WordPress Academy: Learn WordPress step by step

1. Welcome To The Class!: WordPress powers a huge percentage of websites available today. You've almost certainly visited a website which runs on WordPress. Some of the biggest names and brands of trusted WordPress including Disney, PlayStation, MTV, Microsoft, Sony, and so many more. The good news is, it's easy for beginners to get started with and you don't need to know any coding to build amazing websites. During this course, I will guide you through the process of building multiple WordPress websites. Including a music festival landing page, a blog, and also an e-commerce site too. Once you are familiar with WordPress from these projects, we then step things up even further and introduce some code by converting a regular website into a fully custom WordPress theme. Before rounding things off by taking a look at how we can setup a WordPress multi-site installation. Who am I? My name is Chris and I'm a web developer from the UK. For me WordPress has allowed me to create lots of amazing sites for clients or businesses or personal use from a single landing page right through to a complex e-commerce site. It does this by providing a flexible core and then pose as a user and extend it with a huge selection of plug-ins, it extended the functionality. Let's jump into learning WordPress together by building some fun and educational project. I'll see you in the first lesson. 2. Share Your Work On Skillshare!: When taking any course, it's really important to not get in the habit of following along just for the sake of ticking off another lecture. Take the time to process each lesson. Review the code which you write, and think about how you might approach these solutions yourself. With this in mind, this class is project-based and this gives you the opportunity to really make something personal and unique. You don't need to get too lost and divert away from the class, and you can even take a step back after you've finished the class, and come back and make some project changes afterwards. This will really give you a good chance to practice what you've learned away from the class. Also remember to share your project too here on Skillshare. Not only will I check it out, but it will also inspire fellow students too. For more information on the class project, head into the Project and Resources tab, where you can not only upload your project, but you can also see other class projects too. With this in mind, I look forward to seeing what you create and upload here on Skillshare. 3. Why WordPress?: WordPress originally began life as a blogging platform and it's now grown into the most popular content management system available today, which also powers some of the world's most popular websites. WordPress is completely free to use, free to download, and it's also built by hundreds of community volunteers along with all of the great features which WordPress provides. We'll find out about these during the course. One of the things I really love about WordPress is that it has something for everybody. If you are a non-technical person or a beginner, you can buy some simple web hosting, use a one click installation, select your theme and you have your very own website or blog in under half an hour. For web designers or developers or general people who want to jump in a bit deeper, there is also many great things you can do technically to make a really powerful website. You can call your own themes and also plugins to make WordPress look and function exactly how you want it to be. WordPress is also under constant development too, its always improving, whether that's a security fix or a new feature to keep WordPress from becoming outdated. Also the creators of WordPress have made these updates really easy to apply too. You don't need to worry about complicated updates and installations. These updates are generally performed from the WordPress dashboard and often just involve the click of a button. As you can also see from the WordPress homepage which is wordpress.org, there is also many different themes you can choose. If we go into the theme section we can see there is over 7,000 different themes are present. These will allow us to build almost any type of website which we want to create. When we actually create a WordPress website, all of the content stays exactly the same, and we can then switch between different themes to give our content or our site a completely different look and feel. On the first set of WordPress some of the themes will be pre-installed, or we can search through any of these themes from wordpress.org. These are free themes to set up our projects. Along with these free themes there is also premium themes available too, which you can also buy on websites such as ThemeForest, but we'll look at this in more detail as we progress through the course. The WordPress core which we are going to download is really simple yet very powerful, and also packed with lots of features. However, if there is some functionality missing which your app or website needs, then this functionality is more than likely going to be available as a plugin. Plugins are pretty much what they sound like. They are something you can download to plugin and extend the WordPress core. They add functionality and features which are usually simple to install as clicking on a few buttons, but again we will take a look at plugins in more detail later in the course. Some of the other WordPress benefits are that it's really search engine friendly. By using WordPress, many SEO best practices are already taken care of for us behind the scenes. If you want to take it even further there is also some great plugins too, which well take a look at it in the plugins video. Lastly, WordPress has a really useful mobile app for iOS and Android which is free to download. The app allows you to write WordPress contents and also update your website on the move. It can even upload photos, manage blog posts, manage all comments, and also edit pages as you go. These are some great reasons for choosing WordPress. Of course, there are many more and I'm sure you'll find your own reasons for using WordPress as you progress through this course. 