#95: Advice for Your First WordPress Theme w/ Michelle Schulp

of. Um

Yes, I am drinking a mai tai out of a Tiki cup. I, I actually got into cocktail ng as a hobby over Covid, not unlike the, I’m going to pour some alcohol into a glass because it’s covid way, but in the way where I’m actually like reading about the history and the methodology and the technique and I’m taking classes now that we can do things in real life.

Again, it’s also fun because I was going to comment that your margarita is actually more just like a tequila sour because you don’t have the triple secondment, you just have the sweet, the citrus and the booze. So I think

there. I mean it’s, I’m sure it’s great. But I was, you know, well actually in you to start the episode of No, no, no,

But Tiki drinks with some of my favorites because they’re just ridiculous. They’re usually like five or 6 different ingredients and the garnishing is half the fun. So

Yeah, that’s super true.

I promise I’ll even use those words. It’ll be fun like reverse Mansplaining.

How, how long have you been working on that

Right? Yeah. No, like don’t look at any of my personal sites because you know, they are not as cool as the ones I’m building for the people that are paying me that is for sure. A couple of

uh metaphors are complicated and beautiful. It

I

Oh goodness. Well it’s it’s the same and it’s also different. So I it’s really interesting that you compared it to jake weary because I’ve actually made the same comparison when I talk about it. I said, you know, WordPress is not only a content management system, it’s a PHP framework, like that’s what it is, it has its own set of, you know, abstractions and functions and syntax that is kind of stuck on top of PHP, You could write vanilla PHP and it would work.

It just, you know, why would you, when you could take advantage of WordPress. So very, very similar thing. Um Yeah, so nowadays you probably do still need to know html and CSS and and WordPress flavored PHP uh uh C S S Y is likely though you’re you’re probably not just writing straight CSS, like you’re probably uh using some kind of pre processor, some kind of framework or some kind of library something to kind of handle some of the more complex stuff.

You’re probably writing a lot more javascript. So in the past you could get away with maybe a little bit of j query if you wanted to do a thing where the press comes with jake weary still does. Um But nowadays there’s a lot more javascript going on basically. And not only that because we have, you know, CSS with pre processors, we have javascript. Now, you’ve got to start looking at like tools to be able to compile this stuff.

So whether you’re using like uh something like code kit to be able to compile it or you’re using a terminal command line tool like Gulp. Uh So now you’ve got not, not only that plus your local environment that you have to have, you know, you might be spinning up something you might be using. I personally use um local, which I really love. I’ve also used survey press in the past though.

I mean just saying all that stuff is kind of exhausting, Right? I feel like there’s so much more, I just that took me like three minutes just to describe the things. Right. And that, that can feel really intimidating. If you’re just getting started all the

Yeah, so if I’m developing on a flywheel or WP engine site, I mostly just use their deployment tools, especially um local just went entirely free. Um they get rid of their pro version and now everything’s free, which is cool. But I’ve been a pro customer for a while and so I could do kind of selective pulls and pushes of data themes biles all that stuff, which was really nice by um when I wasn’t working on a flywheel or WP engine site, I used my great DB pro by delicious brains.

Um I’m a big fan of the work they’re doing there. They also had some stuff that let you not only um pull databases, but also themes and media files and plug ins and all kinds of stuff, so that was nice, especially if I didn’t have uh FTP access or, or you know, whatever and any other kind of uh version controlling access for files.

Um so and and actually, delicious brains migrate. DB Pro is one of the tools I’ve been using for a while and the other tool I’ve been using for a while, advanced custom fields just got bought by delicious brains. So yeah, so there’s all sorts of uh they’re doing all sorts of fun developer stuff there. Um I just though, and this one’s magic, I just started using WP merge dot io for dad. Oh my gosh, it’s magic.

It is um live to deV database sinking, like, like, like version controlling and merging. And they’re editing content on the live site and you’re editing content on the DEV site and we can keep track of both of them and merge them. That’s pretty cool.

Yeah, so that’s kind of how I started and that’s kind of why it’s really interesting to look at um How how all this is evolving because when I started, so I started in 2011, which I’m like, oh that’s not that long ago, but it’s it’s 10 years ago, so yeah, that time passes weird. Um and when I started in 2011 I was just doing like child themes for parent themes, like that was always and even even the most basic of child themes, right?

