WordPress is a powerful publishing platform which allows both users with no coding experience and developers alike to create and share content quickly and easily. What if you want to start developing themes and plugins for your WordPress website or for clients? Well, you don’t want to try and touch the WordPress Core code. Theme developers and plugin developers have access to hundreds of functions the WordPress core exposes so that they can extend and customize any WordPress installation to perform and behave exactly as they would like.…

In this WordPress Tutorial, we will have a look at the WP_Query class, which is really the workhorse of fetching post data from your WordPress database. WP_Query gives theme developers complete control over what is sent into “The Loop” as we call it. By mastering WP_Query, one gains the ability to loop over any posts they like and in any theme file where it is deemed needed.…

WordPress Widgets are a cornerstone of WordPress theme development and in this tutorial we will explore them in depth. So what is a WordPress Widget? A Widget in WordPress is a way to group together a chunk of content that is specific to a given purpose, and then displayed on the website. If you visit Appearance and then Widgets in the WordPress dashboard, you will see many types of widgets available to use.…

WordPress has a nice feature called Post Formats that can help you to differentiate certain posts to others in a WordPress theme. So far in our series of learning about how to customize WordPress Themes, we have seen how to create and style several posts in our system, but they all pretty much look the same. Of course we were able to create custom pages, but Post Formats work a little differently.…

Let’s now tackle the task of adding a search box to our custom WordPress Theme. The built in WordPress search function which is a part of the WordPress core is actually quite capable as compared to what it was when WordPress was just a new CMS. In this tutorial we will learn how to add a search field somewhere in the upper right hand area of the site.…