Chapter 1: WordPress As a Professional Web Development Tool
WordPress was originally established as a tool for bloggers, aimed at the growing community of people writing personal, technical, or business blogs, and providing them with a platform they could use to host that blog on their own server. But WordPress has evolved—significantly. It is no longer simply a blogging tool, but a fully fledged content management system (CMS), with a myriad of features that enable developers to experiment with the structure and functionality of a site, customize the dashboard and admin screens for users, and install plugins to enable whatever additional capabilities the site needs.
WordPress, to put it simply, is now a professional web development tool, used by thousands of web professionals to build sites for themselves, their clients, and other users. It's a tool on which you can build a business.
This chapter looks at the WordPress features you can harness as a professional web developer, and identifies how your working practices may need to change if you're scaling up your WordPress practice. You'll learn some techniques for improving your working and coding practices when collaborating as part of a larger team, and find out how to manage large web design and development projects, including the skills you'll need and the people you can expect to work with. You'll also look at the implications of building and possibly selling WordPress themes and plugins for release to other users and developers. ...
