Learn WordPress

Get Set Up With WordPress

1. Intro To WordPress

Welcome to One Month’s Learn Wordpress! This course is project-based and very hands-on, and by the end of the next four weeks you will have earned an advanced level of experience working with WordPress development. In the coming weeks, you'll build a WordPress theme from scratch, you'll be able to customize any WordPress theme and build WordPress websites for yourself and future clients.

2. Who Uses WordPress?

WordPress is, by far, the most popular open source Content Management System (CMS), used by approximately 33% of websites (on the entire internet!). So if you are planning on creating a WordPress site for yourself or your business, you'll be in good company. Its popularity also means that there is a large number of plugins available for use, as well as a large WordPress community of makers and developers.

3. Prerequisites for this Course

In this lesson, we go over the prerequisites you’ll need to have in order to be successful in the course. By the end of this course you’ll be able to take a static website built with just HTML and CSS and transform it into a full-fledged WordPress website with a database and backend.

4. Set Up Your Server

To run WordPress, you’ll need a server. In this lesson, I’ll show you how to register a domain name and set up a web hosting account.

5. How to Install WordPress

We're one step closer to getting started on our theme! But first, we need to install WordPress on the server. In this lesson you’ll see how to use the tools available on your web hosting account to install WordPress quick and easy.

6. How to Use FTP with WordPress

When you navigate to a newly installed WordPress website, you'll see a default theme with some default content in use. So how exactly do you change the code in WordPress and get your website's content live? This can be done with an FTP (File Transfer Protocol). In this lesson, I’ll show you how to connect to your server with Cyberduck—a free FTP application.

7. How to Disable Gutenberg and Keep the Classic Editor

WordPress updated their WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) text editor to a newer editor called "Gutenberg." Personally, I’m not a huge fan of the new editor, I find it difficult to use. But how do you revert back to the classic-style WordPress editor? In this video, you'll learn how to use the Classic Editor Plugin. However, if you like the new editor, feel free to continue using it; it won't affect the underlying code, theming or any of the lessons.

Week 1: WordPress Theming for Beginners

1. WordPress Theme Development

In this course we’ll be creating a WordPress theme called Cats Who Code! In this lesson, you'll download some project files, and then we'll quickly go over the files and directories in that project so that you become familiar with the structure of a WordPress site and so that you know which files to modify when creating a new theme.

2. How to Activate a New WordPress Theme

A WordPress theme must always include two files: index.php and style.css. In this lesson, we create a very minimal theme, upload it and activate it via the WordPress admin dashboard. You'll see how to add details about your theme using the style.css file and also how to add an image that will be used as that theme's thumbnail on the admin dashboard.

3. Add the Bloginfo() Template Tags for the CSS

After activating the uploaded theme and heading over to the homepage of the site, you'll notice that things are still a bit off. The CSS isn't being applied. What gives? The problem is that after uploading the website's files to the server, the linked file paths are different than what's written in code. We need to set the correct path to our CSS files on the index page for them to be used. To get the path, we'll make use of the bloginfo() template tag.

4. Add Template Tags to Your Images

We fixed the paths to our CSS files, but their not the only asset files that our website is using. The website also makes use of some image files whose links we need to fix. In this video, we use template tags to fix the paths to local images.

5. Add Template Tags for Your Title

We continue making the site more dynamic by replacing our hard-coded tags with Template Tags.

Week 2: The WordPress Loop

1. Header, Footer, Sidebar

The Loop is the heart of WordPress. In this lesson, we separate out the header, footer and sidebar from our blog posts so that WordPress' Loop can render our page content dynamic. In this way, they will be reusable! We'll be able to easily plug them on any page we want, giving the website a consistent look.

2. Install The Loop

In this lesson we’ll go deeper into the Loop and how it works. You will learn how to use it to loop through WordPress posts.

3. Loop Specific Template Tags

Loop specific template tags are tags that will only work inside the Loop. In this lesson we’ll use these tags to display a rich array of data about our posts.

4. How to Use The Author, The Time, and Images in WordPress

In this lesson we’ll look at the author and time tags, both of which can only be used inside the Loop. The author tag returns the author of a post while the time tag returns the time the current post was made. You will learn how to configure the format of the time displayed by the time tag. I’ll finish off by showing you how dynamic images are added to posts.

5. Full-Size Images and Author Options

In this lesson we’ll look at how to use full-sized images in your posts and also how to edit your WordPress author name and configure the author's publicly displayed name.

6. Permalinks

We set up permalinks for our blog posts. Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual blog posts, as well as categories and other lists of blog postings.

7. CSS Hacking in Your WordPress Theme

Now let's dig into the CSS of our WordPress theme. First we’ll change our markup from using static to dynamic IDs and classes. With this, we'll now be able to easily target each individual post.

