Updates to the WordPress Developer Track and What It Means for Students

Hi Folks,

I made some updates to the WordPress Developer Track this week and want to briefly explain the changes and how they affect anyone in the track.

• New Intro Course: We replaced the How to Make a Blog course with the new How to Make Websites with WordPress. This course covers more building and customizing and less teaching how to edit content and settings. It's great, you'll love it, and if you're currently in the track and haven't taken it, you will now have to in order to complete the track. It covers topics like child themes, making widget areas and custom post types.
• Local WordPress Development Course: We have a new short course on setting up MAMP, XAMPP and WordPress locally. The course also covers migrating websites. This is slightly covered and mentioned in the theme development course, but you will start to see important topics like this one broken out into their own little stand alone content.
• The HTML/CSS/JS Courses: We dropped the basic HTML/CSS course and added two course: Responsive Websites and Interactive Websites. The goal here was to step up the level of ability a WordPress theme developer has to build the static and interactive component of themes. If you haven't taken these courses, you will now need to.
• Removed Advanced PHP: Building WordPress plugins requires knowing PHP, however, I didn't feel the advanced PHP course content related as much to the PHP you need to know in the WordPress ecosystem.
  

In general, these changes make the course more challenging and help it better align with the skills you'll need to successfully work as a WP dev.

I will likely be making another small round of updates in the coming months as some new HTML/CSS/JS release. Ultimately the course will likely have one HTML/CSS course, one JS/jQuery course and one/two PHP course(s).

Enjoy the new content, and don't feel as if you "lost" out if you've completed courses no longer required. They will still help you for sure!