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Welcome to WordPress

One of my friends told me wanted to learn how to develop for WordPress. My reply was it’s very easy just go to the codex and start. Having said that and having sent him on his merry way. I realized maybe I have sent him on the wrong path, while the codex is the holy book of wordpress from which to start but a new developer might easily wander of the correct path.

So keeping that in mind I hope that this post sends any newbie developers out there on the correct path.

I assume that you know how to setup wordpress, Install and Unistall plugins change themes (the very basics of wordpress) people usually get upto this part and assume wordpress is very very easy. Well It’s easy but not that easy.

Coding standards are important and also following procedure so that any work you do can be easily or at the very least feasibly update code. So this article is a suggestion piece for those seeking a path.

The main part are the themes and plugins. Now you could easily make any changes either in the theme or in the plugin and it would work regardless but you need to know where to put what.

I will not be covering how to write themes or plugins that would be to vast to cover in a single post.

This is a article that I think covers the discussion in full so I first suggest you go through this.

http://code.tutsplus.com/articles/functionality-plugins-vs-themes–wp-26314

As a rule I tend to avoid adding functionality (big changes) to themes, only minor changes that I wouldn’t bother creating an entire plugin for I add to a theme as that makes sense to me. And even if I do I always and I mean always work on the child theme(BEST PRACTICE)

So learn how to create a child theme. 😛

Now at the heart of WordPress is action hooks and filters. Your life as a wordpress developer will revolve around knowing which hooks and which filters to use.

For beginners this might be a hard concept to grab I will do my best to make this simple.

Basically these are places by which you can grab onto to specific parts of the wordpress.

Defined as do_action(‘function_name’);
then you can add_action(‘function_name’,’functionality_you_want_to_add’);

So the functionality_you_want_to_add can alter, add or do both.(Please ask in comments if you don’t understand) and please visit https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/do_action and also apply_filters and add_filters.
This is the basic starter pack, after I come up with a more concrete work plan(if requested) I will post them later. For now ciao WPers and have fun.

 

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