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.

“WordPress is a factory” is a core analogy designed to clarify what WordPress is as a technical system.

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:

Navigation menus are one of the most obvious features that go into making a site. If you’re building or revising a WordPress theme, you’ll almost certainly have one or more areas where you’ll want users to be able to easily make menus. Fortunately, they’ve thought of that.

One of the easiest mistakes to make when you first start to make WordPress themes is duplication. It’s one of the simplest and most complicated lesson of making good software anywhere, really. Duplicating code with a quick copy and paste is super easy, and in the short term you feel really efficient — look at all these things I’ve accomplished quickly.