WordPress is my preferred CMS to use. I use it on all of my websites. WordPress is used on 58% of the websites that are active in 2015. There are 76,500,000 WordPress users ; obviously if your developing websites there is a good chance that you need to be familiar with this CMS. There are many files that make up the WordPress infrastructure and I want to give you an overview of them.
Basic Template Files
There are many components to a WordPress developed website. There are a number of different Worpress themes so not all of them are going to be exactly alike. It’s important that whenever you’re updating a piece of your website you know the file or files your looking for, so you can make the needed changes. The core files are the index.php (main content), sidebar.php (sidebar), header.php (header), and the footer.php (footer). There are many other template files like the style.css, comments.php, page.php, etc.
Header Functions
The header functions controls a number of different elements of your website’s header. These files will be in the header.php file. When you view the source of a WordPress site this will be all the data that is between the tag. This can be the title of a post/page, WordPress version, HTML version, etc.
Navigation Menu
The navigation menu is a vital part to our WordPress sites navigation. WordPress has a very robust navigation menu which is very easy to customize. It’s vital that you know how to change the navigation menu if your specifying a category, page, etc. in your navigation menu.
Template Functions
Functions are fancy names for code that call on specify page/post, sidebar, comments, etc. These functions help us to get WordPress to do exactly what we it to do. This is often used to call on different plugins so that we can get the desired result that we want.
Loops
Loops are a very important part to the WordPress infrastructure. The loop is called upon so you can show different post to your visitors. This fetches the data from your database and shows the specified pieces of content.
I have found some good resources that explain WordPress theme files, functions, loops, etc. Please also check out these resources:
https://www.wpexplorer.com/ultimate-wordpress-cheat-sheet/
https://www.buildyourownblog.net/blog/time-saving-copypaste-wordpress-cheat-sheet/
https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-themes/wordpress-theme-cheat-sheet-for-beginners/
Below is an infographic that I created so that you can have it on hand whenever you’re making changes to your WordPress sites. If you would rather have this graphic in .pdf format please feel free to download it here. Please feel free to embed this infographic on your companies website and share it as you see fit.
Embed This Image On Your Site (copy code below):
hi!
Wordpress does rock 🙂 I had no idea it was such a hit for many websites owners. 76 000 000 is a lot of users! I do find it to be user friendly if you are a little resourceful. Websites like yours help the public navigate WordPress to make it easier to post content and embellish it. I think that people imagine that they will have to deal with formulas like in the good old times with DOS. But it is actually quite easier than it seems to navigate WordPress to have an operational and wonderful site.
Just for the record, I used to use Dos (and i hated it)!
I have been working with the functions file in particular. It is important to make sure you have a backup file of that file before changing it. One single line of code will certainly cause a big error on your website. I have done this a number of times and it’s no fun restoring it!
I agree and I am right there with you. Don’t edit it inside the WordPress dashboard. That is just asking for trouble!
I’m a happy WordPress user. WordPress is great! It saves me from having to learn html! On the other hand, it has itself disadvantages – – lol, I wouldn’t know where to even start if I wanted to change something. I went ahead and download that pdf, and this post was helpful in getting the basics organized in my head.
Hey Ben,
You can always check out upwork.com and hire someone to help with your WordPress customization too 🙂