Confidently Build Fast and Modern WordPress Themes
Like a Pro
Online workshop courses to level up your WordPress theme development skills with modern techniques and best practices.
View coursesStay updated with the latest courses
Subscribe to the mailing list to hear about new courses before anyone else and get my free mini-course on WordPress Hooks sent straight to your inbox.
Get the mini-courseArticles & Tutorials
-
Building a Custom Block Part 4: Adding Styles and Custom Interactivity
In Part 4, we’ll make our Notice block actually look and act like a notice. We’ll add some baseline CSS to style the block and then write frontend JavaScript in view.js to handle dismissing the notice when users click that close button we added in Part 3.
-
Building a Custom Block Part 3: Inner Blocks and Inspector Controls
In Part 3 of Building a Custom Block, we’ll update our Edit component to support child blocks (InnerBlocks) and add our own custom Inspector Controls to toggle the dismiss button.
-
Building a Custom Block Part 2: Attributes and Supports
In Part 2 of Building a Custom Block, we’ll go through adding block supports and attributes and explore how they work in some more detail.
-
Building a Custom Block Part 1: Scaffolding block files
In Part 1 of the Building a custom block series, we look at how you can quickly set up a new custom block from scratch using the create-block package provided by WordPress and the anatomy of a block.
-
How to set up @wordpress/scripts
The @wordpress/scripts package makes it easy to bundle your JavaScript for a plugin or theme and is especially helpful when developing custom blocks. In this post, I’ll show you how you can easily set up @wordpress/scripts and take advantage of the dependency management benefits it offers.
-
How to add a gradient text effect to specific words in a block
Gradient text effects are pretty nifty and can add a nice element of visual flair to your posts (if I do say so myself). Adding this effect is pretty easy with CSS, but what if you want to only apply it to certain words inside a paragraph, heading, or similar block? In this post I’ll…
-
4 new essential modern CSS features for WordPress Development
CSS has been around for a while, but modern features are being added faster than ever. In this post, I’ll show you 4 essential CSS capabilities: color manipulation, smart selectors, container queries, and aspect-ratio that will save you time and effort on your WordPress projects, with no JavaScript or complex workarounds required.
-
How to set up custom fonts in block themes
In this post I’ll show you how you can easily add Google Fonts or your own custom fonts to a block theme and how you can customize the generated @font-face rules if needed.
Learning how to develop WordPress themes can be daunting.
Getting started can be simple, but if you’ve never built your own theme before it feel hard to know where to start. So much content is out of date or no longer relevant. Reading the Codex provides information, but not as much context.
Making things to work is one thing, but building something durable that scales can feel elusive. There’s so many different ways to do things and it can be overwhelming trying to determine what is best to focus on.
This material will show you modern techniques that will allow you to comfortably develop your own dynamic themes, improve your understanding of WordPress, and gain job-ready skills.
Meet Your Instructor

Hi! I’m Ian. I’ve been developing with WordPress for over 10 years. During that time I’ve worked at several agencies (most recently 10up) and have built hundreds of custom WordPress sites. This course represents a collection of all of the knowledge, best practices, and approaches I’ve put together during my career and I’m really excited to share it with you!
You’ll learn all the skills you’ll need to succeed as a WordPress theme developer as well as valuable tactics to create reusable block components and dynamic pages without having to using a commercial page builder.
Topics covered in this course will include things like:
Building Your Own Themes
Custom Post Types and Taxonomies
WP Query
Using the REST API
Extending the Block Editor
Hooks (Actions & Filters)
Templates and Partials
Building Custom Blocks
Optimizing Performance
Building Theme Assets
All course packages will include all code samples and audio transcriptions are planned for all course videos.
Subscribe for a Free Mini-Course
Signup now to start receiving the free email mini-course on WordPress Hooks!
You’ll also get announcements and updates on the status of the course, sneak peaks at course content, and be the first to hear about any sales. No spam, guaranteed.