On today’s episode, we are going to talk about the ways to shorten your timeframe to become a WordPress developer right here on Your Website Engineer podcast, episode number 313. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. Today we’re gonna talk about some tips and tricks and some strategies to shorten the timeframe to become a WordPress developer and get yourself becoming more of an expert in the WordPress field. But today what we first want to talk about, I’ve got two announcements and a plugin to share with you.

So let’s go ahead and dive into the announcements. The first one is, and this will be about the last week that we talk about this, is WordPress 4.7 release candidate has been released. It is the last version of WordPress essentially, with all the features built in, before we get that brand new version next month. It’s set to ship on December 6th, so next week, we should be talking about the brand new version of WordPress. WordPress 4.7 is a jam packed release. It’s got lots of new features, like setting up a theme for the first time. We’ve got a new default theme, video headers. We’ve got custom CSS built into WordPress now.

We’ve got customizer edited shortcuts. We’ve got pdf thumbnail previews, a user admin languages, rest API content end points, post type templates, and much, much more. There are so many things that have happened and a lot of refinements in the last week since WordPress Beta 4 came out. So if you are a plugin developer or a theme developer, you want to definitely check this out to make sure your themes and your plugins are compatible and, in about a week or so, we’ll be talking about the brand new version. So that’s WordPress 4.7 release candidate.

Another thing that I noticed this week, as I was looking for a plugin and just looking around WordPress.org is they’ve got a brand new version of the plugins directory. You can find out more if you just go to WordPress.org/plugins-WP. This is the newest version of the plugins and it says that I guess it’s just a brand new interface. It’s basically pulling all the same data and it’s just a new, updated look. This eventually will be the new version when you go to WordPress.org/plugins.

If you want to browse through or look at the 47,000 plugins that are out there, you can go ahead and just check it out. There is a button on the right hand side that says, “Share your feedback.” So if you have an opportunity to find something that’s broken or say that you like it or dislike it, just go ahead and use that button and submit your comments and your changes. Then lastly while you’re here, you’ll notice the red bar across the top that says, “Have you take the WordPress 2016 survey?” They’re looking to wrap that thing up and the results will be shared at the State of the Word that’s coming up next week.

So with that, let’s go ahead and take a look at the plugin of the week. The plugin that I want to share with you today is called Short Testimonials. This is a full featured testimonials plugin that works right out of the box for beginners and offers advanced features for all pros and backed by strong support. So they actually provide free support for this free plugin. It’s got more than 10,000 active installs and it basically has various templates, slideshows, and forms that you could use. You can display star ratings on the front end of your website for your testimonials. You’ve got a front end form. You can do all kinds of things.

It works really, really well. It looks really nice. You can have featured images, whether that be a person or a company logo that you’ve worked with and whatnot. So if you’re looking for a really complete testimonial plugin, this is a great one for you called Strong Testimonials. Alright, today I want to talk a little bit about becoming a WordPress developer and how we shorten the timeframe. I know that if you talk to any WordPress developer out there, all of them are going to give you different experiences or different ways that they’ve come into the WordPress space.

I know that I have an unconventional type way that I learned WordPress I started building HTML websites and then I just continued to learn and tweak and play and pretty soon, I decided to start a podcast and then I was researching and figuring out how to do a lot of things so I could teach them on a podcast. Then I jumped into the world of support. So now I get to continue to develop my skills by running support and learning from other people’s questions and then trying to figure out how to do that and things like that.

So I just want to talk a little bit about becoming a WordPress developer and not necessarily like you have to work full time in WordPress or whatever, but just becoming a WordPress developer, and even using that term developer is a very loose term. I mean I consider myself a developer, whereas I can’t really write anything from scratch. That’s my weak spot when it comes to becoming a developer. I need to have some sort of theme or a plugin and then start modifying it. That’s how I work best.

I am slowly working on my skills to become better at starting from zero and then just start adding the code that I need, but the cool part about being a WordPress developer is that it’s got huge flexibilities. You can work from anywhere in the world as long as you have internet. You don’t even need the internet most of the time or even if you start learning to develop locally, then you could have weak internet because you can still work well and you just need to look up things or whatnot. So you’ve got huge amounts of flexibility to become a WordPress developer. There are tons of opportunities out there.

You’ve probably stumbled upon a bad website every single day looking at local businesses in your area or small shops or different places that are offering services or friends or family that want to put together a website for whatever reason or a blog. There’s tons of opportunities and the barrier to entry is actually really low. It’s not like you have to go out and get a business license and you have to set up a storefront so people can come in and come to your business or whatnot.

The barrier to entry is a computer, which you most likely have. You could probably do a lot of this work from an iPad, if that’s the only piece of technology that you have. You need a code editor and you need a FTP editor. Both of those are free. You can get started with Adam or there’s an editor by GitHub or there’s one called Sublime Text. You can actually run that unlicensed for a while to just understand and learn. Then you need a FTP editor. There’s ones called Cyberduck. There’s FileZilla. There’s some free ones that are out there that allow you to just connect to a server somewhere in the world and you don’t even have to pay for it.

