Dear WordPress Recruit,

Now that you have an understanding of WordPress theme development, you’re probably wondering how to expand your knowledge beyond what you’ve just learned. The best place to start is the WordPress Codex at http://wdgwp.com/codex. Maintained by the WordPress community (which now includes you), the codex covers many of the common WordPress APIs (functions, classes, and so on) organized into two primary categories: Function Reference (http://wdgwp.com/function_reference) and Template Tags (http://wdgwp.com/template_tags). This is all well and good, but what if you don’t even know where to start?

The WordPress.org Support Forums at http://wdgwp.com/support are a great place to begin researching problems or questions. The WordPress Answers site on StackExchange (http://wdgwp.com/stack) is another excellent resource. Looking for general tutorials? Start with a trustworthy source, such as WPCandy (http://wdgwp.com/wpcandy) or iThemes (http://wdgwp.com/ithemes). Another often-overlooked resource is WordPress. tv, which hosts exclusively WordPress-related videos from WordCamps, WordPress meetups, and the like. Once your skills develop you’ll be ready to delve into the core, and learn WordPress from itself.

Before you panic, know that this sounds far more intimidating than it actually is. WordPress Core is, thankfully, quite well organized. The bulk of its functionality is found in the wp-includes folder, while anything specific to administration is found in wp-admin.

One common area of frustration when first exploring wp-includes arises when you cannot locate a function you know exists. In this situation, there are three files to check: general-template.php, link-template.php, and pluggable.php. If that doesn’t work, head over to http://wdgwp.com/phpxref, where you can search for the function in question. This resource, the WordPress Crossreference, is provided by Peter Westwood, a core contributor, and updates nightly to reflect the latest changes in WordPress.

It’s also helpful to know that preceding the majority of function definitions is a comment block that details the function’s intended use, accepted arguments, and expected results. Without needing to read a line of the function definition itself, you can gain insight into how to employ a given function.

I hope this discussion has alleviated some of your concern regarding advancing your WordPress skills by building on the foundation you gained from this book. As I hope you’ve learned, there are many reliable resources for learning WordPress, but none as detailed as the core itself.

Erick Hitter
ethitter.com | @ethitter