Book Image

WordPress Development Quick Start Guide

By : Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake
Book Image

WordPress Development Quick Start Guide

By: Rakhitha Nimesh Ratnayake

Overview of this book

WordPress is the most used CMS in the world and is the ideal way to share your knowledge with a large audience or build a profitable business. Getting started with WordPress development has often been a challenge for novice developers, and this book will help you find your way. This book explains the components used in WordPress development, when and where to use them, and why you should be using each component in specific scenarios. You begin by learning the basic development setup and coding standards of WordPress. Then you move into the most important aspects of the theme and plugin development process. Here you will also learn how themes and plugins fit into the website while learning about a range of techniques for extending themes and plugins. With the basics covered, we explore many of the APIs provided by WordPress and how we can leverage them to build rapid solutions. Next, we move on to look at the techniques for capturing, processing, and displaying user data when integrating third-party components into the site design. Finally, you will learn how to test and deploy your work with secure and maintainable code, while providing the best performance for end users.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Index

Getting started with developing themes


We discussed the development tasks involved in themes in the preceding section. Building a theme from scratch is a process with a very wide scope and hence not feasible to discuss in this type of book. Therefore, we will focus on customizing existing themes while providing the necessary knowledge to build themes from scratch. There are two ways of adding or modifying features in an existing theme:

  • Building and customizing features of a design by modifying template files
  • Extending theme features through available filters and actions

Both of these techniques require us to modify the files of an existing theme. In most sites, we will be using existing, free, or premium themes that have developed by third-party developers. So, it's obvious that we will receive updated versions of the theme with more features, bug fixes, and improved code. The theme update process wipes out all of the changes that have been made to core theme files. This means that we need...