4. WordPress.org or WordPress.com?: Let's begin with WordPress.org, which is the homepage for the popular open source WordPress software. Open source means anybody can use this or contribute to it free of charge. This is the site for the official WordPress software, which we are going to be using to create our project through out this course. We download it, we can customize it and uploaded to a live server when complete. It basically gives us the total flexibility since it's completely self hosted, and also hosting costs for WordPress a relatively cheap when it first started out. At the top navigation of this page, you can see here that we have the available plugins and themes which we can then use. We'll make use of both of these throughout this course. There is also a support section where we can have full access to the WordPress documentation, which we're going to refer to quite often, and of course, everything we need from installing themes, right through to security topics. The actual software is available from clicking on this get WordPress button, and this is one of the setup options which we're going to take a look at very soon. Download this software as mentioned will give us the total flexibility and control over everything we're going to do with our WordPress site, or there is an alternative which is available from Wordpress.com. Wordpress.com is more of a service which will allow us to have a WordPress site, posted photos. It uses the same WordPress software which we just looked at, it takes away this setup and provides hosting for this software. This site was created by one of the WordPress founders. For the ease of setup does come at a cost. We don't have the flexibility we have when self-hosting. Under also by restrictions on which themes plugins we can use, depending on exactly which paid plan which you use. With this in mind, if we click on a Plans and Pricing from the navigation, there is various different price levels along with a free option, which we can see at the top, is 3ca coming option when starting out. But it does also place advertising banners on your site, which you probably don't want. We then have options from a personal side right through to an e-commerce store. We can see these options in more detail, if we scroll down to this table. As far as I mentioned, there is some restrictions, as you can see here when using Wordpress.com, and these restrictions are lifted as we go through higher pricing options. WordPress.org is the one to go for if we want full control over our site, and we are happy to do a little set up work. We're going to be choosing this path through out this course, or this site which is WordPress.com is a good option if you want everything taken care of for you. But remember there are restrictions unless you go for the more expensive plans. 5. Where To Find WordPress Themes: This course doesn't require any purchases for a theme or any additional software. Though at some point in the future, you may be using WordPress to build lots and lots of sites, whether that's for a job, or paying clients, or for businesses. For this use case, you may also want to look at some premium theme options. One of the options for this is themeforest.net. This is a marketplace for not only WordPress themes, but also money of a code, snippets, photos, and also videos too. We're going to be focusing on the WordPress themes which we can go to from this tab. From here, we can check out all of the different categories, we can also search using the search bar up at the very top and there is generally themes available for pretty much any type of WordPress site which you want to create. For example, if we want to create a wedding website, we can do a search, and the wedding search returns over a thousand different themes to choose from. As I mentioned, it's mostly paid content on this site, but this price also does often include support too. It is also many people and companies making a full-time living, creating themes and selling them on marketplaces just like this. If we go back to the popular items, we can see some of the popular themes such as the Avada theme, this is currently one of the most popular themes and it has hundreds of thousands of sales. We can take a look at the live preview and see exactly how this theme will look with various layouts, we can scroll through any of these themes and check out all the features which comes with it and generally, many of these themes have lots of different options for layouts or changing the color and they're also very flexible too so we can use it for product pages such as e-commerce sites, we can use it for blogs and also personal sites too. Along with seeing how our website will look and feel with a particular theme, it's also very important too to check out all of the information which is listed below. We want to make sure our theme is regularly updated, we want to make sure that it got good reviews and also it's compossible with our version of WordPress. When