object, or the query_posts() or get_posts() functions.

I really enjoyed David’s article from a few weeks ago on the basics of functional programming as it applies to WordPress’s nested data structures. One of the nice things about working with him is that I learn a lot, too. Today, I want to continue exploring the somewhat-functional world David introduced, and suggest some freer ways of interacting with a very important entity in WordPress: the WP_Query object.

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

If you don’t understand WordPress functions, your code will do a lot of things the hard way.

WP_Query is an exceptionally powerful tool in WordPress. 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.

Two weeks ago we talked about the languages you need to know to make or modify WordPress themes. This week we’re focusing specifically on the most important of those languages for theme work, PHP. PHP is the language that the majority of WordPress is written in, it’s the part of WordPress that makes the server work in the right way.