As you design your WordPress theme or build a plugin, you will be using a combination of HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript (JS).

There are plenty (probably too many) resources online for you to get started with these web languages. It can be overwhelming!

With this resource page, we hope to focus on resources and guides that will help you the most to provide clear guidance and instruction on using HTML, CSS, PHP, and JS. This is nowhere near an exhaustive list, only meant to help you get started.

We recommend that you save or bookmark this page as a reference for learning while you’re working on your WordPress theme or plugin. See also:
– Theme Developer Handbook
– Plugin Developer Handbook
– Block Editor Handbook.

General Web Development Education

WordPress.org has released Learn WordPress which will guide you through several topics around developing for WordPress.

freeCodeCamp is a free and open source education platform and is not WordPress-specific. They offer instruction, demo projects, and their own certification that have helped millions learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

They will teach you the basics of HTML and CSS in their Responsive Web Design course.

If you’d like to dive deeper with JavaScript, you can do so in their Front End Development Libraries course, which will get you started with JavaScript and even React, which will be helpful for you to developer themes, plugins, and especially blocks.

Unfortunately, there’s currently no PHP course.

Also, since you’ll be writing code, it would be good to familiarize yourself with the WordPress Coding Standards and Inline Documentation Standards.

Beyond that, these are some resources you might find helpful for each of the languages.

HTML

• W3Schools HTML
• Learn How to Make Websites

CSS

If this is your first time using CSS with WordPress, this document provides a fantastic overview

Other than that, these are some solid resources for you to review:

• W3 Schools
• MDN
• CSS Tricks
• CSS Zen Garden – the art of the possible in CSS
• CSS on A List Apart
• Flexbox Guide
• CSS Grid Guide
• CSS Grid by Example

JavaScript

• W3Schools JS
• MDN
• JSDoc for documenting your code
• ReactJS

PHP

• PHP Language Reference
• PHP Function Reference
• W3Schools PHP
• PHP The Right Way is a high level review of modern PHP
• PHPDoc for documenting your code
• SitePoint’s PHP resources

Books

• The good folks at WebDev Studios have put out several books on WordPress theming, plugin development, and also how to use WordPress. You can find a list of their books here
• You Don’t Know JS is a book series on modern JS development. This the Github repo for the books, or you can purchase physical copies.
• Eloquent JavaScript
• JavaScript: The Definitive Guide
• PHP Cookbook
• Programming PHP