choosing a theme, it's not just about how it looks, it's also about the features and the things we can do with it too. One of the good indications of the features is the tags which is down at the bottom. These tags will often reflect exactly what features is included with a theme, such as the number of layout options, if it's going to have a two column layout, if it's going have a three column layout, if it's compatible with WooCommerce for e-commerce stores, if it's translation ready and also what customizations are available for this particular theme. We can also see exactly what browsers this is compatible with and also which versions of WordPress plug-ins are also compatible with this theme too. This particular one is also widget ready too, which means we can enable widgets which are self-contained pieces of content which we can place on our site, as well as all of the paid themes which are available on the site. As we looked at earlier, the official wordpress.org website also has a themes option at the top. There also is paid themes from this commercial section but we are only going to be focusing on the three themes which we have listed here. We can download any of these themes from the WordPress dashboard and we're going to do this when we setup our first project. Just like the themes which we just looked at, we're going to be able to click into any of these themes, we can check out a preview and this will give us an idea of how our theme will look with some blog content. Again, it's also worth checking out all the additional information such as the last time it was updated, the reviews and ratings, and also the tags too. We can see this one is accessibility ready, it's got various customizations such as the background, the colors, the logo, the header, and also the menu. It's e-commerce compatible, its translation ready, and also has various layout such as a one column and also a two column layout. These are really important things to consider for your site but don't worry just yet about selecting themes with all of these tag options because we going to discover exactly what most of these are as we progress through the course. Having all of these themes available for WordPress allows us to decouple the content which we have on our sites with the look and feel. Even if we have a blog which we call hundreds and thousands of blog posts, down the line we can also completely change the look and feel by simply switching the theme. This theme will not affect the original content and we still have all of this information still available and most of these themes are generally customizable from the WordPress dashboard as well as downloading themes like this. We can also create our own custom themes, we can either use these themes for personal use, for a paying client, or we could also upload them back to the theme store. As with everything, if you do a search online, there will be hundreds or even thousands of options which you can choose from but for now though, we're going to come back to our themes and take a look at how we can add these to our sites. First of all, we need to take a look at how to install WordPress. 6. The WordPress Web Server: If you built a website in the past using HTML and CSS, you will be used to just writing this in a HTML file, opening up this file in the browser, and everything just works. Well, this is a bit different when using WordPress because WordPress needs a web server to run. Why is this? Well, this is because WordPress is wrote in a programming language called PHP. PHP will only run on the server, it doesn't work inside the browser. For WordPress, you don't need to understand any PHP course. Good understanding of PHP is running on the server, is key to understanding how WordPress works. If you consider a sites such as Facebook or Twitter, or generally any blog sites, chat application, or even social network, they all look the same for every user, but the details on the page are different. Such as the username which will change your personal friends or connections, your blog posts, and so on. We can think of things like Facebook and Twitter as a template and any details are injected in when needed, and these all based on the logged-in user. This is an example of what PHP does, it can generate a web page which change the particular details for each user or each page. This is an example of what is called a dynamic web page. It's on a web server, where these pages are generated. On the server, it will have the template or the basic setup. Then it will place in all of the details which you pulls into the database, such as a user, or the blog posts which we just mentioned before. You don't need to fully understand all of this at the moment, but just be aware that this is the reason why we need a web server to run WordPress, rather than just open it up inside the browser like we can do with a regular HTML page. Unfortunately, we can set up a web server on our own computer to run this. Also, WordPress needs a database too, which is used to store all of the pages, the blog posts, the images, and all the information which it needs. It's this web server which we'll also talk about the database and grab all this information for us. This now leaves us with some options. If you already have purchased some web hosting in the past, which can run WordPress, you can, of course, use that for this course. Are we going to run through some of what is called local options, which is the ability to set up a web server locally on our own computer? There will be a couple of different options, so make sure you just use one, and I would recommend the next video if you will ensure. With this as a background, we now going to run through how to set a WordPress in this next video. 