This video and text tutorial will teach you how to customize WordPress widgets, including how to edit your WordPress sidebar.

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 year, it’s felt like change is in the air. The WordPress landscape seems to be shifting at the small-to-medium client level, with ever-stronger competitors driving attempted innovation within WordPress, while some giant players (huge hosting companies, “everything” themes) continue to gobble up huge numbers of the worst-informed customers and the rest of the marketplace starts to crunch.

Finding good WordPress themes can be really hard, because:

In this week’s Quick Guide, we cover how to make a child theme in WordPress. You can — and sometimes should — just modify your CSS via the new “Additional CSS” feature in 4.7. But when you want to make bigger changes — especially to the PHP in the template files themselves, that’s not enough. That’s where you should be using a child theme in WordPress.

One of the focuses that Helen Hou-Sandi chose for WordPress 4.7 has been the experience for new users of WordPress. I think this is really wise, as WordPress faces increasing competition from hosted off-the-shelf website-building platforms that have long made that a much higher priority than WordPress has.

I asked myself: What in WordPress have I been thankful for in 2016? The answers will guide you to some amazing stuff.

Paulund has a nice little tutorial about something I’ve done once or twice, but haven’t managed to ever write down or remember well: how you can provide page templates in a plugin.

I’m writing Solo Pine up because they’ve been (specifically, their theme Redwood has been) lovely for a current client project. It’s very rare that a WordPress theme designer offers both beautiful design and clean, not-overdoing-it coding, and Solo Pine fits that ticket.