When people who are already savvy with WordPress, successfully freelancing, selling websites or themes, and want to know where they should go or what they should do to improve their skills, the first thing I recommend they do is get involved with the community. There is no faster way to solidify your knowledge than to teach it to someone else. Plus, WordPress meetups and of course, WordCamps, are great laces to gain exposure to new practices and ideas.
I also point them to CaboPress by Chris Lema, the Advanced WordPress Facebook Group, and the 10up Engineering Best Practices.
We asked our speakers to name one WordPress-related advanced tool or resource they recommend to those looking to up their game.
Here are the tools and resources our speakers recommend:
- Justin Busa:: WP-CLI.
- Cory Miller: iThemes Training.
- Dorothy Kern: Short Pixel Image Optimizer.
- Matt Vanderpol: WordPress Codex — There is a lot here both in the nature of “How To” articles and API documentation.
- Jen Miller: Yoast SEO premium plugin.
- Bill Conrad: Genesis Framework by StudioPress.
- Amber Hewitt: Advanced Custom Fields plugin.
- Sarah Wefald: New code frameworks and techniques outside of WordPress. Learning how to use them with WordPress, rather than leading with WordPress.
- Adam W. Warner: The Advanced WordPress Development Tutorials by Tom McFarlin.
- Jonathan Trujillo: http://javascriptforwp.com is really great. Digital Marketer is a good resource for learning how to get people to the sites you’ve built on WordPress.
- Adam Silver: Learn to use GIT.
- Kim Shivler: Advanced WordPress can mean a lot of different things from a deeper understanding of WP structure, how to write PHP or database management. I like the compilation of resources Torque has put together.
- Matt Cromwell: Carl Alexander. 10up Engineering Best Practices. Start collaborating on big projects.
- Ben Byrne: The source code!
- Jason Cosper: Every WordPress developer should learn, love, and do their best to live by the WordPress Coding Standards!
- Andrew Taylor: WP-CLI.
- Bridget Willard: The WP Crowd.
- Jarrett Gucci: WordPress Codex.
- Heather Hogan: Child themes.
- Vasken Hauri: ElasticPress.
- Sallie Goetsch: I’ve signed up for Tonya Mork’s WP Developers Club because my development skills have been acquired rather haphazardly. Also, I’m really liking Local by Flywheel.
- John Locke: Spend some money on courses from established developers. Pippin Williamson, Josh Pollock, Tonya Mork and many others have some great courses for learning more advanced aspects of WordPress.
- Cat Scholz: iThemes membership and training programs.
- Jake Goldman: 10up’s open source Engineering Best Practices.
- Treighton Mauldin: Timber.
- Ivan Villa: Local by Flywheel.
- Mike Fitzpatrick: Multisite utilization for scaling.
- Tanner Moushey: xDebug with PHP code stepping.
- Leslie Staller: Courses by Carrie Dils or Lynda.com is great for both beginner’s and more advanced. The secret for Lynda.com is to check with your local library as you can often get free access with your library card.
- Justin Sainton: WP-CLI / Query Montior.
Also, if you haven’t purchased your WordCamp Sacramento ticket yet, what are you waiting for? DO IT NOW 🙂