WordPress: What You Need To Know If You Want To Be A WordPress Programmer

I’m sure most of you have heard of WordPress by now; either in your classes in school/college (if you’re taking some programming courses) or by being present on the internet for a long time. WordPress, for the uninitiated, is an open-source content managing system which allows you to create your own website, your own little corner on the internet. In layman’s terms, WordPress is an incredibly easy platform to use that allows you to create your website by using many of their own templates. What’s great about it is the fact that you don’t really have to have any programming knowledge to use it – you can simply just create your account and have a great looking website by the end of the day. To prove to you how omnipresent WordPress websites are, I’ll just let you know the statistics: Almost 40% of all the websites on the world wide web are hosted by it!

With that being said, I wanted to dedicate today’s post to those of you who are interested in or maybe want to do more than follow the basic templates WP offers; If you would like to become a WordPress programmer, these are the things you need to know and be aware of:

First of all, you need to know programming languages

While for the basic use of the platform you really don’t need to know anything about programming languages, for your career as a WordPress developer / programmer you have to know at least one programming language. This is because your work will revolve around coding in one way or the other.

What you have to know is that there are three paths for you as a future WP programmer: You can work on core programming, theme programming or plugin programming, and all of these call for knowledge of programming languages.

What’s the difference between these three types of programming?

While the difference is minimal, we still need to appreciate it and mention it. For example:

· If you opt for core programming, you will work on the main code WP uses – which means that you are going to work on code of the whole platform. Any changes you will make will reflect on the platform as a whole.

· If you opt for theme programming you will still be relying on your programming language knowledge, but this time it will be used for creating custom themes from scratch. Side note – do you remember using Tumblr in the early 2010s and constantly editing themes to fit your blog? Well, if you choose theme programming, that will be your job – Creating themes for people to use and customize to their liking.

· If you choose plugin programming, you will use your knowledge of coding for creating plugins that will enhance websites on WordPress.