Course Overview

Introduction to WordPress Development syllabus

1. A brief overview of how WordPress works
   • An introduction to how a web server works with WordPress
   • The WordPress file system
   • Creating basic things like posts, pages, and users, and changing settings
   • Permalinks, and how they work with the rewrite module on both Apacheand Nginx
   • How a dashboard page request loads
   • How a front-end page request loads
2. The programming languages of WordPress
   • HTML
     • Introduction to Accessibility
   • CSS
   • JavaScript
   • PHP
   • MySQL
3. WordPress development fundamentals
   • Setting up a local development environment
   • Action Hooksand Filter Hooks
   • The WordPress database
   • WordPress coding standards
   • Enabling the debug.log
4. An introduction to developing WordPress themes
   • Classic themes vs blockthemes
   • Theme requirements
   • Templates and template parts
   • The WordPress Template Hierarchy
   • Classic themes – Template tags and conditional tags
   • Block themes – patterns
   • Block themes – theme.json
   • Enqueuing CSS and JavaScript
   • Custom functions
5. An introduction to developing WordPress plugins
   • Pluginrequirements
   • Creating custom post types and taxonomies
   • Using post meta
   • Enqueuing CSS and JavaScript
   • Introduction to developing plugins securely
   • Preventing common vulnerabilities (WIP)
6. An introduction to Internationalization
   • The commonly used Internationalization Functions
   • An overview of the Internationalization
7. An introduction to Roles and Capabilities
   • How to create/modify/remove roles and capabilities
   • Custom content types and capabilities
   • How to check user capabilities
8. An introduction to Common WordPress APIs
   • Responsive Images
   • Dashboard widgets
   • Database
   • Filesystem
   • Global Variables
   • Metadata
   • Options
   • HTTPRequests
   • Rewrite
   • Settings
   • Shortcode
   • Transients
9. An introduction to the WordPress REST API
   • Using the WordPress REST API
   • The WordPress REST API under the hood
     • overview of how the REST API works, detail about design decisions
   • Interacting with the WordPress REST API
   • Extending the WordPress REST API
     • custom fields, authentication
     • modifying responses
     • creating custom routes and endpoints (WIP)

10. An introduction to developing WordPress blocks
    • An introduction to React
    • Using JSX vs vanilla JavaScript
    • Setting up the block development requirements
    • Building your first simple block
      • Converting a Shortcode into a Block
      • Styling your WordPress Blocks
      • Using Block Attributes to Enable User Editing

11. An introduction to WordPress multisite
    • Setting up a Multisite network
    • Managing a Multisite network
    • Building plugins and themes that support multisite
    • The differences between developing for multisite vs single site
12. Debugging in WordPress
    • Enabling the built-in WordPress debugging options
    • Examining the state of your PHP code using error_logand print_ror vardump
    • Examining the state of your JavaScript code using the consoleobject
    • Popular debugging plugins
      • https://wordpress.org/plugins/debug-bar/
      • https://wordpress.org/plugins/query-monitor/

Introduction to WordPress Development addendum

In addition to this list, the following topics were suggested for inclusion, but a consensus was not reached as to whether they should be included at the beginner level or intermediate level. Therefore I am including them in this post as an addendum.

1. An Introduction to Localization
2. Installing and using Xdebug for step debugging
3. An Introduction to using SVN
4. An introduction to using WP-CLI