Week 3: WordPress Template Hierarchy

1. Template Hierarchy

Let's talk about template hierarchy and how it'll help make your WordPress site look even spiffier. A WordPress theme is a collection of templates that are used to display content. Template files are modular, reusable files, used to generate the web pages on your WordPress site. The WordPress template hierarchy determines what order your template files are loaded within your WordPress theme.

2. Comments

In this lesson, we look at how to add a comments section to your WordPress site.

3. Functions

Functions.php is very powerful! The functions file behaves like a WordPress Plugin, adding features and functionality to a WordPress site through PHP code. You can use it to call native PHP functions, WordPress functions, or to define your own functions. It can be used to change the default behavior of WordPress and to extend the functionality of your theme and WordPress installation. In the next few lessons, we'll use it to register a sidebar and a main menu. Stay tuned!

4. How to Create a Sidebar in WordPress

Now let's upload our footer and sidebar to WordPress, and start customizing it! In this lesson we’ll use the functions.php file to register our sidebar. Sidebars usually contain widgets that you can customize. Let’s look at the steps needed to get a new sidebar active in your WordPress theme.

5. Customize the Available Widgets

Now that we've registered our sidebar in WordPress, let's customize it. You'll find out how to add widgets to the sidebar and customize them. Other than using the available widgets, WordPress also allows you to create widgets of your own. We cover this briefly in this lesson, but in the next lesson, we'll create a widget for our site.

6. Create New Widgets

Let's explore how to create our very own bespoke WordPress widget.

7. Navigation Menus

Now let's talk about how to set up navigation menus. WordPress includes an easy to use mechanism for introducing customized navigation menus into a theme. In order to incorporate menu support into your theme, you need to add a few code segments to your theme files. The good news, is that the process of registering and setting up a navigation menu is similar to that of setting up the sidebar.

8. Tags and Categories

Tags and categories are the meta-language of WordPress used to organize and structure your content. The rule of thumb is: Tags are meant to describe specific details of your posts and it is usually a best practice to have several per post. While categories are best used for broad groupings of topics and there is usually one per post while

9. Category Navigation

It's good to plan out the categories of your website early on when creating your theme as these often end up being part of the site's navigation links. The lesson also covers how to remove the word /category/ from your WordPress permalinks.

Week 4: Advanced WordPress Development

1. Advanced Theming

In the previous weeks, you've learned the basics of WordPress. What you've learned so far is more or less included in every theme you've worked on or that you'll ever work on. This week we're going to look at more advanced theming features.

2. The Edit This Post Hack

'Edit this post' is a cool hack to offer your users. It displays a link to edit the current post if a user is logged in and has permission to edit the post. It can be used inside or outside The Loop and it can be used with pages, posts, attachments, and revisions. Let's set it up!

3. Adding Plugins to Your Theme

WordPress plugins offer all kinds of customization for your WordPress website. There are thousands of plugins that you can utilize. Before we explore them, let's enable plugins on our custom theme.

4. WordPress Plugins Tutorial

Now that our WordPress theme is ready for plugins, let's install a few!

5. The Best WordPress Plugins You’ll Want to Include in Your Theme

In this lesson I’ll share with you a list of my favorite WordPress plugins. This will come in super helpful and save you a lot of time searching for plugins.

6. How to Get Custom Post Types in WordPress

By default, WordPress comes with a few different post types. These are Posts, Pages, Attachments, Revisions, Navigation Menus, Custom CSS and Changesets. If none of these are suitable for your theme, WordPress allows you to extend the number of post types you have. You create or modify a post type using the register_post_type function.

7. Advanced Custom Fields

What about custom fields? Well, you guessed it, WordPress can support those, too. You can use the Advanced Custom Fields plugin to take full control of your WordPress edit screens & custom field data.

8. The Most Popular WordPress Themes

What if you don't want to build a WordPress theme from scratch? You can find free and premium themes online that you can use. A good place to start looking is the official WordPress Theme Directory. In the video, we also point you to some other websites that you can get themes from.

9. Congrats! You Earned Your WordPress Certification

After you complete all the videos in this course you will earn the One Month WordPress Certificate. Kudos to you!

Bonus Tutorials

1. How to Use FTP

In this lesson, I’ll show you how to get started with FTP, as well as an update to change the permissions settings to improve performance.

2. Multiple Sidebars in WordPress

Let's walk through how to set up multiple sidebars in WordPress.

Download Completed Projects

1. Download Final Theme

Take a peek at the final One Month WordPress. This is all the code (HTML, CSS, and PHP) that has gone into building our theme. If you get stuck at any point in this course? Take a look at my code and compare your work to mine.