What Exactly Does WordPress Development Involve? The Site Slinger Explains

According to the data on builtwith.com, WordPress (WP) firmly holds first place among similar content management systems (CMSs) and is far ahead of its closest competitor.

What makes this CMS so popular among many businesses and organizations such as the White House or Sony Music? Here are just a few of WP’s benefits to give you an idea.

Flexibility. WP is one of the most flexible content management platforms out there and a good WordPress development agency can work wonders for your business website. While its original purpose was to host and manage blogs, these days, it’s used for almost any type of site, be it a portfolio site, non-profit organization site, or e-commerce store.
Extensibility. A WP site is extremely easy to create, even for someone who has never been involved in web development before. However, basic WordPress has limited functionality, which is not sufficient to handle more complex tasks such as inventory management or video conferencing. To fill this gap, the official WP directory offers tons of helpful plugins, both commercial and free. In addition, WP site owners can hire developers to code custom plugins for their unique business needs.
A rich variety of themes. The way a site looks is no less, and in certain cases even more important, than the way it functions. WP offers its users a huge number of ready-made themes, which represent collections of code in separate folders that you can download and install through the dashboard. Then, you can tweak them to give your site a unique look. Another option is to create a custom theme.
Convenient content addition and manipulation features. WP is a blogging software pioneer. Over the years, it has been improving existing and adding new content creation and management options such as the Gutenberg content editor or autosaving. Even novices can get to grips with these features in no time. This incredible ease of working with content attracts many news agencies to WP, for example, BBC America.

Of course, WP has a lot more advantages than we’ve listed above. When companies start working with this platform, though, they realize that they need more fine-tuning than they can get out of the box. This prompts them to start looking for WordPress developers. Sadly enough, they often come across people who don’t deserve the title.

That’s why we think it will be interesting and useful for you to learn what skills and knowledge a professional WordPress developer should possess and what WP development actually involves. This should save you time, nerves, and money in the long run.

What Differentiates Amateurs from True WordPress Developers?

Amateurs

First, let’s talk about people you can hardly consider WP developers, let alone WP experts.

The ease of using and configuring WP is both its blessing and its curse. Even a teenager can get a WordPress site up and running by spending just a few weeks or even days learning how to do it. This is the reason why there are so many freelancers claiming to be professional WP developers.

However, just installing and tweaking a theme or adding a couple of plugins is far from being classified as professional WP development.

True WordPress Professionals

A true WP developer is someone who knows the platform inside and out — its file system and core functions. They are not just simple users who can install a plugin or change a theme, although they can do that all too.

What distinguishes a real WP expert is the knowledge of the principal web development technologies for the front-end (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) and the back-end (PHP and SQL) sides. Additionally, they should have an eye for aesthetics and be well familiar with the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) principles.

What Exactly Do a WP Developer’s Responsibilities Involve?

WP developers belong to a broader category of web developers. If necessary, they can take on the full website development cycle, starting from the requirements analysis to support and maintenance. However, they are back-end specialists in the first turn.

A WP developer is an expert in PHP, one of the most popular programming languages in the world. PHP is the weapon of choice in the majority of e-commerce projects. Its main purpose is to interact with a database, sending data to it and retrieving data from it through SQL queries, and then manipulating it as required.

THEMES

By using these two essential tools (PHP and SQL), a WP developer takes theme files prepared by a designer and front-end specialist and integrates them into the WP site. Data from forms that a theme contains must be sent to the site’s database safely. Product data with descriptions, prices, and visuals stored in the database must be retrieved and displayed on the site correctly.

All this requires writing high-quality PHP scripts that contain SQL queries. The code must be clean, easy to read, and hard to crack by hackers. It must also be well-tested by the developer himself or herself and by dedicated QA professionals to ensure the best quality.

For example, our WP developers follow the TDD (Test Driven Development) methodology. In a nutshell, it assumes writing tests based on the technical specifications prior to typing a line of code. As a result, our WP experts create top-quality, bug-free code.

PLUGINS

Another major area of a WP developer’s expertise is writing custom plugins or tweaking existing ones. WordPress provides some basic functionality to add and manipulate content. To extend it, WP developers create PHP scripts that perform additional functions, known as plugins.

There are tons of plugins in the official WP directory, fulfilling all kinds of functions, starting from search engine optimization and security and ending with data import and export. Plugins often represent a collection of several types of files (CSS, JavaScript, images, PHP) intended to perform a particular task.

What makes PHP scripts as plugins different from PHP scripts written for themes is that the former are available to all themes, while the latter are attached to the current theme only. Change the theme and your functionality is gone.

That said, the same requirements for code quality concern plugins as well. WP developers must pay particular attention to the security of their plugin code and regularly update it, since plugins are the most coveted of hackers’ targets. To learn more about plugins, visit the official WP website.

ENTRUST YOUR WORDPRESS PROJECT TO A RELIABLE PARTNER

WordPress is the leading content management platform on the planet. With its flexibility, extensibility, and versatility, it attracts a wide audience of users, starting from individual bloggers and professionals who want to showcase their projects and ending with governments and large corporations.

