Where to Learn WordPress Development

You are already familiar with HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP or MySQL. You do web development as a hobby or even a full time job. And now you’re entering in WordPress world – brave new world. Welcome!

But where can you learn WordPress development? There must be thousands of places where you could start. But this is not one of those post where you can see massive list of all possibilities. Otherwise post title would have been “100 ways to learn WordPress development”.

Instead I give you just one (and fun) recommendation. It’s called Themehybrid.com.

Learn WordPress Development in Themehybrid

Themehybrid is maintained by Justin Tadlock where you can find cool Themes and Plugins. He also have Theme and Plugin review service. Not to mentioned that he is also one of the admins in Theme Review team. He knows WordPress.

You might be wondering why I only recommend Themehybrid in this article. The answer is simple, I can only speak from my experience.

Why I Recommend Themehybrid

I’m not sure when I joined Themehybrid, somewhere around 2010 perhaps. But it’s the most important reason why I’m still doing WordPress related stuff. I struggled to find words why Themehybrid has been so important for me. Justin himself explains it pretty well.

Really, it’s because we have a vibrant community of users and developers, standards-based philosophy, focus on education, and cool shit. Theme Hybrid also happens to be one of the oldest- and longest-running theme businesses around. Also, there’s plugins and themes; both are 100% $free to download.

For me education is the key point. That’s why I call Themehybrid as a WordPress School. Note that it’s not typical tutorial site where you can find WordPress related courses. It’s about community helping each others.

I’ll try to summarize how I learned WordPress Development in Themehybrid WordPress School.

• Ask questions: I didn’t know much about WordPress. I had a lot of questions and every time Justin or someone else answered. Every single time. And not only answered the questions but gave me ideas, code examples and forced me to understand the issue.
• Read others questions and solutions: There was a time when I read every topic and tried to understand what was going on. Some day I might have the same issue.
• Read tutorials: Most of the tutorials are in Justin’s blog but there are cool stuff in Themehybrid blog also. Read everything and try to understand what you are reading.
• Study the code: I had no idea how to build a theme or plugin. But reading the code helped me understand what was going on.
• Help others: At some point I started help others by answering support topics. For me it’s still best way to learn and really go deeper.
• Build child themes: I started to learn more and more by building child themes. Entry level was low and it helped me understand the anatomy of a WordPress Theme.
• Write code: Next step was to build parent theme for Themehybrid and let Justin himself review the code. It was kind of my graduation. I passed!
• Repeat: Yes, rinse and repeat.

Join Themehybrid

This was not paid review of Themehybrid. I just wanted to share how important impact it has been for me. I recommend that you join Themehybrid community also if you want to learn WordPress Development. Or you are WordPress user and need help.

There is also Slack channel for members. Cheers!