Like I was starting out with like just the style dot CSS and then I was like okay let’s add some functions, and then I was like okay let’s add some templates. Right? So that was that was how I got my start in in theme development. Um Nowadays I uh do custom development, you know? Right? Right. My own thing, I’ve kind of written my own starter framework theme and that’s constantly evolving and it’s also up on get hub for people to, you know, look at pick apart if they want to.

Um But my actually the I based mine off of like a really old version uh this because I did this like in 2013 II based stuff, a really old version of like the roots sage framework.

I know nowadays they’ve built this whole like tooling process and it’s like this big thing, but the only reason I adopted it is because I thought it was silly to have to write like your header and footer call and every single template file and I really liked there little abstraction of templates, so that’s why I did that, but that’s a long answer.

Yeah, Well, so in the past it was like, if you just want to make a few stylistic changes, do a child theme that being said when they introduced in the customizer, the additional CSS panel, the child theme just for CSS became a little obsolete, right? Because you could just, you know, go up into your customizer and put it in there and even if you have jet pack installed, you can even write like pre processor stuff and it’ll compile it for you.

So that’s kind of sweet. Um So I would say it became a child theme was useful if you basically liked the structure in the opinions of your parent theme, but maybe wanted to expand or tweak it. So you wanted to change how a specific template laid out, You wanted to um maybe add some new templates for some new custom post types or something.

So it’s really like, do I do I agree with most of the opinions of the parent theme and I just want to expand on that. That that’s a pretty good candidate for a child theme at least historically speaking.

Um if you started to be like, well uh this parent thing would be great, but I actually want to rip out all the walls and change all the paint and change everything from carpet to hardwood and add on a second story and finish the basement and throw on a pool. Maybe you should just like build your own house. Right? Um and yeah, so that’s kind of how I think about about that

I was just going to say cry silently. Yeah,

That’s fair.

yep, that’s true, but it was like, like, classically speaking, when you were talking about theme development, like underscores was a big deal. And yeah, underscores is more like A functioning blueprint for a theme, whereas I would say 20, and all the other ones, it’s more like, you know, you’re walking into an apartment, right?

It’s yeah, so if you, if you installed underscores and didn’t do anything to it and kind of tried to run a site on it, like it would not look like much of anything and, you know, content would probably display, but like, you wouldn’t be very thrilled with what it looks like.

Um I did want to bring up, there is a newer theme framework generator called WP rig, um which kind of includes a lot of these things we’ve been talking about, so um not just the framework, but also like a lot of these build processes. Um so if you want, if you’re starting to do like very modern WordPress theme development where we need five million tools that take me three minutes to list. Um WP rig is a really good starting point for that. Very cool.

So fun fact, you know that image that’s on that page that shows you at the diagram looks like I’m the one that made that. Oh, no kidding.

Um so if you’re just writing like a text input or a basic field. Right? I mean we can we can do that and if that’s the only thing you need it for one or two things you know why why install you know the whole framework for that?

Right. Like that makes total sense to me. It’s kind of like if I just need to do something really simple and javascript like why don’t I just write some vanilla javascript and do it like why have a whole framework, you know. Right. But but um if I need to do but chris

um but uh the thing we keep in mind and this kind of goes back to the whole uX part of this thing um as a U. X. Person which I think demon developers have a big responsibility in U. X. And you. X is my background. You. X. Dy visual design. Um I’m actually not just designing the experience for the person who is using the website. I mean I am designing that experience, you know who else I’m designing for. I am designing for the content manager.

I’m designing for the advent, I’m designing for the person that has to update and maintain this site. Now one lovely thing about WordPress, The thing that was appealing to me as a as a user experience person is that their dashboard is fairly thoughtful. It’s not perfect. But compared to a lot of other content management systems out there, it’s pretty easy to understand. Like as a content manager, I can find where things are.

Um, granted lots of plug in authors have lots of opinions of where things can go that can make that more complicated. But that’s kind of our, all of our responsibility as as user experience people, like we are designing not only the websites user experience, we are designing the content managers user experience and what I like about some of these frameworks, like advanced custom fields, is it made a pretty good content manager user experience to, especially when we were starting to do very complicated things.

