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 WordPress themes


A WordPress theme is a set of files, created using a predefined structure and features, to act as the presentation layer of the website. In simple terms, the presentation layer should contain the HTML needed to generate the layout and all the data passed by the models. WordPress is built to create content management systems, and hence it doesn't focus on separating the presentation layer from its business logic.

Themes contain template files as a mix of both HTML code and PHP logic. As a developer, you need to have knowledge of both designing layouts and applying logic to work with themes.

The themes in your WordPress site are located in the wp-content/themes directory, with each theme using its own folder. A theme is identified by the predefined set of comments used in the style.css file. If this file is not available or the comment is broken, WordPress will not list it as a theme, even though the theme files have been placed in the wp-content/themes directory...