Not everyone who can add plugins and tweak themes deserves to be called a professional WP developer. A genuine WP specialist has deep knowledge of the main web development technologies and can create high-quality custom plugins and themes.

This is exactly what The Site Slinger WordPress developers can offer you. With over 2,415 WP projects implemented to date, our WP pros have amassed unrivaled experience in all WordPress-related tasks.

We can develop a WP site of any scope and purpose from the ground up or tweak your existing site to suit your needs. The Site Slinger WP developers are proficient in using all staple web technologies, PHP and its frameworks like Lavarel in particular, and can integrate a wide variety of external solutions with your WP site, such as WooCommerce or the Event Calendar.

Avoid amateurs, trust professionals! Get in touch with us for any requests or questions regarding WordPress development.

Effortless Full Screen Background Images With jQuery

Today we’re going to build a simple and fun webpage for the sole purpose of showing off Fullscreenr, a great little jQuery plugin that makes it easy to add a background image to your site that automatically adjusts to the window size.

We’ll also throw in some @font-face and rgba action to keep things modern and educational on the rest of the build. Let’s get started!

Demo

Just so you can get a feel for what we’re building, check out the demo below. To see the jQuery in action, resize the browser window and watch how the image adapts dynamically.

View the demo

Now that you’ve seen how it works, let’s build it!

Step 1: Grab Fullscreenr

The first thing you’re going to want to do is go to the Fullsreenr website and download a copy. Grab the JS files and throw them into a folder with a basic website framework: html, css and images folder.

Step 2: Start the HTML

To begin the HTML, thrown in the code for an empty page and add the references for the stylesheet and the two JavaScript files.

<!-- Stylesheet -->
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/style.css">
<!-- JavaScript codes -->
<script src="js/jquery-1.3.2.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script src="js/jquery.fullscreenr.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Step 2: Select a Background Image

Before we insert the code for placing our background image, we’ll need to know the size. Which of course means we need to find an image.

I grabbed the image below by Faisal.Saeed on Flickr Creative Commons. It’s an awesome snowy mountain scene that should make the perfect setting for our site.

Next, I sized the image so that it would be 907px by 680px. These are the dimensions that we’ll use in our next step.

Step 3: Insert the Fullscreenr Snippet

In the demo files of the Fullscreenr download, you should find the following JavaScript snippet to enable the plugin. I’ve customized it a bit with the image dimensions specified above.

<script type="text/javascript">  
    var FullscreenrOptions = {  width: 907, height: 680, bgID: '#bgimg' };
    jQuery.fn.fullscreenr(FullscreenrOptions);
</script>

All you have to do for your own version is change the hight and width to match that of your own image.

Step 4: Body HTML

Next up, there is a chunk of HTML in the demo page that you’ll need to grab. The structure may seem a little funky but really all the developer has done is applied the background image to the body and created a basic container (realBody) for you to then add all the rest of your content to. If you don’t like the div ID names used by the developer, feel free to change them to something more conventional.

<!-- This is the background image -->
<img id="bgimg" src="img/mountains-907x680.jpg">
<!-- Here the "real" body starts, where you can put your website -->
<div id="realBody">
    
<!-- Here the "real" body ends, do not place content outside this div unless you know what you are doing -->
</div>

As you can see, all we’ve done here is throw in the background image.

Step 5: Add the CSS

Finally, throw in the CSS below to make everything work properly. This is necessary to make sure your content will scroll correctly and stay positioned properly in the stack.

body {
    overflow:hidden; 
    padding:0;margin:0;
    height:100%;width:100%;
}
#bgimg {
    position:absolute;
    z-index: -1;
}
#realBody{
    position:absolute;
    z-index: 5; 
    overflow:auto; 
    height:100%;width:100%;
    background: url('../img/raster.png');
}

And with that, you’re done! You should now have a background image that dynamically scales with the browser window. The transition is super smooth and works brilliantly.

The plugin comes with an dotted pattern image overlay, shown below in a zoomed-in view. If you don’t like this effect, simply leave it out!

If you’d like, you can stop here and proceed with your own design. If you’re interested on where to go from here, I’ll finish up with some fun design.

Step 6: Add a Background Div and Header

Now that we’ve got our background image, we want to center a div over the top of it and give it a background fill. We’ll also give it a basic header that I thought seemed appropriate given the snowy background image.

<img id="bgimg" src="img/mountains-907x680.jpg">
<div id="realBody">
    <div id="container">
        <h1>Welcome to Hoth</h1>
    </div>
</div>

Next we’ll style these two elements with CSS (insert this in addition to the CSS above).