You know, I I made extensive use of their uh, repeater fields and their modular fields, like those being able to do some very, very complicated things uh, without having to be very confusing for for the content manager. And um, so that, that’s kind of what I think about it. Like I don’t really think about, I mean I’m the developer, like sure there’s things that would be easier or harder for me to do.

There’s things that would be more fun or less fun or more challenging or less challenging for me to do. But like, my responsibility is to the content manager.

And so what is a good experience for them as well as the end user who’s going to see the site, Like obviously that’s going to be pretty and great, but like how about how about the admin that’s got or or the editor that’s got to write these posts and it has to figure out how the heck to use the thing, which is also why I don’t necessarily like using um whole bunch, like I need to use plug ins that I trust.

I need to use plug ins from people that I know are also being thoughtful about the admin experience because it can get real full, real fast, right? There’s just a lot going on. Um and so I only want to use tools that are thinking this way to um

Yeah, I mean I I like to joke with my clients, like I I don’t want you to call me to your content, like please don’t I want you to be able to do that. That’s the whole fun of like having a content management system.

to build. I want to build something. Yeah, I want you to be able to update your content. That is also why I think the block editor and all of the stuff they’re doing in Gutenberg is going to take off and it’s going to continue to take off because if you can make your content management experience look as close as possible to what it’s going to look like in the end and feel intuitive and involve moving stuff around and like you change the color and there’s the color, it’s right there, you know, you change the type of thing.

It is and that’s exactly what it’s gonna look like. Um you know, that’s a very powerful experience for the content manager when it’s when it’s working properly, when it’s not buggy or frustrating, it’s it is still not perfect but that’s really powerful and like developers and people that have been using wordpress for awhile, myself included might complain a little bit about, you know, the change in tooling and the change in methodology and like yeah, we we spent all this time learning, you know, the template hierarchy and all this PHP and all this stuff.

And now you’re telling me that templates are going to become, you know, black based and we’re gonna be writing mostly just like mark up and a bunch of javascript and like, you know, we’re moving all of our, all of our theme settings from, you know, a bunch of add theme support calls to a Jason file, like what is this?

Like this isn’t this isn’t what I know, but like look at the end user when they’re like, oh my gosh, like I totally understand how to do this and and I know how to edit my content, I know how this works like that’s why we’re doing it right.

Like we get so stuck in our own heads like to complain about, you know, that’s what twitter’s for, but like, you know, it’s real magical for for our for admins for our content managers to be able to like be empowered to do all this stuff, you know, democratized publishing. That was the point, right? I’m on a soapbox right now. No, no, I love it,

um you pretty much should only be using I mean there are there is almost no reason why you need to not use WP query. Um I mean it’s it’s it’s kind of like the best case, I mean get post is kind of like a bit like using that as a theme developer is a bit like legacy. Uh like pretty classic legacy. Uh huh You look 10 years also counts his legacy. Okay, Like I’m right there with you. Uh Okay, so um but no, like, so the loop um yeah, so where?

Uh oh there’s just so many things, so just take a step back. We mentioned the term template tags and at at the beginning we were talking about how, you know, WordPress is a PHP framework, basically in template tags are basically just uh uh WordPress is little PHP stuff. They are like little abstract functions that WordPress has, that represents a whole bunch of queries and sequel stuff that they did for you that you don’t have to do, right?

So that’s what a template tag is. Just so that we’re using the language people understand. Um and the loop is the thing that says um hey, what should I display here? Tell me WordPress WP query is the thing that says, hey, loop here is the parameters for the thing and there’s a whole bunch of stuff.

Exactly. And now the cool thing about the template hierarchy is each uh template by default has its own queary associated with it. Like you can just like have an archive dot PHP template and you just write your loop, you know, if have posts while have post the post and then say the content and it’ll just like do it right, Because it’s baked into the archive dot PHP template. It just knows what to do, it knows what that means. It means.

Call, you know, call these things and whatever, right? Like it knows what it means. Um and then what you can do as a theme developer is either override the native query of a page or something using the hook. Um pre get posts or you can write custom queries on your own templates or in addition to a template using your own, you know, WP query function. Um and that was convenient. You mentioned hooks before. I wanted to kind of say what’s a hook?