You will need some hosting, but that’s standard. That’s only a few dollars per month to get started to get up and running. So you’ve got maybe $10.00 a month in hosting if you start out real basic, with shared hosting, and maybe you buy a theme for $50.00 or something. I mean you can get started in this business and start your own company for less than $100.00. So the big piece of advice that I want to share with you today is the best way to get started, if you want to know the absolute best way to get started, is to just build websites.

You’ll run into tons of problems and you’ll just learn how to solve on your … Oh, it would make a lot of sense to spend a lot of time learning and trying to figure out like, “Okay, let’s take this class and let’s do this and let’s do this” but then I struggle in learning in that aspect in the fact that, “Okay, now I have this knowledge that I may or may not need.” It’s kind of like going to college and the professor gives you all this information and you’re like, “When will I ever use this?” They’re like, “Oh, well probably never, but here’s the concepts and you need to know in case you need to know it.”

It doesn’t make a lot of sense to go through courses, but right away I think the best way is just to go and get started. Most projects, when I started out, it was somebody who asked me, “Could you do this?” You’re like, “Yeah, it’ll only take this, this, and this” thinking in my head like, “That’s not a problem.” As you start building and learning, peeling the layers of the onion apart, you’re like, “Oh, well I need to know this to do this. Then I need to know how to do this other thing before I can even do that second step that I thought about.”

So you’re just gonna start learning and figuring out the things that are a lot more complex than you actually think they’re gonna be. One of the big things that I think is a great starting point is creating your own blog. Now this again, there’s a low barrier to entry. You can even start with WordPress.com and just start there and start working with the visuals via CSS, but if you have your own self-hosted blog that you’re using regularly, I think that is a great place to start because there’s so much that you can learn from creating a blog and using it.

I say “and using it” because as you use a blog, that’s when you start figuring out like, “Oh, I’d like to do this” or “I’d like to do this.” Then you start thinking, “Okay, now how would I make these customizations and whatnot?” So let’s talk about this. We’re gonna go out there and we’re just gonna create our own website; you know DustinHartzler.com or whatever that looks like to be your main blog site. Then you start looking around your site. Maybe you purchase a theme. That’s the easiest place to start.

You purchase a theme from some sort of theme shop, you know ThemeForest.net or you go to a WooCommerce theme or whatever theme you pick. That’s not a big deal, but then you start looking around your website and trying to figure out, “Okay, I’d like to change these colors” or “Maybe I want to rearrange and I want to put the sidebar from the right to the left” or “Maybe I want to include a little blurb about the author at the bottom of every post. Whatever that is, you’re gonna come up with things that you could make your website better.

Then from there, now you’re starting to figure out, “Okay, now what we need to do to make changes.” These are real time changes that you can make, especially on a blog when you’re getting started. Nobody really cares if, for a little while, you don’t have your author name on the end of your posts. Nobody’s gonna mind if that happens. We don’t want to be doing this on a website that we’ve been paid for or our company’s website, but this is a great place to get started.

So in order to start making these changes, you’re gonna have to learn a few new skills. You’re gonna have to learn the technology and learn what these acronyms mean, like FTP, File Transfer Protocol. We’re gonna have to know how to connect to a server and how to be able to transfer edited files from one place to another. We’re gonna have to learn a little CSS and HTML. We’re going to need to know how to use the WordPress Editor.

Well, that’s where we’re gonna write our blog posts inside the WordPress Editor. How does it work? What kind of formatting can we do inside the Editor? Can we change colors of the text? Can we make the text bigger? We’re gonna learn all of these things. We’re gonna need probably a code editor if we’re gonna start really diving in and making some changes to the theme. In order to do that, we probably want to learn how to make a child theme so we can make these changes the correct way, without worrying about losing all of our customizations with the risk of updating and the main parent theme overwriting all of our changes.

So that’s another thing to think about. I don't think right off the gate you need to learn things like command-line or SAS or Git or some of these more complex technologies that indeed will make your life easier later down the road. I think right now, as you get started, the best place to start is with those four technologies: FTP, CSS, and HTML, the WordPress Editor and a texting code editor. You just need to get started on hacking something. I call it hacking, but essentially you’re live working on your website.

They call this term cowboy coding, like going right onto the server, editing your files or saving them and then uploading them straight to the web or whatever without a backup copy, without redundancy systems and whatnot. I don't think all of that is necessary right out of the gate. You just need to start building something, hacking on something. If your personal blog breaks, then it’s not that big a deal. If you’re building a blog for Microsoft and you’re working on that, in a live environment and you break something, then that’s kind of a big deal. But right now, we’re just getting started. We’re looking to build websites.

