Though many of the concepts in this course are still relevant, overall this course does not reflect our current course standards.
Transcript from the "Introduction" Lesson
[00:00:00]
>> Zac Gordon: Before I get rolling, I just have to plug Frontend Masters for one more second, because Mark and the team here has done some amazing stuff. And me coming to be here is a huge honor, because some of the instructors that they have on this site are the top-notch people out there writing books, lecturing, talking about JavaScript in super depth.
[00:00:20] So if you haven't checked out their other courses and stuff, I highly suggest it. It will take any level of JavaScript you have and go way, way deeper. So that said, way to go you all, Frontend Masters, where it's at. Now, this JavaScript for WordPress workshop is a little bit interesting, because we're coming to WordPress from a very unconventional avenue, which is from the world of JavaScript.
[00:00:47] So we've already gone through hopefully everybody has everything set up that we need. So I wanted to start off just talking about why as a JavaScript developer, or why as a developer, we should care much about WordPress. And I don't have my notes here but we're gonna make this work.
[00:01:05] So, first of all, if you don't know what WordPress is, it say content management system, which means that it let's you edit and manage your data. It could manage media, anything form videos to audio to pictures. It could deal to post and pages, it can also deal to custom content.
[00:01:22] So you could set up your own thing like projects or events, and you could set up your own custom fields to have whatever conditions you want. It's also very extendable, so it has two kind of directions of extendability. You have themes, which controls how all the content looks, and then you have plugins which extend the functionality of WordPress itself.
[00:01:42] Now, traditionally, all of this was done in PHP and WordPress is build on a very open source stack. But that's shifting a lot. As a developer that knows JavaScript you have a huge win in the world of WordPress, because it's becoming more and more JavaScript driven, but not as many people in the WordPress space, even experienced developers know JavaScript.
[00:02:07] So if you have some of that foundation and you learn just a little bit of WordPress, you're already much ahead than a lot of other folks. So that's one of the main benefits coming into this. The other is that if you're building applications out there, WordPress can offer a lot in terms of taking care a lot of what you would maybe call like the application framework or foundational stuff, handling login, handling user credentials, handling user roles, managing the content, having the database synced up, having an API available.
[00:02:40] So if you're rolling your own, that's gonna be quite a lot of work and it may be something helpful there. So that's kind of the two areas of why, as a JavaScript and general developer it's helpful to know about WordPress, especially in the time we're at now. So historically, WordPress developers have lived in a bubble, just like a lot of us live in bubbles, and this bubble has been a very safe place for learning how to develop.
[00:03:06] Some of the top WordPress plug in and theme developers out there learned everything they know about Web Development from WordPress. You could learn HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript all at the very easy barrier to entry.