This book shows you how to use plugins and themes from WordPress’ thriving ecosystem to make a search-engine friendly website with advanced features.

WordPress is more than a blogging platform—it powers one-fifth of all sites. Since its release, enthusiastic contributors have pushed the envelope to use it as a platform for building specialized social networks, e-commerce storefronts, business sites, and more. This guide helps you sort through the vast number of plugins available to find the ones that work for you. You’ll also learn how to use CSS and PHP code to tailor WordPress to your needs further.

WordPress Development in Depth is a guide full of example code and advice based on the authors’ real-world experience working with the platform. Starting with how to plan your website and assess its requirements, it then touches on considerations for developing and hosting your site, how to use the Gutenberg editor, when to use custom code. Finally, it provides a survey of useful plugins to solve everyday problems.

“From hosting and plugins to ecommerce, Peter MacIntyre has written a definitive guide to building with WordPress.”

Foreword by Matt Mullenweg

Topics covered include:

• Website planning and requirements gathering. Identify the critical features and decisions for making a useful site.
• Solutions for development, testing, and production environments. Surveys typical solutions used for local development.
• Introduction to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) – from basic rules, to new features including flexbox and grid layouts.
• The Gutenberg editor, what it is and how to create a custom block.
• Writing a custom plugin with PHP. See how the pros build a maintainable, secure plugin.
• Customizing look-and-feel with child themes for making your site standout.
• Adding internationalization to your plugin to handle multilingual uses.
• Plugins for tasks across sites such as sliders, spam countermeasueres, and optimizing site performance.
• Plugins for advanced implementations to keep your site secure, build custom forms, and sell products online.

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About the Authors

Written by PHP professionals Peter MacIntyre and Sávio Resende, this book distills their experience building online solutions for other WordPress site builders, developers, and designers to leverage and get up to speed quickly.