WordPress Lunch ‘n’ Learn – Advanced 101

Every developer likely needs to use WordPress now and then! It’s so ubiquitous that it’s almost a fact of life. I recently did a lunch and learn Advanced WP 101 to cover some aspects that aren’t immediately obvious.

Here are some helpful hints and links for those who “don’t know what they don’t know” about the world’s most popular CMS.

Update: Two years later I lunch and learned this again, also covering some workflow stuff. 

2017 Workflow talk

• Demo theme on this Github repo discusses Gemini Lite, Gulp, and ACF https://github.com/arleym/wp-gemini-lite
• We discussed VVV (I didn’t mention this killer add-on for it), Desktop Server, Xampp
• We discussed WP CLI (and this bash setting I had to change to make it work with Xampp)
• We looked a lot at the Advanced Custom Fields Repeater and making it return nice Gemini classes to the front end

2015 Lunch n Learn

Theme

• Template Hierarchy https://developer.wordpress.org/files/2014/10/template-hierarchy.png
• Child Themes https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes
  • Technically only needs style.css
  • If you’re going to fork the WordPress stock Twenty* themes are the best
  • If you use Sass you need that doc block to not be stripped out! Start comments with a /*! */ to keep them.
  • Version control FTW (Bit Bucket shout out)
• Custom Page Templates https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/template-files-section/page-template-files/page-templates/
• Advanced Custom Fields http://www.advancedcustomfields.com/
  • Harvest Oakville Sermon example: http://www.harvestoakville.ca/teaching/sermon-archives/latest-sermon/
  • Harvest Oakville repeat region example http://www.harvestoakville.ca/ministries/
  • Theme Options http://blogs.blackberry.com/
• i18n / Internationalization – make theme strings translatable by PHP pot files
  • Wrap theme strings, eg. <h3><?php _e(‘Leave a Reply’, ‘my_text_domain’); ?></h3>
  • Best plugin https://wpml.org/
  • Example http://corma.com/

Not as theme related…

• Custom Post Types https://codex.wordpress.org/Post_Types (eg Harvest Oakville sermon)
  • Can set up with a plugin or in functions.php
• Custom Roles
  • Theme My Login plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/theme-my-login/
  • Plugins can create and assign custom roles / abilities (eg. Form manager, ministry leaders)
• Forms
  • Gravity Forms – http://www.gravityforms.com/
    • To DB and email
    • Best UX, extensible
• Multisites – http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network
• Gemini Theme is on Github – coming soon!
• Backups
  • Plugins like https://ithemes.com/purchase/backupbuddy/ Migrate, remote backups, backs up non-WP stuff

Categorized in: WordPress

This post was written by ArleyM