Another place that you could start is maybe a friend or family member. They need a website for maybe a local campaign. That’s one of the very first live websites that I built. A friend of mine was running for a county commissioner position in his county. So I built him a website with WordPress. The previous year, I built it with HTML because that’s all I knew and then the year after I’m like, “I’m gonna build this with WordPress because I want to learn this technology. I want to learn the skills.”

Yes, it took four or five times longer trying to do everything I wanted to do in WordPress, but that gave me a great opportunity to say, “Okay, I need to do this. Now I have to go and research and try to figure out how I want to do that specific thing.” Another place that you could start is wedding websites. That’s another great place to start. Usually wedding websites are pretty simple. They’re just a few pages. People want an About Me page that talks about a little background about each person and how they met, things along those lines. It’s just a great place to get started.

You’ll run into problems. You’ll run into things and you’ll just have to learn as you go. They sometimes call this just in time learning, where there’s hundreds of hours of things that you could learn about WordPress and how to use it, but you just want to learn the things you need right then. You’ll learn it and I feel like you’ll learn it and use it and understand it much better when you have a specific application that you’re using it for. Then you use it right away. So those are some of the basics to get started. You just want to find somebody. You could even start volunteering at a local nonprofit.

Just get started just doing something and getting your hands dirty with WordPress and code editors and things like that. Now there are some WordPress learning resources of course. You’re listening to one here at YourWebsiteEngineer.com and you’re listening to a podcast, but some other places that are out there, there is a course on Lynda.com all about WordPress. You’re more than welcome to … I mean you’re welcome to do any of these things. You’re welcome to do nothing, actually, but if you want to get started with a course, you can definitely start with the Lynda.com course.

There’s another one called WP in One Month. This is Joe Casabona is a front end developer that works with WordPress and so he has created this whole course about how to learn WordPress in a month. This is another great resource to go out and learn some of the ins and outs of WordPress. There is a WordCamp TV episode, which was a video taken from a WordCamp, or it’s WordPress.TV and it’s Brian Krogsgard. The title of it is Going For It and How To Become a Respected WordPress Developer. That’s a great way to learn some more. That’s more along the lines of learning the skills and the traits of becoming a developer and going in and working with clients and things like that.

Another great place to learn is on the WordPress Stack Exchange. This is a community forum where people write in all kinds of WordPress question. Then you can just go in and you can browse that forum or you can ask your own questions there. It’ll come up with a lot of resources and a lot of great solutions for you to find the answers to whatever problem that you may be having. Other things that you could do is you could listen to other WordPress podcasts.

One of the ones specifically that I like that a lot of time the content is a little bit over my head or just about where my knowledge gap is, is one called Apply Filters. That’s a couple plugin developers, Pippin Williamson and Brad Touesnard. They are in charge of Pippin does Easy Digital Downloads, Restrict Content Pro, and Affiliate WP, and Brad is the founder and creator of WP Migrate DB Pro. So that’s another podcast that you can listen to.

There’s tons of WordPress podcasts if you look for podcasts on the WordPress directory. There’s one all about business. There’s a few that are all about business. There’s some that are how-to. There’s some about WordPress news and community and stuff like that. So that’s another way to learn. Probably the last way is Google. Google is your friend. It is a great way to just, “Okay, how do I do this?” Usually if you tack the word WordPress on with whatever you’re searching for, you’ll run across a Stack Exchange post or a post in the WordPress forums that will take you through exactly step-by-step of how to fix whatever you’re looking for.

One other way, and this is kind of unconventional, but it’s the path that I’ve created for myself, is I’ve got myself into an area where I provide support for other people. So I am every day learning because other people have all these struggles and challenges and unique situations that they’ve put themselves in to building out their store. They want to ship things in a certain way or whatever. I’m learning how to look at code, how to figure out, “Okay, what kind of filter or action needs to be created?” It’s just making me into a better developer as well.

This is, like I said, an unconventional path, but this might be one that you could take if you find yourself inside of a company that has a WordPress website and you could say, “Hey, I could take on this. Let me keep your website updated. Let me do this. Let me do this.” it’s just another way that you could learn the different skills and abilities. I mean probably one of the best ways is to have somebody that’s in the non-tech world and then have them ask you to do things with the website. You say yes and then you just go and try to figure out how it works and if it’s actually possible to do it in WordPress.

So those are some of the things that I want to share with you today. Basically, if you want to streamline and speed up the way that you learn WordPress, it’s basically doing it. The opportunity costs are right there. If you could charge $50.00 an hour for what you’re doing and you could work 20 hours per week, you’re talking like $4,000.00 a month, if my math is correct, to go ahead and make an additional wage or supplement your income or whatnot.

So there’s tons and tons of opportunities. There’s tons of people that love WordPress, love the community, that will just absolutely enjoy learning more about WordPress and spending time building websites for people. So those are some of the things that I want to share with you this week. Until next week, we’ll talk again soon. Take care. Bye, bye.