Chapter 10: Making Your Site Soar: HTML, JavaScript, and CSS
As you know, WordPress is built on PHP. To push the limits of the platform in terms of querying and outputting data, building complexity into your themes, customizing the Dashboard, writing plugins, and more, PHP is the language you need to be familiar with. But WordPress also needs other languages to function—HTML provides the markup used to display page content, CSS styles your site, and JavaScript enables you to create more complex animations, transitions, and interactions.
Obviously, this chapter cannot provide a comprehensive guide to these languages—many excellent resources are available if that's what you need (you can find a list of some I find especially useful in the “Further Resources" section at the end of this chapter). What you will learn here is how to identify scenarios in which you'll need to work in different languages; how to optimize your markup, styles, and scripts for performance, accessibility, and standards compliance; and how to use CSS and JavaScript in particular to create visual and interactive effects on your site. You'll also learn about some of the applications of your code—forms, animations, galleries, and navigation—and some approaches to improving and working with them.
Choosing Your Approach
This chapter also emphasizes a common theme of this book—that there is more than one approach to solving many of the challenges you are likely to encounter when you're working with WordPress, or ...
