Develop WordPress custom themes and plugins by coding

Last Update: Feb 25, 2024

Develop WordPress custom themes and plugins by coding

Free

About Course

In this course you learn how to develop WordPress themes and plugins by doing coding in PHP, HTML, and CSS.

There’s a lot of overlap between theme and plugin development in WordPress. Both themes and plugins rely on core functions and APIs, especially the Options API. In this session, you’ll learn about these common functions and development concepts, and how WordPress theme and plugin files are organized.

If you’re curious about WordPress development, you probably opened the files of a theme or plugin before you took this course, or perhaps you started reading the WordPress core code itself. You probably saw a lot of functions that confused you, like () and do_action(). This doesn’t look like any PHP you’ve seen before. What is all this stuff?

Learning Objectives

In this course, we will teach you the way WordPress handles theme and plugin functions, settings, data validation, and translations. Along the way, we build a custom university website from ground up. We show you all detail steps for customizing a WordPress site like changing theme functions or adding and publishing a new plugin.

Topics and Subtopics

Here is the course outline:

I. Intro to WP theme and plugin development

Requirements
Theme and Plugin Files
Working with Hooks
Actions
Filters
Removing Hooked Functions
Avoiding Recursive Actions
Prioritizing and Troubleshooting Actions and Filters
Using the Options and Settings APIs
Adding an Options Page
Registering Settings and Creating Defaults
Creating the Options Form
Updating Options
Deleting Options
Writing Secure Themes and Plugins- Sanitizing and Validating Input
Text and HTML
Email Addresses
Numbers
Escaping Output
HTML and Attributes
JavaScript
URLS
Escaping MySQL Queries
Checking Capabilities
Checking Nonces and Referrers
Translations: Localization and Internationalization
Other APIs
Developing in Debug Mode

II. Create a WP theme

Requirements
Building the First Theme Files
stylesheet
Creating the Index Template
Including Common Files
Post Content: The Loop
Template Files
Template Hierarchy
Conditional Tags
Theme Functions
Modifying Themes the Right Way: Child Themes
Modifying the Loop: An Introduction to the Query
Multiple Loops
Accessing Post Information Outside the Loop
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Adding Scripts and Stylesheets
Creating Theme Options
Creating Theme Frameworks for Large Sites
Outside the Theme Hierarchy: Database Errors and Maintenance Messages
Responsive Design and WordPress
Distributing Themes

III. Creating WP Plugins

Get Started
Extending User Profiles
Creating Template Tags
Creating Shortcodes
Creating Settings Screens
Variations on Settings Screens
Creating Widgets
Dashboard Widgets
Publishing a Plugin

Requirements

Good knowledge of HTML, CSS HTML5/CSS3, WordPress, MySQL, PHP and PHP OOP. Also, basic knowledge of JavaScript is highly recommended.

Related Courses

Complete Training Bundle

If you are serious about learning web design and development, you should enroll in our Web Design and Development Training Bundle. This bundle covers all essential and practical topics related to web development. For $290 monthly subscription, you can have access to 300+ hours of hands-on project-based training covering all courses related to web development like JavaScript, PHP, JavaScript frameworks like React or Angular and many more. Click here to learn more.

Private Tutoring Classes

To take skills you learn from this course to the next level, taking the following tutoring classes are highly recommended. It is also a great opportunity to discuss your questions and problems related to this course with an experienced instructor:

What Is Next?

After finishing this course, you can enroll in any of following classes:

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Develop WordPress custom themes and plugins by coding