This year we have a really special treat at WordCamp Milwaukee! If you’ve ever wanted to learn more about making your own custom WordPress website and theme, have we got a track for you!
Join us ALL DAY SUNDAY for a FULL, Step-by-step Custom Site build!
WordPress Architect and Developer Jamie Schmid will walk us through the basics of getting a custom site up and running – all in a day! This track is super special – instead of five typical 30 minute sessions, there will be 4 1HOUR sessions taking us on a deep-dive into what really goes into creating a custom WordPress site from beginning to end.
These sessions will get you up to speed with WordPress’ content types, how to plan your site for an easy build (and easy content entry!!), developing your own CUSTOM WordPress theme according to your OWN design, local development and deployment, and advanced content and themeing topics like Custom Post Types, Custom Fields, Taxonomies and more!
Seriously, there’s never been a better time for you to take your skills to the next level. All you need for the Themeing sessions is some basic HTML and CSS knowledge (we will be working with an existing static coded website, so there won’t be any frontend development here at all, just pure delicious themeing!). And the great thing is that Discovery, Themeing, and Advanced Content are all self-contained sessions – you can come to one, two, or all three and you’re sure to take away some great skills to help you in your next project and beyond.
You are free to work along with us!
If you cannot work along, don’t worry: all of these classes are documented online, and you will get a link to them in the session. You can then go back and work at your own pace with the full slides and detailed online documentation of each of these classes.
If you WOULD like to work along with us, please be sure you have the following downloaded to your local machine – we DO have WiFi at WordCamp, but having everything up and running ahead of time will ensure you’re ready to go. Bonus: ALL of these tools are FREE!
- DesktopServer! – a fabulous local WordPress development environment (that lets you develop WordPress websites right on your own computer without need for an internet connection!)
https://serverpress.com/get-desktopserver/ - WordPress! – You may have heard of it?
https://wordpress.org/download/ - Underscores! – a custom starter theme with all the basic files and functions to start your development
http://underscores.me/ - Advanced Custom Fields! – THE de-facto plugin for easy creation & management of custom fields and relationships
https://wordpress.org/plugins/advanced-custom-fields/
ALL 4 of these tools are used by professional WordPress developers EVERY DAY to create awesome websites for clients big and small – so you will not only be learning how to do it, but how to do RIGHT. What more can you ask for?!
Breakdown of the Big Day:
Sunday at 10am: the Discovery class
Here we get our project summary — building a website for a local school — and break it down into all the parts necessary to build the site into WordPress. You will learn about all the content types in WordPress, when to use a post, a page, or something even more custom. The Discovery and content architecture phase is CRITICAL when beginning any website! Knowing this phase of web development is going to help you immensely in creating a site that’s organized, properly understood and planned out for the development phase. You do not need to know ANY coding at all for this session: project managers, implementers, and developers alike are all invited to this session. You will absolutely have some great knowledge to take away!
11am and 1:30pm : Introduction to Custom Themeing classes.
We will be looking at all the parts of a WordPress theme (HINT: there are only TWO files necessary to make a WordPress theme!), reviewing the theme hierarchy so we can learn how to break down theme files for the most efficient and custom development, and checking out some great built-in WordPress functions that make our lives so much easier when creating a theme. In Class 2, we take a look at the Underscores (_s) starter theme, which has tons of basic WP functionality already built in and ready for your customization. Lots of developers swear by this starter theme (NOTE: a starter theme is NOT a framework!!) as the foundation to all their custom themes, and you will learn how to take advantage of all its shortcuts to create your own theme. At the end of Class 2, we will have a fully-build theme and website, ready to deploy!
2:30 : the Advanced Content Types class
A must for anyone who wants to extend WordPress’ functionality to create custom content. We discuss implementing Custom Post Types, Custom Fields and Taxonomies, and various relationships you can use to make really powerful dynamic websites.
Hope to see you there!