This week on WPblab we’ll be speaking with WPShout about learning to do WordPress development. If you are looking to be a WordPress developer this should be the perfect episode for you.
David B Hayes and Fred Meyer – WordPress developers, contributors, and enthusiasts. Our goal is to make the world of WordPress accessible to everybody.
Alex Denning – started publishing about WordPress development on WPShout in 2009
One of their projects for meditation – http://medivate.com
WPShout – mostly writing for people who are learning or who already are developers – not aimed at beginners
David writes a quick guide every Thursday for simple tips and suggestions
Good starting place for someone wanting to get into development – Up and Running – step by step introduction to WordPress development
Up and Running – Discount code: WPBLAB – 20% off any package!! If you purchase before end of 3/24, you’ll also be entered to win some cool prizes!
Up and Running starts with the core technical fundamentals (and terminology) and breaks it down into a factory analogy to make it easier to understand the process … (Up and Running synthesizes WordPress development into a cohesive package)
The goal is to go from knowing about the concepts (html, css, php, wordpress basics, etc.) to becoming proficient and knowing how to use all the pieces and parts, and why & how they work, by the end of the program
“Everyone should use CMS’s and WordPress is the best one, so use it!”
Recorded a number of interviews with well known WP devs about how they got to where they are – Pippin Williamson, Helen Hou-Sandi, etc.
Screenflow is used for their video screen capture
Even if you never do the coding stuff or that’s not your focus, the hope is that Up and Running helps make it easier to understand the concepts and why it works the way it does – great for Designers too looking to level up their understanding
David started using WordPress in 2007 – learned how to be a web developer by having a website and wanting to make little changes here and there and beating his head against the wall – it was something he cared about strongly so making it better was important to him
WordPress is a great way to break into the entire field of Web Development
Learn WordPress Plugin Development
Some of the best ways to learn are to use Google to search for answers and to really dig through the Codex or the Code Reference
- https://codex.wordpress.org/
- https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/
- https://learn.calderalabs.org/
People come to WordPress from so many different backgrounds – sometimes it’s a nurse or an educator or a business person who was the most tech savvy in their office and they ‘inherited’ the site and the responsibility to market it
One of the most under-valued skills that most people in the tech field have is that they know how to use Google just a little bit better than everyone else!! You might have the ability to get an answer in 2 minutes that may take a non-technical person an hour to find. That’s worth a whole lot!
One of the first and easier plugins you could tackle is a shortcode plugin – will teach you some of the basics of the hook system / registering a plugin, etc.
One of the greatest ways to start learning PHP is to start with creating a child theme – it’s pretty safe and pretty easy to get started
If you can safely “cowboy code” your website – it’s one of the best first steps to getting started with WordPress development… you get immediate feedback from the work you put in – a local development environment is great and you should use it as a professional, but for the beginner dev, it can be overkill
Local Development – DesktopServer
Text editing
Thanks for helping us with the show notes
Cheryl LaPrade – @YayCheryl on Twitter
Sherie LaPrade – @HeySherie on Twitter
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