7. Option1: Installing With Local (recommended): Now we understand that WordPress needs a web server to actually run. In this video and also the next, we're going to look at some options to get started with creating a web server on our own computer. This video is going to focus on a service called Local by Flywheel which will allow us to create a web server on our own computer, and then we can create our WordPress websites. You only need to either follow this video or the next video, and the next video will focus on a alternative solution called MAMP. I would recommend that you follow along with this video rather than and the next one. To get started, we're going to head over to localwp.com. From here we're going to click on the download button, where we can download for both Mac, Windows and Linux. There's also a paid version for teams and agencies, but we just need the free community edition. Flywheel is going to allow us to quickly assess WordPress projects on our own computer, which is going to be really straightforward and take care of all the setup, the server, and also the database for us. Local has lots of great features. We can view our site and admin section at click of a button. We can generate a live link to view our project anywhere and also share with others too, along with a lot more advanced features such as the ability to set up WordPress multi-site and so much more. Choose your particular platform, download and then go through the installation steps. Once Local is fully installed and setup, you're taken to a screen which looks just like this. This is where we can add and also manage our Wordpress sites. I already have some sites setup just here if this is your first time, you won't see any in the sidebar. To add on new project we need to click on this green button in the left corner and then give our site a name. I'm going to give this title of Festival, and we don't need any of these advanced options for now. Continue, I going to stick with the preferred default environment. Then we need to add a username, a password, and an email. The username, let's go for the festival_admin, and this is going to be the details we need to log into the back-end of our WordPress site. We'll take a look at this in just a moment. The password, make sure you change your email if needed to. Click on Add Sites. If you're going to using a Mac you may also need to add the administrator password too. Good, once this is done our site is automatically started up. We can see this because we have the option to stop our site in the corner. If yours is green and it say start site, you will need to click on this to start up the server. We can see all the version numbers for our servers, for PHP and also the database which we're using too. We don't need to change any of this information, but it's all there if we need this in the future. One of the great things about using Local is this live link down at the bottom. We can click on Enable, and this will give us a live URL which we can share with others too. This means we could share our work with colleagues, with friends or family, and it's also useful for getting feedback on our site to run other people. We'll spend most of the time during this project in these two sections up at the top. We have a admin section which will link us to the back-end of our site. To login we need add in details which we added into Local just before. My username was the festival admin and the password. Click on Login and this will then redirect us to the WordPress dashboard. The WordPress dashboard is like the control center of our sites where we can add new features, we can update it, we can change themes, and we'll take a look at this in just a second. The other button is to open our site, and this is our actual WordPress website. If yours looks a little bit different to this don't worry, the default theme does change from time to time. This will now give us our back-end or front-end using these two terms. If we want to switch between these manually, if we are on the site just like this, we can hover over the site title and then go over to the dashboard. When inside the dashboard we can do the opposite and then head back over to visit our site. To the dashboard we'll take a closer look at all these options in the next video. For it's from here where we can update our sites if we have any themes and plug-ins or even the WordPress call. If any updates become available, we will be notified from this view. We can manage and update our posts. We can upload different assets and media such as images, videos and audio. We can work with our pages. We can edit them, we can add new, we can manage any comments on our blog posts. There is an appearance section where we can customize the look and feel of our site. We can upload different themes. We can change menus, background images, and lots more. We briefly talked about plug-ins early on and it's from this section where we can either manage our plug-ins or add new ones too. For example, if we wanted to add email to our site, this is the plugin section where we could add this. We can manage our users, such as seeing who is signed up. We can change the preferences. We can update profiles and permissions and lots more. We have a tool section where we can do things like importing and exporting data. We also have a setting section where you can fine-tune all of the options for our site. For all of these projects in this course, we will spend a lot more time in this back-end. Starting in the next video we'll take a deeper look for all of these options. 