Book Image

WordPress Development Quick Start Guide

By : Ratnayake
Book Image

WordPress Development Quick Start Guide

By: 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 (11 chapters)

Introduction to WordPress Development

WordPress is the most widely-used CMS in the world, and the demand for developers is on the rise. Beginner WordPress developers are often restricted to using existing plugins and making minor modifications with the theme functions file. As a developer, you need a thorough understanding of WordPress core modules and components, along with a proper development setup to tackle complex application requirements.

This chapter focuses on introducing you to the prerequisites of WordPress development while clearing up some of the misconceptions about development. Unlike other frameworks, WordPress doesn't have an MVC architecture or similar. So, developers have the freedom to find their own techniques. We will begin by having a high-level overview of how developers can use the existing features in development, as well as the techniques for integrating our code with WordPress components. Then, we will move on to installing WordPress and discussing the use of configuration files with default and advanced configurations. Development tools and coding standards are the keys for producing quality code, and hence we will discuss the use of WordPress-specific coding standards as well as the use of popular open source development tools.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Installing and configuring a development environment for WordPress
  • How to use a WordPress configuration file
  • A high-level overview of the WordPress file/directory structure and their use in development
  • A brief introduction to WordPress coding standards and its usage
  • Using popular tools for debugging code

By the end of this chapter, you will have the necessary knowledge to understand the key development areas of WordPress and preparing the development environment for a smooth workflow.