That’s another really confusing thing that it took me a while to understand. But basically a hook is like some stuff that they baked again. This is more of the WordPress as a framework thing. A hook is basically a spot that they put into the code that says, wait, wait, wait, when we get here, let’s run anything else that’s referencing this thing. Right? So like, I’ll be like, like wordpress is like, do I’m wordpress?

And then it’s like hola hook, Hey, themes plug ins and any of you want to do anything here? Yeah, No. Okay. Um pre get posts is a hook that runs basically modifying modifying the query on, on any given page that you’re on. And so you can, you can modify your loop on an archive or, and you just use this, you know, put some stuff and functions that PHP right? Your stuff that modifies, Hey, just kidding.

I wanna not show this or on this type of, you know, then you start using your, oh gosh, we just, we go down the rabbit hole. But the point is, um, WP query is very powerful. It’s basically the thing that tells you what’s supposed to be displaying when and in combination with the template hierarchy and template parts. Uh, you know, that was, that was the magic man. That was just the magic. And then, um,

a special kind of hook that just modifies content. Good way. Just like modifies content output.

Yeah, no, that’s true. The cool thing about WordPress is it’s like a million ways to solve the same problems and it’s really like what makes sense for this specific iteration? Yeah, I think the way my theme is set up, I have my um like single and archive theme files as very basic and they’re just saying like get template part, you know, content hyphen get post type right?

And then I do a bunch of template parts that because unless I need to change the structure of the whole page, like everything, I don’t really need to, you know, I can keep my route theme files kind of to a minimum. Uh Yeah, which, you know, I totally I totally uh agree with that. And it’s also it’s also as a matter of like, yeah, what makes sense to solve this specific problem? I want to repeat myself as little as possible. So yeah,

Um I do not think that the like code to register blocks belongs in themes because if you change themes, you break your content right?

Kind of the governing thing about, about anything that went into a theme was like, themes are about structure there, about style there, about what it looks like, but like they should, it shouldn’t break your content to change themes now, maybe it won’t output pretty, maybe like not everything is there, but it should all still exist right? Like it shouldn’t be broken. So like, custom post types. Custom fields, all that stuff should be in a a plug in. Yeah,

Yes. Um well, there’s a couple things you can do with native blocks and they, are there things that I’m doing a whole lot of right now because I don’t want to go too far down the custom block path. Um you can write um block templates for your custom post types, which is really cool. Um this is it, this is a PHP thing. Um So if you’ve ever used, let’s say, have either of you ever used the events calendar, that’s like one that I can think about my head.

That’s doing it a long time ago. Okay. Well nowadays if you open the events calendar and you open an event and you have enabled the block editor for your events post type, um you will open your event and it won’t just be a blank black editor with the title and some text, it will have a whole bunch of blacks already on the page for you. That’s a black

And those definitely belong in themes because what that is is like, here’s my opinion of how you should lay stuff out. Um

Right? Right. So I I, when I build custom post types for my clients, I build block templates for those things that give them an idea like there’s a lot of complicated layouts, right? Like what if I intend the page to have a bunch of columns or a gallery or like a cover image with stuff and buttons and it’s like, no, I’m not gonna ask you to build that every single time, right?

Like I’m going to build you a block template when you open it up, that stuff is going to be there and all you gotta do is start putting your content in. You can even lock it so that they can’t change them. Like no, you have to have three columns here, like that’s what you’re doing. Um or not lock it and let them play with it. Um But that’s one thing you can do as a theme developer with core blocks.

Um Otherwise, you know, themes should definitely be styling things. That’s the whole point of themes and that’s going to continue to be the point of themes even when we move into front at full site editing. Um The whole point of themes is going to be like, look, we’ve curated like the visual experience for you. Like this is how we believe colors should be. This is how we believe spacing and padding and typography should be.

This is how we believe things should relate to each other. This is how we believe different blacks should interact when they’re next to each other, or Children of each other or you know, all that stuff, Right? Like themes 100% should have this opinion. I think if you want to be like real ridiculous, you can even like de register all the block styles and like just do it all in your theme. That is that is a choice.

It’s definitely changing all the time. So you probably want to make sure you’re you’re like keeping your theme up to date because they’re probably going to add like 40 new things to it that you haven’t accounted for yet. Um But I mean you can do that, right? And I think that’s it’s gonna be even more important, um as things go forward, like how can we style for the things that WordPress is already giving us, how can we style for some of the stuff?

