codex Archives - Untame

Aug 16 2012
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15 Excellent Ways To Learn WordPress

Posted by | WordPress | 4 Comments

WordPress is huge, and it is only getting bigger. Over the past few years more and more developers are turning to WordPress to deliver accessible websites to their clients. This means that at a very basic level it is advisable that no matter your position in the internet world, having a good working knowledge of WordPress is a must.

For Beginners

Welcome to WordPress! This area is dedicated to users that need to know the very basics of how to work within the context of a WordPress site. Need to know how to add your first post? This is the section for you! We assume that right now, you have no need or desire to learn to code your own sites and that is completely cool! A huge amount of the largest blogs and sites in the world are operated by users that have never touched a single line of code. You are in very good company with WordPress!

WP101

A landmark series for WordPress beginners. Not necessarily because it had never been tried before. WP101 is a landmark because it is an incredible resource, provided absolutely free that is of just about the best quality you will find.

WPBeginner

Need a refresher on how to operate your new WordPress site? WPBeginner will help you through the process, from picking out a good hosting company to setting your new site up.

 

WordPress | Where To Start

Spoilers! The WordPress Codex is pretty great. Not only is it great, but it is the go to place for the latest in WordPress best practices.

 

WordPress Essential Training (premium)

Lynda.com hosts a variety of training videos and courses. This WordPress essential training video series will take you through just about everything that you will need to begin your publishing journey.

Get Going With WordPress

Plug Alert! Our very own post on what to do once you have installed WordPress.

For Designers

You know the basics. Perhaps you already create awesome sites for your clients using static HTML, CSS & JavaScript and are ready to let your sites go to the next level. WordPress will give you the power to offer clients interactive, editable and feature rich environments. This section is for you, we will cover a few incredible places that you can take your skills to the next level.

WordPress 3: Creating and Editing Custom Themes

Chris Coyier will guide you through a surprisingly easy to understand tutorial on how to create your very own WordPress theme.

wp.tutsplus.com

The home of some of the best darn WordPress tutorials around. Sneak back to the basics and theme development sections to take advantage of the TutsPlus+ resource.

How to be a Rockstar WordPress Designer

A watershed publication in WordPress theme development. What’s better, one of your teachers is the CEO of the entire Envato network of sites… not too shabby!

How to be a Rockstar WordPress Designer 2

Dive deeper into WordPress with this one. Know how to set up a general theme? Nice! Now understand how theme options and plugins work with part 2.

WordPress Codex

This should be on your bookmark bar. Take a load off and go read the codex for an hour or so. I promise you will learn something!

For Developers

You have been there and done that but maybe not yet with WordPress. If you have spent the past few years custom coding your own CMS for your clients or maybe using another CMS like Joomla or Drupal. In this section, we will assume that you have a working knowledge of PHP and will feature some sources from a few WordPress masters!

Digging Into WordPress

Chris Coyier is back with Digging into WordPress. This book basicly defines extensive. Would you like to share in WordPress best practices? There is no better place to start than right here.

WordPress Codex

Are you noticing a theme here? I am not kidding when I assure that you need to make the codex your new best friend! I was totally that guy… “I’ll never need the codex”. Then I wised up. If you are a WordPress developer, the codex is simply the fastest and most searchable way to get the info you need!

ThemeShaper Blog

Get to know WordPress from the theme masters themselves. These guys word at automattic and curate the giant library of free WordPress themes. Better yet, they have dedicated this as a resource to share their knowledge with fellow dev’s.

wp.tutsplus.com

Past the mid-level tutorials, wp.tutsplus.com is really a place where you can dive into complex builds, solving niche problems. All throughout the comments of this site you will find a community of fellow dev’s that are solving problems right along side of you.

WPMU.org

WPMU is a massive source of information, founded by some of the most advanced WordPress plugin developers on the planet. It would serve you very well to make WPMU a daily stop.

There you are, a few of the absolute best ways to learn WordPress no matter your skill level or need. Do you have a favorite that we didn’t cover? Let us know in the comments below!

Jun 12 2012
0

What is the WordPress Loop?

Posted by | WordPress | No Comments

The WordPress loop is an essential building block when a web designer or developer begins to better understand how WordPress works and moreover, how they might manipulate a theme to fit the needs of a web site. The loop is a very simple concept to grasp once you understand its necessity. The loop tells WordPress to go get the content that you need. It is that simple, but lets take a stroll through some code to see exactly how it works in practice.

Relax: It’s easier than you think!

In order to get the loop going, we just need to accomplish a few simple tasks.

  • Begin The Loop
  • Do something to display the content we want
  • Close the loop (simple right?)

In order to perform these actions we will need to ask WordPress to play fetch! This is called the “Query”. So in order for us to get the correct content on the correct page the incredible guys and gals at WP ask that we just tell them what we are looking for. So without further ado, lets take a look at some code.

Begin the loop:

[crayon lang=”php”][/crayon]

ask WordPress to play fetch! …

So, in this simple line of PHP we are up to a few things, and it might be easiest to understand if we just look at it like a sentence. This statement first checks if posts exist on our website. Once we have found that there are posts, then we tell WordPress that as long as posts exist, we would like to display those posts.

Do Something About It!

Next, we would tell WordPress exactly what content we would like to be displayed from those posts. For instance, we could include items like our post title <?php the_title(); ?> or maybe our post content <?php the_content(); ?>.

After we have displayed all of our desired information we just need to close up shop (and tidy up a bit). It is always best practice, if not now entirely essential to close the WordPress loop in a clean manner, in case we want to fire up another content loop anywhere else in the page.

So to clean up, we will use the following code to stop our query.

[crayon lang=”php”]

[/crayon]

This snippet of code will essentially end our loop. Lets walk through this code step by step. <?php endwhile;else: ?> allows for us to tell WordPress to stop repeating the content loop of the queried posts. In the middle of that snippet you will find a helpful PHP bit that provides a helpful error message for users, just in case we didn’t have any posts related to our query. This type of message is a huge help in places such as search pages. After close out our cash register by ending our while statement, we simply turn out the lights by ending our “if” statement.

So our full beginners loop might look a lot like this.

[crayon lang=”php”]

Sorry, no posts matched your criteria.


[/crayon]

There! Wasn’t that easy? I hope that this post will make you a little more familiar with how the WordPress loop works. Admittedly, this is an enormously simplistic look at what can be a very involved function. But Hey! We need to start somewhere. Next we will start to take a look at how to eek out some neat loop functionality and eventually code up our own custom blog page.

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