LearnWebCode

My New WordPress Dev Course is Finally Here

Brad — Wed, 22 Nov 2017 22:17:30 +0000

It’s been almost a year since my last blog post. At least I have good news to share

I’ve spent the last 7 months filming a new premium WordPress course; and less than a month ago I finally launched it!

So far about 1,700 people have joined in and I’m having a blast answering all questions and making improvements to the course here and there.

The goal of the course is to teach PHP and JavaScript so that you never need to rely on or feel limited by a certain theme or plugin ever again; developers can code their imagination

We create a 100% custom site and theme for a fictional university. We use PHP to setup custom post types, custom fields, relationships between posts (e.g. relating a professor to a campus, etc…) and much more.

We use JavaScript to communicate with the back-end WordPress database from our website’s front-end on-the-fly. This opens the door to infinite possibilities and allows your sites to feel interactive, seamless and modern.

Creating a 25 hour course on a topic as popular as WordPress is a humbling experience; there are tons of engaged students in the course not only asking questions but also sharing their knowledge as well. I’ve already made several updates to the course to reflect the shared knowledge and best practices that the course as a community offers.

It’s hard to explain all of the features we cover in the course, so if it sounds like something you’re interested in I encourage you to watch the promo video over on the Udemy site. Here’s a link.

Thanks!
Brad

The post My New WordPress Dev Course is Finally Here appeared first on LearnWebCode.

My Goals for 2017

Brad — Wed, 21 Dec 2016 01:39:24 +0000

Believe it or not, a human being, not a robot, runs this website. I usually only post when I have a new technical tutorial to share, but I’d like to begin actually blogging. You know, sharing my thoughts and experiences in an informal way and on a somewhat regular basis.

I’ve read countless articles explaining that if you share your goals publicly you are more likely to stay committed to them. I guess it’s some basic part of human psychology . So without further ado here are my goals for 2017:

Actually write blog posts
Launch Premium Course: WordPress for Beginners
Launch Premium Course: WordPress for Developers
Launch Premium Course: Backend Node.js (Express and MongoDB)
Launch Premium Course: React
Not abandon my YouTube channel
Redesign this website

Let’s go through each of these items in a bit of detail.

Actually Write Blog Posts

When I was a kid I loved writing. I wanted to be an author or journalist when I grew up. I studied literature and education in college instead of anything related to computers.

I want to start blogging on a regular basis. Sounds easy, right? Well, the challenge is that I have zero desire to write about JavaScript, or any other coding language. I already cover that in my videos. I want to write about attitude, productivity, entrepreneurship, my dreams, the creative process, working-from-home-tips, imposter-syndrome-rants, etc… you know, human stuff .

I’m not sure my current audience has any interest in those topics, but it’s pretty easy to ignore blog posts you don’t care about so I’m not going to let that stop me.

Premium Course: WordPress for Beginners

I’m working on completing a new premium video course aimed at people who want to learn WordPress and have no real prior experience. The course doesn’t involve any coding whatsoever, even though coding is usually the only thing I teach. Still, I’m convinced this course will help a lot of people. I recently taught a local night class for people who wanted to learn WordPress and it inspired me to create this online video course. You might think, “Hey, aren’t there already like 50,000 online WordPress for Beginner courses” and you might be correct. But I think many of them are taught by beginners!

A little piece of me dies every time I hear a WordPress “teacher” say “Yep, then just go install these 791 plugins and you’re golden, now you can just drag ‘n’ drop and create the site of your dreams.”

Every extra plugin you use has the potential to slow down your site, make it less secure and less maintainable. If you take the time to actually learn the “WordPress way” of doing things I don’t think the average site needs very many plugins at all. My course focuses on the essentials and gives people a strong foundation regardless of whether they want to (A) create websites without ever writing a single line of code or (B) transition into coding their own custom themes.

Premium Course: WordPress for Developers

In this video course we code a WordPress website from scratch. The website is for a fictional university and we learn how to create relationships between different types of content (i.e. professors, courses, campuses, etc…). We use the new WP REST API to display live search results for degree-programs & professors as-you-type. We learn how to get the most out of “Advanced Custom Fields.” We allow for basic user registration, and learn how to deploy our site from our development environment up to a real hosting environment. I also demonstrate how to use the popular template language named Twig instead of spaghetti code PHP logic mixed into our HTML.

Premium Course: Backend Node.js (Express and MongoDB)

One of my top goals for 2014, 2015, and 2016 was to learn non-DOM-related JavaScript. I’m still no Addy Osmani, but I’ve made tremendous progress from my jQuery-roots. This course will involve building a simple CRUD web application that allows user registration, sign-in / sign-out, user-specific content, and finally deploying live to Heroku or a similar service. We’ll use Node.js and Express as our server and MongoDB as our database. If you’ve been wanting to learn PHP and MySQL this course will essentially teach the modern “cool kid” equivalent technologies.

Premium Course: React

I wouldn’t say I’m anti-Angular, but I’m more of a React guy. This course makes zero assumptions about your current knowledge. We’ll learn basic SPA (single page application) concepts from scratch in addition to learning React itself.

Not abandon my YouTube channel

A few months ago I revived my YouTube channel. Prior to that I hadn’t posted any new videos in ~2 years. If I’m going to achieve all of my other goals for 2017 I realize I might not be able to keep up a weekly-upload schedule on YouTube. Missing a week or two here and there won’t be the end of the world, but I don’t ever want to go longer than 2-3 weeks at the longest without a fresh new video.

I’ve gained a lot of new subscribers lately and I don’t want to let them down. I remember when I got my first 10, first 100, first 700, first 2,000 subscribers. Each number felt like a huge milestone. As of this blog post I have 68,700. If you’re a subscriber and you’re reading this; thank you! I never thought I’d even hit 1,000 subscribers, and my subs are what inspire me to create each new video I record. Also, my comments section is one of the kindest, most respectful places on YouTube. I only get insulted in about 1 out of every 5 videos. That’s got to be one of the best ratios of any YouTube creator .

