WordPress development is a massively useful skill, but it’s also tricky to learn—especially if you learn things in a piecemeal way that allows basic confusions to persist while you try to tackle advanced topics.

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. It’s often usefully simplified into being called “a WordPress theme’s plugin.”

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.

We here at WPShout are thinking hard about making a complete paid course that gets anyone interested in WordPress development totally up to speed on PHP. And so far on the site, we’ve covered to the most important PHP data types, objects and arrays.

This introduction to PHP output buffering and its uses in WordPress contains a few helpful resources:

Earlier this week we announced the upcoming Third Edition launch of our critically acclaimed “learn WordPress development” course Up and Running. This new Edition adds new Gutenberg content, and updates the course for 2018.