8. Option 2: Installing With MAMP: This is an option video to setup WordPress using a service called MAMP. If you successfully installed WordPress in the last video using local, you can skip this video. However, if you use month before or you just want to try something different you can follow along with this video and setup using MAMP. Let's get started by heading over to mamp.info. This is also going to create a free local development server and also take care of the database for this two, we can download a free version by clicking on the link here and then download for your operating system. I'm going to go for the mac version and give it a few minutes to download. Once this has downloaded, will need to go through the installation steps to your computer hit Continue through each one of these. May also need to add a password to to install this. MAMP also comes with a paid version called MAMP PRO. This also downloads at the same time, but you don't need to use this. We just need to stick with the free version of MAMP as we don't need any of the prophages. Once MAMP has finished installing to your machine you will be taken to a star screen which should look just like this. You may also be asked to upgrade the MySQL database. I'll go ahead and do that too. Inside here the key thing to note is the two green lights up at the top. This means that our web server and also a database is open and running. We can now download the WordPress core and add this to our MAMP folder. For me, MAMP is stored inside my applications, then we have this MAMP folder inside here. The key folder which we'll be working with is these htdocs. This is going to be the location where we add all of our WordPress projects throughout this course. To do this we need to go to WordPress.org and from the homepage will have a get WordPress button just down here. This then takes us to this download section where you can download the WordPress core. This is a zip file it shouldn't take too long to download. Once this is done, we can click on this package and open this up. This is now our WordPress project folder. We can go ahead and rename this, I'm going to call this wpfestival Then we can drag this project over to our htdocs. Let's grab this, places this inside of the htdocs, open this up and we can check this is that. The next thing we need to do is to create a database for our project. Inside of the MAMP start screen we open up the webstar page. From here we can go to PHPMYADMIN. If we click on tools, click on PHPMYADMIN where we can add a new database. You can see on the left I already have many databases already setup but I'm going to click on New and then create a new database. This can be any name of our choice. I'm what's called this, the wp-festival. Click on Create, then we don't need to create any tables or any data. Since WordPress is going to handle this photos. With this now sets up, we can go back over to MAMP, add to the start screen. Now the older versions of MAMP used to have the preferences on here, but now it's available in the main options. If you're using a Mac, you can head to the MAMP icon in the top corner and then click on the preferences link. This will end that linkage to the section where you can check out which port we using. If we click on ports we can see the default web server port is 8888. We're now going to use this to access our project in the browser. All we need to do is to click on localhost. Then 8888 hit Enter. Then we take it to the index of our htdocs. This will contain all the project which we are inside a MAMP. We want the wpfestival. Clicking on this will then start to up the WordPress installation scripts. The first step is to choose the language. I want to go for English and then continue. This page is just let us know we need to set up our database first only to have access to all of this information. Click on Let's go to the database name, which was wp-festival. The database username, which is roots and also roof for the password, working on the localhost, and then click on submit. Once connected to our database, we can then run the installation scripts. We need to first of all add the subtitle. I'm going to go for wp-festival. This can be changed later on in the WordPress dashboard. Don't worry too much about this. We then need to add a username and password to login to a WordPress back end. I want to go for festival admin, a password and then also an e-mail. I'm going to uncheck this for now since society is not live. Then click on install WordPress. We can then login using our details, which we just provided. My username was festival admin, then paste in the password. This then takes us to the WordPress dashboard where we can control our site. We'll take a look at this in more detail very soon. We can also click on this home icon just above the top. This will then switches to our WordPress site. If you've go to the stage, congratulations, WordPress is now open running using MAMP. 9. The WordPress Dashboard: We had a quick preview of the WordPress dashboard, just before when setting up our projects. This is the control center for our website where we can add new content, we can update, and also delete our content too. We can also use it to install new features such as plugins or themes. But currently I'm not going to go too deep into the WordPress dashboard because we are going to be jumping into all of these options in more depth throughout this course. To begin, we have this homepage which gives