Introducing JS Essentials for WP Devs

For the complete course outline, check out the official sign up page. The first lesson drops on on March 4, 2024. Or read on for the full story.

WordPress is becoming increasingly JavaScript heavy, first with the editor and now slowly the entire Admin being transformed with JavaScript, and while PHP will still remain the backbone of WordPress for a long time to come, there will soon come a time when most modern WordPress development will require knowing and using JavaScript. For a lot of us, that time is already here.

So I’ve been thinking about creating a JavaScript crash course for at least 6 months. And I finally sat down and created it.

You could go out there and grab a complete course on JavaScript that takes you through everything, but if you’re anything like me, you can figure a lot of it out and just need a primer on some of the more important things that will help you get up and running quickly.

You know PHP and you know how to program. You’re smart, capable, and you inherently understand WordPress. You just need a bit of a leg up in some of the JavaScript specific syntax and ways of thinking so you can dive into JS/React/Next.js quickly.

So the brief is simple:

We’ll cover things like:

• the difference between var and let,
• arrow functions,
• what the heck destructuring is,
• how to map over an array in JavaScript,
• how async/await really work, and
• why those three dots are sometimes called the spread operator and sometimes called the rest operator, can’t JS devs just pick a name?

Basically, if there was something I found myself explaining again and again, I put it in this course. The reality is, lots of people are going to jump straight from PHP into React (hey, I did it too), and there is plenty of React specific syntax and paradigms to understand too, however, a lot of it becomes easier when you recognize that a lot of the conventions in React are actually just pure JavaScript things, and not specific to React at all.

I can’t tell you how many people think destructuring is specific to React, when in fact, it’s vanilla JavaScript functionality. I get it though – once upon a time, I made that mistake too. Destructuring is an easy example, because React uses it a lot, and once you understand how it really works, you start to feel a lot more empowered.

The course is completely free. In our WordPress community, some of this knowledge is becoming more and more essential and it doesn’t belong behind a pay wall.

For the complete course outline, check out the official sign up page. The first lesson drops on on March 4, 2024.