WordPress powers over 40% of the modern web and 60% of websites that use a content management system. The numbers keep going up.
Is WordPress Market Share declining? Millions of websites are powered by WordPress, from everyday bloggers to Fortune 500 company websites.
In the video tutorial on developing WordPress Themes, I show you how to create a WordPress Hybrid Theme using some of the best tools and resources.
If you want to learn about the various types of WordPress Themes you can use, checkout the video below.
Why Code a WordPress Hybrid theme?
WordPress Theme Development has been evolving with the introduction of Gutenberg aka the block editor, and new ways to code themes. With those changes, some of the previous ways of coding a WordPress Theme were believed to completely go away. But for the foreseeable future, that’s not the case.
There are over 10,600 themes on the official WordPress website. Of those 10,600 themes, less than 300 are considered block themes. The takeaway is that Classic Themes and Hybrid Themes, account for more than 10,300 of the options people have to choose from. Another takeaway is that the Classic way of developing themes are here for a very long time to come.
Developing Hybrid Themes is a great way for people to get familiar with block theme development while at the same time, recognizing that millions of websites need to be maintained with themes that we are all familiar with.
Keep an Eye on the Future of WordPress Theme Development
It’s important that theme developers take a good look at the direction WordPress is going in, what that new direction means for them, and their future. For those looking to get into theme development today, Hybrid themes are the way to go.
Developing Hybrid themes gives you the opportunity to maximize your capability to work with various types of websites that are powered by WordPress.
Change is hard, change can be good, change always brings new opportunities for those who are willing to adapt and learn.
Resources I use developing DevWP WordPress Theme
Underscores – a starter theme that speeds up the process of developing themes. Underscores hasn’t been updated in a while, but I demonstrate how to update the code to make it work properly. I also heavily change the file structure and refactor the code since we do use Bootstrap 5.
Bootstrap 5 – which is a front-end framework that handles the way your website is styled and adds some dynamic features.
Git – a version control system that is part of most web developer’s workflow.
NodeJS – used in conjunction with Gulp and NPM to help automate some of our workflow, and to lint our project.
Gulp – helps to automate some of the workflow by concatenating files, minifying our code, etc.
Composer – is used to help lint our code and to make sure that we are using best practices while developing DevWP.
Windows or macOS for WordPress Development?
It doesn’t matter. In the video I show how to develop your WordPress Theme on both a Windows System, and macOS.
While developing themes is similar on both platforms, there are some minor differences that need to be reviewed. On Windows I use XAMPP, and on macOS I use MAMP.
VS Code – a code editor that when properly setup, can be as powerful as a full featured Integrated Development Environment aka IDE.
Font-Awesome is used for the social media icons.
There’s a lot more that goes into developing WordPress Themes and I hope you invest the time to learning how to create your theme with DevWP.