WP Realm

WordPress news, community news, reviews and more from all over the world

How to get started as a WordPress Developer

by Leave a Comment

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.

The plan and schedule for WordPres 5.0

by Leave a Comment

Ever since WordCamp Europe 2018 in Belgrade, people have been anxiously waiting for the release schedule of WordPress 5.0. Specifically, when will Gutenberg finally been added to core.

Well, the wait is over. Matt Mullenweg published a plan for WordPress 5.0 over at the Make WordPress Core blog. This is what he had to say about it:

[Read more…] about The plan and schedule for WordPres 5.0

Give props in abundance, not in restraint

by Leave a Comment

Giving props, for those who are unaware, is where someone who has contributed to open-source code is given acknowledgment. Typically you’ll find these props given within a specific ticket in which a person has contributed a fix for the open ticket. In the WordPress realm, you’ll also find these props at the bottom of a new release post as you can see here in the section called The Squad.

Those who contributed the actual fix are the ones receiving props. But … that’s not very inclusive.  [Read more…] about Give props in abundance, not in restraint

WordPress.com, Jetpack and How It’s All Changing, Maybe?

by 5 Comments

Having a commercial version of WordPress alongside a non-profit version has been confusing. Especially to those starting out with WordPress, but not exclusively those new to it. It would be a great win for the WordPress Community if Automattic’s flagship product, WordPress.com, would rebrand itself to Jetpack.com. I have said this, half-jokingly, in the past decade to anyone who would listen. #sorrynotsorry.

But with WordPress.com now allowing for plugins and themes to be activated on their platform, the lines get even more blurry.

The Need to Make Money

Since Automattic is running on venture capital money, at some point it’s going to focus on monetization even more. If you have been paying close attention to how the sign-up between a stand-alone WordPress installation and Jetpack has changed over the last couple of months, you will have noticed. For a brief period, the free option was even hidden in the “Skip for now” button below the pricing table you’re greeted with when you connect Jetpack to your site.

You may have also noticed Automattic opening up their affiliate program. It includes Jetpack, WordPress.com, and everything WooCommerce now. All clear signs that Automattic has made monetization a higher priority in recent months. And judging by a tweet sent out yesterday at the Affiliate Summit, Jetpack is taking a very prominent role:

Changes in Branding

What’s even more interesting, navigating to the WordPress.com main page–make sure you’re logged out–will show you a WordPress frontpage without any signs of a W. Meaning the WordPress logo. I’m not sure when this changed, but it’s a very clear sign that WordPress.com’s branding is changing.

It’s just pure speculation on my part that this will lead to switching from WordPress.com to Jetpack.com, but I for one would welcome the change. I also think it will help send less of a mixed message for those entering the WordPress Community, Automattic’s affiliate program or both. 😉