Um you know, maybe maybe as a theme developer, I wanna, you know, explicitly support uh woo commerce, um and their blocks, right? Like that’s that’s how I’m I’m, you know, if I’m from a commercial theme developer, right? Which I’m not. Um but if I was, you know, that’s a differentiator, right? Like I’m styling for this block library, you know, I didn’t build the black library, but boy, am I going to make it look good? You know, that kind of stuff?

Yeah, so I’ve certainly used the theme unit test content, which is basically just a way of popular, like before you have, your real content may be populating your your theme with just like, here’s all the stuff like here’s something with five columns, here’s something with a weird gallery, here’s something that, you know, here’s something with a really lung title and hopefully, you know how to text wrapping like content that’s designed to stress out your theme.

Yeah, so that’s content. Um I am also running the like, WordPress coding standards, Code sniffer on my stuff through. Yeah, so that’s super fun. I do some work, I do some contract work with automatic, so I have to like follow strict coding standards, so I might as well have all my stuff follow that.

And so that is kind of more of the automated like testing on my code that I’m running in the background and then I have the content testing on my content to make sure that like when my content manager writes a weird thing, it’s not going to break or render funny. Um so that’s that’s basically what I do for my my workflow,

Yeah, I would say just start doing it and don’t be scared. Uh you know like but for real like it seems really scary and overwhelming and when I started, you know, I I I didn’t understand what I was doing and I just kept poking at it. Um Having a local environment is great. You can go make a copy of it on on local um and then just start breaking it and it’s ok if you break it because it’s not real right? It’s just your local copy.

Um Start by just modifying some CSS right? If you already know how to do that, you know uh start by seeing what happens when you do some stuff in functions dot PHP if you already know how to do that. You know? Look at one of the core wordpress themes like one of the year based themes and just like open it and look at it and see what it’s doing. Like compare it to the template hierarchy, like what are these things? Right?

Like what’s this, how does this work? What happens if I change this? Like also don’t feel like you have to know everything about theme development in order to be useful. I have been doing the development, Terrible theme development back in 2011, barely, you could even call it that theme development more like theme poking with stick, but like I knew enough about it to be able to do something that was valuable for my client at the time, right?

Like I could do a little thing and that was perfect, right? I didn’t know, I didn’t even know how the loop worked yet. And I was able to do something that was valuable for a client because I could style the thing that already existed, right?

Um so especially because WordPress is going to keep changing front end, development is gonna keep changing, best practices are going to keep changing, like you don’t have to know everything in order to know something, right? I don’t know everything and I was just on a podcast talking to everybody right, like you know what I mean, but like you you can know enough that will add value to somebody and that’s okay. There, there

also take care of yourself in the meantime, like you could get down a rabbit hole of like feeling like you always have to learn things and like, you know,

Oh goodness. Well, like, so the other thing that I do, obviously I, I do, um although, you know, I have my own business website and personal website, but I also run a website project called fitness and freelance dot com, which is where I write about basically like how to take care of your physical and mental health as like a independent, like tucker creative professional, right?

And having done all of the things wrong, um you know, I want to, I want to, you know, advance the whole like, hey, your mental and physical health is also important. So like, if it’s a matter of staying up super late, feeling like you have to learn every single freaking thing about the latest javascript framework or sleeping, maybe she was sleeping sometimes. That’s, that’s all I have to say about

Sure, no problem. So, I am Markt Time media basically everywhere on the internet. Uh love to talk to people on twitter or whatever. Hit me up. It’s fun. Um I blog occasionally at my name is Michelle dot com. You can find my business portfolio. Mark time media dot com. And I also run a blog about physical and mental health for independent tech and creative professionals at fitness and freelance dot com would love to see you there.

Um That’s kind of like my pet project where I I try to write about things that are more mental and physical health focus rather than tech focus, it’s kind of nice. Um otherwise I am looking forward to slowly starting to speak at things again. I missed speaking at Word camps uh you know, hopefully you know, who know, who knows if and when we’ll be doing stuff in person again.

But it was it was super lovely to be on here. I love sharing with people and it’s it’s fun to joke around and be geeks and laugh and learn, oh thank you.