All Courses > Up and Running > Chapters > 3. Core Concepts of WordPress Themes and Plugins

3. Core Concepts of WordPress Themes and Plugins

In this book—and in most WordPress developers' careers!—"WordPress development" is a synonym for "theme and plugin development." That may seem narrow or restrictive at first glance, but let's look at what "theme development" and plugin development really mean:

Theme development: Creating and modifying the themes which every WordPress site uses to dictate its presentation, including its design, layout, display options, and accessibility features.
Plugin development: Extending WordPress with custom functionality.

Outside these two huge topic areas, there's truly not too much else to do in WordPress—except helping to improve and expand the WordPress core software itself, which we'll leave aside for now.
So the place to start is to understand the fundamentals of both themes and plugins: "What makes them tick." That's what this section offers, in the following chapters:

What WordPress Themes Are For
Anatomy of a WordPress Theme
Core Concepts of WordPress Themes: 1. The Template Hierarchy...