Nate Finch

All the things, keeping it clever…🤓

3 Most Important Techniques I’ve Learned on WordPress (So Far)

Nate

·

Moving toward being a developer has forced me to learn some technical skills and techniques I did not know six months ago. There are plenty of things I have learned in the last six months that I had no clue about. WordPress, to use the words of Augustin, is

“shallow enough for a child to wade in, but deep enough for an elephant to swim in.”

You get the idea.

With this in mind, there have been three key skills or techniques I’ve learned that have greatly helped my development and sanity as I try to figure a lot of this out.

Website Backup, Restore and Migration

Always have a backup! I remember in college consciously training my fingers to hit “Ctrl S” every few minutes. I had lost a paper or two by not saving.

Never again.

I have gotten into the habit of saving backups for the sites I am working on as well by using a backup plugin. One of the great things about using these plugins is the ability to use the WP Cron and set weekly automatic backups. I tend to work on site a few hours a weeks, so I know that I am never going to be more than a few hours behind where I was.

If you mess things up, you can always roll back to a previous version of the site. If something happens and the site breaks beyond repair, you can restore the site.

I have also been using the backups created by these plugins to move development sites I am working on for a client to live (see the development site discussion below).

There are several plugins I’ve used for this backup, restoration and migration in the past. My favorites are:

And I send all of these to Dropbox. If you don’t have a Dropbox account, get one here (now!).

There are many other ways to perform a site backup (just search “wordpress site backup, migration retore” on YouTube). These are my favorites because they are easy and can be set to automatically backup your site.

The best way to create a backup is to do so automatically, and without thinking (I just hit the “Ctrl S” again on this post). If you haven’t made a backup yet, do so now!

Using an FTP Client and Code Editor

The first time I encountered the “white screen of death” was around 12:30am on a week night. I had to go to work the next day and was extremely tired, and trying to get one last thing done. I am no PHP expert, but was changing some PHP code on the WordPress backend, hit save, and all of a sudden, everything went to a white blank screen…

I couldn’t log in…

I couldn’t pull up the website…

I couldn’t go to sleep because I was wide awake at this point… (facepalm!)

If you have ever tried editing code in the WordPress editor, then this is for you!

Grab yourself a FREE FTP client and a FREE text editor (not the Notepad or TextEdit that comes standard on PCs and Macs). I use CyberDuck for my FTP client and NotePad++ (PC only) for my text editor. These can be integrated to be used together. Plenty of folks use FileZilla for FTP work, and other text editors like TextWrangler, Sublime Text or Coda for working with code.

Why is this important? As I’ve written about before, if you get the white screen of death, you can easily fix a code edit you did. You can quickly undo or paste back text you cut out. This alone will save you plenty of time (hours maybe!), and avoids having to un-install and re-install your website, especially if you don’t have a backup (if you still don’t have a backup after reading the first section above, stop now, and go do it!).

FTP clients also allow you to easily upload multiple plugins, themes or other files without having to use the WP backend. If you have several plugins you like to use when setting up a site, you can use the FTP client to transfer multiple files at once, and you do not have to activate them one at a time.

Using a text editor allows you to better interact with text. Most text editors come with color coding and brackets for different languages (HTML, CSS, PHP, etc.) so you can tell which code snippets are related to others. This is super helpful when troubleshooting some code that’s not working properly.

For the best tutorial on how to use an FTP client and text editor, see this tutorial from Dustin Hartzler.

Developing on a Subdomain or Local Site

If you’ve ever seen something like “mail.google.com” for GMail or “m.facebook.com”, these prefixes “mail” and “m” are subdomains of the larger site. For our purposes, this allows for completely separate installations of WordPress, specifically a development site.

When I learned I could do this, I was so excited. Working on a subdomain of someone’s site is the easiest way I know to allow the site to be seen by my client and create the exact conditions (loading speed, uptime, etc.) in which the live site will function since it will be on the same hosting. The major drawback is that if you want to develop without an internet connection, you won’t be able to.

If you do want to develop locally, you can do this as well. If you are developing a theme, plugin, or web application, you may prefer to keep everything offline and on your computer (with proper backups). There are two major programs I’ve used for developing locally:

The main point here is not that you should be developing on a subdomain or locally, but that you should NOT be developing and testing things on a live site.

Much better to be safe than sorry.

Runner Up: Creating and Installing a Child Theme

I am by no means a master at working with child themes. In fact, my last fore into trying to develop a simple child theme failed miserably. But I’m learning.

Working with child themes is extremely interesting to me because it does not require completely re-working a theme or “re-inventing the wheel”. Child themes allow parent themes to be modified without changing the files in the parent theme, and thus preserving the appearance of your site if an update is to occur.

Child themes also teach you about file structures, functions, and other modifications that might not be as intuitive to the beginner, like myself.

Using child themes, in general is a great way to learn about the small steps of building a theme and even a framework.

There is an incredible amount of skills, techniques and general navigation around WordPress to be learned. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

Honestly, I can’t wait for more.