WordPress is an open source Content Management System (CMS), allows the users to build dynamic websites and blog. As per an estimate it is a beast that powers 29% of the Internet, and there are over 74.6 million websites that depend on it.
Self-hosted WordPress websites account for 20% of that and over 50,000 WordPress websites are launched daily. That means there’s a monstrous market and a lot of work that needs to be done. In short huge demand. With WordPress on your skills list, you can not only launch your own site/blog, but can do development for others to make good funds.
Installation
WordPress is well-known for its ease of installation. Under most circumstances, installing WordPress is a very simple process and takes less than five minutes to complete. Watch the video to completely understand the whole process.
Important Links:
- WordPress files can be download from: http://wordpress.org/download/
- XAMP can be downloaded from https://www.apachefriends.org/
- Alternative to XAMP is WAMP, can be downloaded from https://www.wampserver.com/
- In-case you are using Mac OS then you can use MAMP https://www.mamp.info
Theme Development
WordPress Themes are files that work together to create the design and functionality of a WordPress site. Each Theme may be different, offering many choices for site owners to instantly change their website look. You may wish to develop WordPress Themes for your own use. Watch the complete video to start learning the whole process of developing your own theme from scratch.
Important Links:
- WordPress theme development guide: https://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development.
- Theme Handbook: https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/
Navigation Menus
WordPress comes with a navigation menu system that makes it quite easy for end user/developer to create and manage their website menus. Here is a quick go through on how you can create your own menus and manage them when developing your own theme.
Page Templates
Page templates in WordPress are a great way to add structural variations or highly customized functionality to your website. They allows you to create custom layouts for all of your pages. These custom layouts are called templates.
Watch the video to learn about WordPress pages and their usability within your theme.
Child Page Menus/Links
Pages in WordPress can be standalone or hierarchical, which means a page can have its own sub-pages also known as child pages. In this video, you will learn how to easily create a child page in WordPress to better organize your pages.
Post Meta Data
The post meta data is the “administrative” information you provide to viewers about each post. This information usually includes the author of the post, when it was written (or posted), and how the author categorized that particular post. In this video, you will learn about different ways to change your Theme design to display these important pieces of information in the manner you desire.
Archives
Archives page are a great way to bring together all your old content in one page. It allows you to even have dedicated pages for your monthly archives, category archives, tag archives, author archives, and anything else that you might want to add. In this video, you will learn about the archives and how you can use them within your theme.
Excerpt
Excerpt is an optional text associated to a Post. Most of the time, it is used as the Post summary. They allow users to display more content in less space. It is particularly useful for content rich websites such as news or magazine sites where the website owners would want to showcase more content on the front page with links to full articles. In this video, you will learn about the excerpt and their use within your theme.
Featured Image
Featured Images (also known as post thumbnail) is a WordPress theme feature which allows theme developers to add support for using a representative image for posts, pages, or custom post types. They are particularly useful as they represents the contents, mood, or theme of a post or page. In this video, you will learn about how to use featured images in your theme.
Search Form
In this video, we will learn about how to add search form to our WordPress theme.
Using Template Part
It’s a very common practice to reuse your code. For this reason in php we either use include or require. In a similar manner, WordPress also provides a simple mechanism for themes to overload reusable sections of code in the theme by using get_template_part() function. In this video, you will how to reuse your own code and reduce redundancy.
Widgets
A WordPress Widget is a small block that performs a specific function. You can add these widgets in sidebars also known as widget-ready areas on your web page. They were originally created to provide a simple and easy-to-use way of giving design and structure control of the WordPress theme to the user. They can be easily dragged and dropped into a specific widget area. You can find the list of available widgets and widget areas by going to the Appearance » Widgets section in your WordPress dashboard. In this video, we will learn how to use widgets within our theme.
Custom Homepage
A custom homepage is like customizing the front door to your site. By default, your homepage is your blog, but you can change this to any page you’ve created! Let’s learn how to achieve this:
Loop/Query
Though it’s little advance, but it will be fun to learn through on how you can loop through any posts, at any time and at any location within your theme.