This is 3rd article in the WordPress Developer Tools Series by Tahir Taous. We are publishing articles about best tools, Starter themes, frameworks, plugins, browser add-ons, video courses available online to become a powerful WordPress Developer.

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Do you want to become a WordPress developer, want to create powerful websites with WordPress yourself or want to customize WordPress themes, In this series, We are going to share best resources, tutorials, and tools to become a WordPress developer.

Recommended Reading

How to become a WordPress Theme Developer

If you want to create and customize WordPress themes, You should learn HTML and CSS.

Recommended Reading: 38 Free video courses to Learn HTML, CSS, PHP, JQuery, JavaScript, Git and More

With the good understanding of HTML and CSS, You can customize styles of different sections of WordPress themes. Chrome Developers tools are one of the best tools available to easily edit web pages.

You also need to learn basics of PHP. WordPress is a PHP based Content Management System. You will have to add PHP tags to your theme files, so WordPress can display content.

For example, to display post title you will have to use following PHP tag in your theme.

<?php the_title(); ?>

There are so many template tags available for WordPress. You can see a list of available Template Tags at WordPress codex.

With HTML and CSS, You can create and style web pages, after creating HTML pages, you can replace static HTML content with WordPress template tags to display dynamic content.

Download WordPress Theme Development Handbook, which reveals free tools and resources to become a WordPress theme developer. , which reveals free tools and resources to become a WordPress theme developer.

Local Development Environment

To create and test WordPress websites, plugin, and themes, you need an active WordPress installation. You don’t need to buy web hosting or domain name to set a WordPress website. There are many free software available to set up WordPress websites locally.

XAMPP, WAMP, MAMP and Bitnami WordPress installers are free tools to easily install WordPress locally on your Windows or MAC. You can read this tutorials to learn How To Install WordPress using WAMP Server on your Windows PC.

Local development servers make your development and testing workflow much faster and simpler. You don’t always need an internet connection to test your themes or plugins.

WordPress Theme Development Courses

Here are the list free video courses available online to learn theme development.

What’s next

We are going to publish more tutorials and articles about WordPress Development tools, don’t forget to join our WordPress Newsletter to receive latest articles and tutorials directly in your inbox.

Note: This post was originally published at createwptheme.com. We have republished it here with permission.