Start WordPress

A Theme for Learning WordPress

You know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You can make beautiful websites. Maybe you’ve heard about WordPress, but aren’t entirely sure how to implement it, or why you might need it. Maybe a client asked for WordPress, but you’re not really familiar with it. Maybe you’ve worked with it before, but don’t know how to make your own theme from scratch. Whatever the case, this article is for you.

Read the article on Developing a Wordpress Theme from Scratch, Part Two, and Part Three.

Prerequisites

All you need to start is a website. Any website will do. You don’t need to know any PHP, or have any prior experience with WordPress. Your website can be custom, or built on Bootstrap/some other framework.

You do need to know how to set up a local server environment. Fortunately, if you don’t know how, I wrote a short, sweet article about getting set up with one. It will only take a few minutes, so go ahead and do that first.

Goals

Install WordPress locally
Take an existing HTML website (based on Bootstrap) and convert it into a custom WordPress theme
Migrate WordPress to a live server

Topics covered

What can WordPress do for me?
Creating a design
Installing WordPress
Creating your custom theme
Make blog posts
Make pages
Include pagination
Include comments
Learn how to use functions
Create custom post types
Migrating WordPress

Layout pages

Header - header.php
Footer - footer.php
Content - content.php
Sidebar - sidebar.php
Single Post - single.php
Page - page.php
Index - index.html
Comments - comments.php
Functions - functions.php

The Loop

Posts
Pages
Custom Post Types
Comments

Functions

Learn how to use functions.php
Properly enqueue styles and scripts
Include featured images
Correctly insert WordPress title
Create custom global settings fields
Create custom post types

Summary

License

The code is open source and available under the MIT License.

taniarascia/startwordpress