If we do hit 100,000 subscribers I’ll film a fat celebration/party video complete with my cat, catnip, maybe a burrito and a Capri Sun.

Redesign This Website

Have you heard the “the cobbler’s children have no shoes” phrase? If not, Google it. Basically, if I teach web design and development why is this website so basic/ugly? The reality is, I’ve just never spent the time to make this website something I’m proud of. I always spent my time on other tasks that would help me pay the bills. But if I’m going to continue to focus on blogging and creating premium video courses I should probably go the extra mile and actually use my skill-set to create a beautiful website for my own project.

That’s it! Even if I only achieve half of these things in 2017 that’s fine with me. It’ll give me a start for my 2018 list .

The post My Goals for 2017 appeared first on LearnWebCode.

WordPress REST API Tutorial (Real Examples)

Brad — Fri, 16 Dec 2016 04:30:24 +0000

WordPress comes with a built-in (as in no plugins required) REST API as of version 4.7. In this lesson we learn how to load and save content to/from the WordPress database on the fly using AJAX and the brand new REST API.

Link to download .zip of theme files as shown in this video (note: this is not a “complete” WordPress theme yet and this download is only intended for educational purposes to dissect and review).

View the entire “Learn WordPress” series

The post WordPress REST API Tutorial (Real Examples) appeared first on LearnWebCode.

WordPress Pagination Tutorial (with Custom Queries)

Brad — Thu, 08 Dec 2016 22:32:25 +0000

In this lesson we learn about the basics of pagination with WordPress. We also go the extra mile and learn how to paginate our custom queries that leverage the WP_Query class.

Link to download .zip of theme files as shown in this video (note: this is not a “complete” WordPress theme yet and this download is only intended for educational purposes to dissect and review).

View the entire “Learn WordPress” series

The post WordPress Pagination Tutorial (with Custom Queries) appeared first on LearnWebCode.

WordPress “About the Author” Tutorial

Brad — Tue, 13 Sep 2016 22:22:40 +0000

In this lesson we learn how to create a dynamic “About the Author” box. This is a bit underwhelming if your site only has one author, but for multi-author sites this is a must-have feature!

Link to download .zip of theme files as shown in this video (note: this is not a “complete” WordPress theme yet and this download is only intended for educational purposes to dissect and review).

Here’s a link to the new video course I mention at the end of the video.

View the entire “Learn WordPress” series

The post WordPress “About the Author” Tutorial appeared first on LearnWebCode.

WordPress Editable Theme Content Tutorial

Brad — Tue, 06 Sep 2016 21:51:15 +0000

WordPress makes it easy for theme developers to add editable content regions that can be managed from the WordPress admin screens. In this lesson we learn how to add a custom textfield, textarea, image upload (with custom aspect ratio cropping), and a select dropdown. All of this comes together to create a completely custom “callout” area in the footer of the website.

Link to download .zip of theme files as shown in this video (note: this is not a “complete” WordPress theme yet and this download is only intended for educational purposes to dissect and review).

Here’s a link to the new video course I mention at the end of the video.

View the entire “Learn WordPress” series

The post WordPress Editable Theme Content Tutorial appeared first on LearnWebCode.

WordPress Custom Theme Options Color Picker

Brad — Sun, 05 Jul 2015 22:39:47 +0000

Want to learn how to add custom options to your WordPress theme, like a color picker to control the color of links, or buttons, or the header? That’s exactly what we learn how to do in this lesson!

Link to download .zip of theme files as shown in this video (note: this is not a “complete” WordPress theme yet and this download is only intended for educational purposes to dissect and review).

Do you want to share the WordPress website that you’ve been creating on your computer with the world? The next step is to use a web host to share your site with the world. Learn about web hosts, my favorite one, and how to get a plan for only $5.78 per month.

View the entire “Learn WordPress” series

The post WordPress Custom Theme Options Color Picker appeared first on LearnWebCode.

Sublime Text Custom Settings – Tips & Tricks

Brad — Sun, 05 Jul 2015 22:35:37 +0000

In this lesson we learn how to increase the readability of your code, make your cursor easier for your eyes to track down, and a bunch of other Sublime Text tips and tricks to make your coding life more enjoyable. Let’s get to it!

Have you created amazing pages with HTML & CSS and want to move them from your computer’s hard drive to online so the world can see them? The next step is to use a web host to share your site with the world. Learn about web hosts, my favorite one, and how to get a plan for only $5.78 per month.

The post Sublime Text Custom Settings – Tips & Tricks appeared first on LearnWebCode.

Custom Sublime Text Themes and Color Schemes

Brad — Sun, 05 Jul 2015 22:31:44 +0000

It’s super easy to change color schemes in Sublime Text, but changing “themes” is a bit tricker. A “theme” controls the appearance of the sidebar, bottom status bars, and other parts of the UI aside from the actual part of the screen with your code. Let’s learn how to install and use new Sublime Text themes!

The post Custom Sublime Text Themes and Color Schemes appeared first on LearnWebCode.

Sublime Text Macros – Record Your Patterns For Reuse

Brad — Sun, 05 Jul 2015 22:27:56 +0000

If you find yourself performing the same action again and again in your text editor odds are you can save yourself some time by creating a macro. For example, if you find yourself frequently pushing the right arrow key a few times, then typing a semicolon, and then pressing return… why not have a keyboard shortcut that performs that chain of actions for you automatically in one fell swoop. That’s exactly what we learn how to do in this lesson!

The post Sublime Text Macros – Record Your Patterns For Reuse appeared first on LearnWebCode.