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

Summary


The frontend of an application is the main interaction point for users and hence the possibility of requesting frontend changes is relatively high. Therefore, it's important to use the existing features of a theme to make templates as flexible as possible. In this chapter, we looked at the importance of a theme and its components in development. Then, we started extending existing themes with the use of child themes, actions, and filters. Next, we had an in-depth overview of the theme template hierarchy in order to build new themes as well as customize existing themes in a flexible way. Finally, we looked at the techniques for conditionally changing the design to cater for advanced site requirements.

In Chapter 4, Building Custom Modules with Plugin Development, we will be looking at the process of building different types of WordPress plugins and adding the features, beyond the functionality of a them.