Wordpress Syllabus Details and Schedule

Week 1

Getting started

• Installation
• Getting Dev Environment Set Up (flywheel)
• First Tastes of PHP

First Coding Steps: PHP

• Creating a new theme
• PHP functions
• PHP Arrays
• PHP Drills

Week 2

Wordpress Specific PHP

• The famous “loop” in Wordpress
• Header and footer
• Convert static HTML template into Wordpress

Pages

• Interior Page Template
• Parent & Children Pages
• To echo or Not To Echo
• Menu of Child Page Links
• Navigation Menus

Week 3

Building the Blog Section

• Blog listing page(index.php vs. front-page.php)
• Blog archives (archive.php)
• Custom queries
• Making edits and improvements to blogs

Workflow Automation

• Using Gulp
• Preparing for automation w/command line

Week 4

Review

Week 5

Events Post Type

• Custom post types and displaying them
• Quick timeout: Misc. Updates
• Custom fields
• Ordering (sorting) custom queries
• Manipulating default URL Based Queries
• Past Events page (custom query pagination)

Week 6

Programs post type

• Creating relationships between content
• Displaying relationships on the front end
• Some more editing tricks

Professors Post Type

• Featured image (post thumbnail)
• Sizes and cropping for images

Cleaner Code (less duplication)

• Use the “pagebanner” function
• Other ways to reduce duplication

Week 7

Campus Post Type

• Campus Map on Front-end
• Campuses Continued

Live Search (UI Javascript)

• Livesearch
• Open and close search overlay
• Keyboard events in javascript
• Waiting/loading spinner icon

Week 8

Review

Week 9

Wordpress REST API (AJAX)

• Load WP content with JS
• Generate HTML Based on JSON
• Conditional Logic within Template Literal
• Quick Misc. Edits
• Synchronous Vs. Asynchronous

Customizing the REST API

• REST API: Add new custom field
• REST API: Add new custom route
• Create your own Raw JSON data
• WP_Query and Keyword Searching
• Working with Multiple Post Types

Week 10

Combining the front-end & back-end

• column layout for search overlay
• Custom layout & JSON based-post type
• Search Logic that’s aware of relationships
• Completing the search overlay
• Non-JS Fallback Traditional Search
• Traditional Wordpress Searching
• User Roles and Permissions
• Open registration

Week 11

• User Generated Content
• “my notes” feature
• Delete posts with the REST API
• Edit/update posts with the REST API
• Creating new notes
• Note permission and security
• Per-user post limit

Like or “heart” count for professors

• Let users “like” content
• Creating custom POST and DELETE endpoints
• Programmatically create a post
• Enforce limit of one like per user/teacher combo
• Completing the likebox

Week 12

Going live: deploying the Wordpress Site

• Manually moving a site
• Database config for two site environments
• Ignoring certain files with git
• Automatic git deployments to web hosts

Challenges

• Make homepage slideshow dynamic
• Create a basic plugin
• Have an update plan in place (security)
• Query Vars
• Javascript next steps

Week 13

Debugging and Documentation

• Fixing “.dev” domains
• Intro to Virtualbox and Vagrant
• Our first site with virtualbox and vagrat
• How to start and stop Vagrant
• Only for Vagrant Users (installing wordpress)
• Setting up new(multiple) sites in Vagrant/VirtualBox.