WordPress development is a hugely useful skill, but it’s also tricky to learn—especially if you learn things out-of-order and try to tackle advanced topics while remaining confused on the fundamentals.

This article explains what I’ve needed to know to work as a freelance WordPress developer.

One of the most maligned features of WordPress is the use of “PHP global variables.” Whether you love them or hate them, global variables probably aren’t leaving WordPress soon. So today we’ll cover all there is to know about them. How to think about them. How you, in PHP, make variables global, access WordPress’s global variables, and a little about the theory and debate about global state in software applications.

Learning WordPress development starts with a lot of key questions, including this one: “What language is WordPress written in?” Another common one is “Should I learn PHP or JavaScript first?” WordPress programming languages is a big topic, but we’ll cover all you need to get started.

This article introduces one of the most important topics in WordPress development: functions.php. The functions file is one of the complex, interesting, and powerful in the arsenal of a WordPress theme. What follows

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.)

Before we look at how to register WordPress custom shortcodes, let’s be clear: If there’s one thing Gutenberg is about to kill, it’s the use of WordPress shortcodes in content creation.

WordPress template tags are a super-important and super-valuable part of WordPress, especially for theme development. They’re also one of the things I remember spending lots of time not quite getting as I was learning WordPress.

As a part of WordPress Security with Confidence, I built a feature that I felt a lot of people were hungry for. It’s a comparison table of WordPress security plugins. It starts to take people along the journey from “security is a serious topic that I have no idea how to handle” and toward “security is a set of problems I can solve in a variety of ways.” That transition is my motivation for the course, and it’s also the motivation for something I just made free: WPSecurityCompared.com. Which, well, makes it easy to compare WordPress security plugins.