#container {
    width: 800px;
    height: 1000px;
    margin: auto;
    margin-top: 60px;
    padding-top: 10px;
    background:rgba(0,0,0,.8);
    
}
#container h1 {
    color:#fff;
    font-family: 'KitchenpoliceRegular', sans-serif;
    font-size:60px;
    font-weight: normal;
    text-decoration:none;
    text-align:center;
}
@font-face {
    font-family: 'KitchenpoliceRegular';
    src: url('KITCHENPOLICE-webfont.eot');
    src: local('‚ò∫'), url('KITCHENPOLICE-webfont.woff') format('woff'), url('KITCHENPOLICE-webfont.ttf') format('truetype'), url('KITCHENPOLICE-webfont.svg#webfontCRDciSXC') format('svg');
    font-weight: normal;
    font-style: normal;
}

This is a big chunk of code but it’s all super basic. First, we gave the container a height and width, then set the margins to auto. This gives us a vertical strip that automatically stays centered on the page. The background color for the container has been applied using rgba. This will give us a nice transparent container that lets some of that nice background image show through.

Next, we used applied some basic styles to the header and customized the font using @font-face. I used a font called Kitchen Police and an @font-face kit from FontSquirrel.

At this point, your page should look like the image below.

Step 7: Add a Header Image

The next step is extremely easy. All you have to do is toss in an image that’s the same width as the container (800px).

<img id="bgimg" src="img/mountains-907x680.jpg">
<div id="realBody">
    <div id="container">
        <h1>Welcome to Hoth</h1>
        <img src="img/walkers.jpg">
    </div>
</div>

And with that your image should fall right into place without any extra styling.

Step 8: Add Some Text

In this step we’re going to add some basic filler text to the page and in the next we’ll add a grid of images. Since the text will hypothetically tie into the images, we’ll throw it all into a “grid” div.

<img id="bgimg" src="img/mountains-907x680.jpg">
<div id="realBody">
    <div id="exampleDiv">
        <h1>Welcome to Hoth</h1>
        <img src="img/walkers.jpg">
        
        <div id="grid">
            <h2>Good Times on Hoth:</h2>
            <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...</p>
        </div>
        
    </div>
</div>

To style the text, we’ll first add a little margin to the top of the div. Then we apply basic color, size, and positioning to both the h2 tag and the paragraph tag. Notice I used some more @font-face goodness, this time with Lobster.

#grid {
    margin-top: 20px;
}
#grid h2{
    color: #fff;
    text-align: left;
    margin-left: 65px;
    font-size: 30px;
    font-family: 'Lobster', sans-serif;
    margin-bottom: 3px;
    font-weight: normal;
}
#grid p{
    color: #fff;
    text-align: left;
    margin-left: 65px;
    margin-bottom: 3px;
    font-size: 12px;
    font-family: helvetica, sans-serif;
    margin-top: 0px;
    width: 650px;
    line-height: 18px;
}
@font-face {
    font-family: 'Lobster';
    src: url('Lobster_1.3-webfont.eot');
    src: local('‚ò∫'), url('Lobster_1.3-webfont.woff') format('woff'), url('Lobster_1.3-webfont.ttf') format('truetype'), url('Lobster_1.3-webfont.svg#webfontcOtP3oQb') format('svg');
    font-weight: normal;
    font-style: normal;
}

This should give you a nicely style block of text similar to that in the image below. Now we can move onto the final step!

Step 9: Add the Gallery

To finish the page up, we’ll toss in a simple image gallery that is basically just a grid of nine JPGs. To give the photographers credit, I’ve linked each to the original source images on Flickr.

<img id="bgimg" src="img/mountains-907x680.jpg">
<div id="realBody">
    <div id="container">
        <h1>Welcome to Hoth</h1>
        <img src="img/walkers.jpg">
        
        <div id="grid">
            <h2>Good Times on Hoth:</h2>
            <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit...</p>
            <a href="http://ow.ly/35afM"><img src="img/hoth1.jpg"></a>
            <a href="http://ow.ly/35ah9"><img src="img/hoth2.jpg"></a>
            <a href="http://ow.ly/35aim"><img src="img/hoth3.jpg"></a>
            <a href="http://ow.ly/35ajg"><img src="img/hoth4.jpg"></a>
            <a href="http://ow.ly/35ajY"><img src="img/hoth5.jpg"></a>
            <a href="http://ow.ly/35alw"><img src="img/hoth6.jpg"></a>
        </div>
        
    </div>
</div>

As the final piece of the puzzle, we’ll toss in some margins and borders to make the image grid look nice and styled.

#grid img {
    margin: 20px 10px 20px 10px;
    border: 3px solid #000;
}
#grid a:hover img{
    border: 3px solid #fff;
}

That should space everything and and finish up your page! Feel free to keep going and add in a navigation section, footer, sidebar and whatever else you can think of!

Conclusion

jQuery and the Fullscreenr plugin present the easiest and best-looking solution I’ve found for scaleable background images. If you’d rather try the same effect with CSS, check out Chris Coyier’s methods on CSS-Tricks. Chris presents three possible alternatives, the last of which uses pure CSS and works much better than other CSS attempts I’ve seen.

As always, thanks for reading. If you liked the article give us a tweet, digg or any other social shout out you can come up with!