The WordPress workshop comes again

Right, so I guess it’s about time I started thinking about the WordPress workshop I had to postpone last year. Again sorry to anyone who had booked on it and sorry again for taking so long to arrange it, a lot has been going on over the last few months but I think I’m ready to start thinking what I want to do with the workshop now.

First of all I think it’s time for a new and better title which describes the day a bit more. The previous generic title of “The WordPress Workshop” led to a lot of questions about what the course would actually cover and what level of experience with WordPress was needed in advance. So the new title for the workshop will be:

WordPress for front-end developers

WordPress for front-end developers will cover using WordPress from the point of view that you’re a front-end coder (or designer with some front-end knowledge) and want to use WordPress to be able to deliver a better level of service to your clients, to offer them a “full-service” so to say. You will be required to have no prior knowledge of WordPress or backend coding in PHP, to find this workshop useful. I will be going into enough detail in the workshop that by the end of the day you should be confident enough to be able to develop your own custom themes for the CMS.

One day

I’m going to keep the workshop at a day-long for now, purely so that I can see how it goes and keep costs down for the first run. After the first one I will review what went well, less well and what could be included/left out for further runs. I’m toying with the idea of doing an advanced workshop or a two-day workshop should it work out well and the interest be there.

The day itself

On the day here’s the topics I will look to cover:

  • Introduction to WordPress
  • Installing WordPress (from the command line, including setting up permissions and simple configuration)
  • Introduction to PHP and WordPress specific uses
  • Starting a theme from scratch
  • The Loop
  • Template hierarchy
  • Custom post types and taxonomies
  • WordPress and theme security

I’ll stick roughly to this list at the moment and work on it from there, I think these are some of the more core topics that should get you up and running with building your own theme and getting to grips with backend development.

When?

As it’s very much still in the planning stages the when is very loose but I will hazard a guess at it being towards the end of April time. But I will release more information as and when I get things better set up.

Where do I sign up?

I’m writing this sat on the train on the way back from NAConf, so for the moment there’s no website or booking set up. For now if you would like to be kept up to date with developments you can sign up to the mailing list through the old site and I will be sending out information when I have a better idea of what’s going to happen next.