Category: Creative Circus

The casual WordPress user customizes their theme by selecting a theme, installing their choice of plugins, and perhaps hiring a designer to create a custom header image. This works for many people and there’s something to be said for tasteful minimalism.

With that being said, there are a number of ways that we can begin tapping into the power of WordPress on the path to mastery. Among these are the creation of child themes, the utilization of theme frameworks, and custom plugin development.
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Most people probably haven’t checked out the WordPress Codex pages on The Loop and The Loop in Action. This is a shame, because there’s no more important concept in WordPress. Let’s get it.

The Loop is used by WordPress to display each of your posts. Using The Loop, WordPress processes each of the posts to be displayed on the current page and formats them according to how they match specified criteria within The Loop tags. Any HTML or PHP code placed in the Loop will be repeated on each post. When WordPress documentation states “This tag must be within The Loop”, such as for specific Template Tag or plugins, the tag will be repeated for each post.

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For web professionals looking to build a business that’s both challenging and rewarding, WordPress represents an ideal development platform. It’s completely free, open-source, well-supported, and requires very little time to get up and running. Most web hosts can run WordPress (it requires PHP 4.3 or greater, MySQL 4.1.2 or greater, and the mod_rewrite Apache module) and many hosts have automated installers to make setup a breeze.

Additionally, WordPress is everywhere. News organizations, bloggers, web professionals, designers, and marketers all use WordPress every day to run their businesses. Regardless of your industry, there’s a good chance that someone has done what you’re trying to do. Central to WordPress is the concept of theming, which is a collection of files that determined the look and feel of your site. WordPress requires a theme to display output for your visitors, and there are countless free and premium themes to choose from.
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