Advanced WordPress Basics

For anyone comfortable with HTML, CSS, and a minimal amount of PHP, WordPress is the easiest content management system to "get your hands dirty" with and start customizing beyond the options built into your theme and plugins. Customizing WordPress is also a great entry point to learning PHP and JavaScript.

We'll peek behind the curtain to see how WordPress processes a page request, dip our toes in the waters of action hooks and filters, dig into simple plugins and child theme page templates, cook up our own shortcodes, tinker around under the hood to modify the WP admin interface, and mix metaphors in other ways to get that "fully custom" look.

The goals of this session are to understand "what's possible" with customization without building from scratch, gain familiarity with the structure and coding patterns of WordPress template and other files, learn how to implement a Child Theme, learn where to look for hooks that afford customization and how to find documentation and help in using them.

Participants should be comfortable using FTP, the WordPress admin and writing HTML, and understand the fundamental programming concepts of functions and variables (specific knowledge of PHP is not necessary, but helpful).

Experience level: 
Intermediate
Session Time Slot(s): 
Time: 
Sep 12 2015 - 2:00pm-Sep 12 2015 - 2:50pm
Room: 
163
Allowed Types: 
Session
Sessions Topics: 
Speaker Bio(s): 
Greg Perham is a freelance website developer and hosting provider specializing in custom WordPress sites. He began working independently in 2011 with the business name Swing Graphics. He has been customizing, tweaking, and hacking website templates since his LiveJournal in 2003.