So, what’s next…

In our last post we recommended that all budding WordPress developers start by reading the font of all WordPress knowledge – the WordPress codex. So hopefully you’ve had some time to check it out and familiarise yourself with some of the core concepts, pretty logical stuff really but amazingly powerful too!

The next step we would recommend is to get your hands dirty, install WordPress on a local server and start to familiarise yourself with how the system works. To do this you will need the following:

– If you’re on a Mac download MAMP or WAMP  if you work on a Windows machine.

Both MAMP and WAMP are servers that you can install locally on your computer to run a website from your machine. They effectively allow you to develop and design a website without having to purchase hosting and make the site live on the web.

– You will need to download the WordPress package from the WordPress website which is the nuts and bolts of the WordPress CMS.

– You will also need to download a text editor to edit your chosen Theme’s code. We would recommend using Sublime  if you work on a Mac and Notepad ++ if you’re on a Windows machine.

That’s pretty much all you need to get everything up and running. To do so simply follow these steps
–    Setup your local server (each comes with their own setup instructions.)
–    Create a database for WordPress. This is where WordPress stores and pulls all its content (posts, pages etc) from.
–    Install WordPress (instructions can be found here)
–    Install demo content (this can be found here)

Awesome, congrats, your site is now up and running!

We would now recommend that you spend some time navigating both the front and back ends of your new WordPress site to help you understand how WordPress displays post and page data and how menus are constructed etc. Getting a good understanding of this will help you understand how the WordPress database works on the back end. In our next post we’ll outline next steps re developing your own theme.