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Andrea Rennick

How to get started as a WordPress Developer

13 April 2014 by Andrea Rennick

WordPress is the web’s most popular content management system powering over 70,000,000 websites worldwide. With this amount of mass-usage, some of the most talented developers around have chosen WordPress as their development platform of choice. These developers aren’t born with the skills to make WordPress functional and elegant.

Fortunately, there are numerous resources to help developers hone their WordPress mojo. This article is intended to serve as a resource for both newcomers and seasoned developers to both learn how to develop better websites and how to find answers to often ambiguous or complex questions.

1. Prerequisites

As far as development goes, WordPress has one of the lowest barriers to entry of any platform. This doesn’t mean that anyone can become without having any other web experience. These the folowing items are the foundation of any WordPress Developer’s skills.

HTML, CSS & JavaScript

HTML, CSS and Javascript are the basic building blocks of the web. Having a solid grasp of these tools will help immensely when developing on WordPress, or any other web platform at that. Luckily these languages are relatively easy to learn, but it takes time to master. There are countless books and online courses around to teach you these skills. I recommend W3 Schools to learn the basics then moving to a more advanced course like Lynda.com or Treehouse. There are also countless books available.

PHP & MySQL

WordPress’s Content management system is written almost exclusively in PHP with MySQL as it’s database backbone. Having a grasp these two technologies will help you develop better on the platform. Lynda.com has a great introductory course to PHP & MySQL which will walk you through building your own (custom) CMS. Though many the things you learn, such as database queries and includes are handled by WordPress through its own functions, understanding what these functions actually do under the hood will help you build sites better.

Local Development Environment

Having a local development environment allows you to work with WordPress on your own computer and is the quickest way to develop sites. This is part of any standard development workflow. There are several ways to install WordPress locally. The easiest way to do this is with something like BitNami which allows you to install all off of the WordPress components through an easy to use application. To get more advanced install an AMP (Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack. MAMP is a good way to do this for users on a Mac. WAMP is a good tool for users on a windows machine. The most advanced users often opt in to installing these services individually and often replace the standard PHP install with PHP-FPM and Apache with NGINX for better performance while using fewer system resources. Who Is Hosting This also offers reviews of the top shared hosting packages, which could be a great option for developers just getting started, or is having trouble working from a local server.

Staging Environment

Once changes are made to a site locally, in a standard development workflow, the next step is to push the files to a staging environment. This will mimic how a production (public-facing) website will loop and perform, but is not publicly accessible. Launching a small cloud server instance through a company like Digital Ocean is an affordable way of creating a staging environment on a dedicated cloud server, less than $5 per month.

Note: Amazon Web Services and Rackspace are the top two providers of cloud servers, but Digital Ocean is much cheaper, and is a startup.

Text Editor / IDE

Choosing a text editor can be a very personal choice, such as choosing a brand of cars. With that being said, some text editors are much more fit for WordPress than others. The editor of choice for most WordPress developers is Sublime Text 2, which is an open source text editor with a wide range of features. Pauluund has a great post on Web Development with Sublime Text, which will show you all of the key features that a WordPress developer would use.

2. Working With WordPress

Now that all of the prerequisites have been met, it is time for the fun part, working with WordPress.

Installing WordPress

Installing WordPress is super-easy with the famous 5-minute install. One thing to note is that the instructions are listed on the WordPress Codex. The Codex is WordPress’s living documentation, and is a great point of reference for almost any WordPress issue.

When Things Go Wrong…

Most, if not all developer run into problems, especially when they are first getting started. When this happens, it is important to find the right place to get support.

Getting Basic WordPress Support

WordPress is a thriving Open Source project with thousands of active community members. Many of them offer their assistance through things like forms and Q&A sites. For most questions, the best place to go is the WordPress Support Forums and post the issue in the appropriate category. Most posts get responses (and subsequent answers) within a matter of hours. Be as specific as possible for the best results; the more information the better.

More Advanced Support

Another place to get support is the WordPress Stack Exchange. Similar to Stack Overflow, there are hundreds of daily active users. Please note, Stack Exchange has very specific rules for formatting and what questions should be asked, keep all questions on the WordPress topic. For more generalized programming questions, Stack Overflow is the appropriate Q&A Site. All of the questions on these sites are geared towards developers.

Filed Under: Miscellaneous Tagged With: development

How to Stay Sane While Working Online

5 September 2012 by Andrea Rennick

You know those days. The ones where everything on your computer is blinking at you, your inbox causes you to sigh and close it, the phone will not stop and it’s possible that funky smell may be coming from your person. On top of that, every little thing that crosses your path is causing irrational feelings of anger. On the rare occasions you do leave your desk, the people you live or work with shrink back or get out of your way.

Does this sound familiar?

You aren’t alone. It happens to all of us. It’s also a sign that you need a break.

Yes, I said it. This is your WordPress Mom talking and she’s being.. well, your mom. It really is for your own good. [Read more…] about How to Stay Sane While Working Online

Filed Under: Columns Tagged With: support

Writing a Better Support Forum Request

8 August 2012 by Andrea Rennick

Greeting from the not so cold or snowy Great White North. It is I, your intrepid reporter coming to you live from the support forum trenches. I’m Andrea Rennick, co-author of WordPress All-In-One for Dummies, and part of the excellent support team at StudioPress.

When I was first asked to contribute, one of the very first things that came to mind was covering the myriad of ways in which your users can provide information that we, the support team, can use to help them get the best help available. Send your users here and I’ll set them right.

[Read more…] about Writing a Better Support Forum Request

Filed Under: Columns Tagged With: support

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