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

Introduction to the WordPress database


The process of planning and designing a database is one of the most critical phases of any project. A well-planned database design eases the process for future growth while increasing performance in data storage and retrieval. Usually, it's the responsibility of the development team to identify the entities and relationships between these entities. WordPress, on the other hand, is a CMS and hence offers an existing database to handle core features. So, the process of planning a database is not part of the responsibility as a developer in most scenarios. Instead, developers have a tougher task of understanding the core tables and managing the data needs with its limitations. Of course, you can create and use your own database tables for any requirement. But, doing so eliminates the whole purpose of developing on top of WordPress.

The WordPress database currently supports MySQL and MariaDB, with MariaDB being the most preferred choice. However, most of...