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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

Check your server setup easily with phpinfo() for WordPress

4 October 2012 by Zé Fontainhas

We all know that phpinfo() is an easy way to see if a server has what it takes to run WordPress smoothly, but sometimes that is not enough. phpwpinfo provides an equivalent to the phpinfo() function that reports WordPress Requirements information about the PHP/MySQL/Apache environment, and offers suggestions for improvement. This tool allows you to quickly test environment server where you want to install WordPress.

It tests various elements such as : [Read more…] about Check your server setup easily with phpinfo() for WordPress

Filed Under: News Tagged With: development

WordPress In-Action: CGIAR NGO

10 July 2012 by David Coveny

Project Website:

CGIAR

What is the website for?

The website is designed to act as both the main site for the CGIAR NGO, and as a hub for the huge range of content made available by all the consortium members.

The Brief:

The brief was, in effect, this list:

  1. Web design based on the new branding guidelines
  2. Designs for page layouts, style elements, typography, graphical elements
  3. Unify and clearly present the information generated by the various Centres and CRPs
  4. Create a central entry point for visitors to find the main governing bodies of CGIAR
  5. Shift the emphasis from ‘the institution’ to ‘content and research’
  6. Increase the unity of the Centres, CRPs, Fund and Consortium Office through consistent design and branding
  7. Communicate clearly what CGIAR is and what it does

There was, of course, a lot more to it than that and in the meetings that followed we realised that a good responsive design was a must – even if it can be a massive challenge on a complex site. We also knew that widgets had to work flexible – if a widget space was small, the widget should respond to that – responsive within responsive, if you see what I mean. That means the chances of a user putting a widget somewhere and messing up a page is pretty slim, so long as it’s one of our widgets, that is – some plugins have their own ideas!

[Read more…] about WordPress In-Action: CGIAR NGO

Filed Under: Case Study Tagged With: development

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