Although WordPress at its heart is still a CMS that allows for a dive-in easier than any other in history, it is still not without advanced functionality needs — especially if you want to take it further than the mundane templates and plugins it comes equipped with.
Thankfully, WordPress’ immense popularity and fan base has led to a growing breadth of WordPress tutorial blogs to tackle the more difficult problems the CMS can cause from time to time. Depending on your skillset, expertise and need state, there’s probably a good blog for you to pick out some top-notch-knowledge and solve that problem you might be having.
1. WPBeginner.com — Beginner’s Guide for WordPress
WP Beginner is basically the cream of the crop as it comes to beginning-level content — although that shouldn’t make you shortchange the overall quality of their posts there.
Ran by WP Expert Syed Balkhi, the site manages to elegantly mix great advice with a beautiful aesthetic that makes digesting the information a breeze for beginners.
If you prefer visual learning, that’s an option too, as they have a large number of videos to get you started on WordPress.
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- Tips for Protecting Your WordPress Admin Area
- 55+ Most Wanted WordPress Tips, Tricks and Hacks
2. Smashing WordPress — Smashing Magazine’s WP Category
Smashing Magazine is a world renown design community with a specialty in long, epic articles. This continues to reflect in their WordPress section, which they describe as being for the “intermediate” WordPress user — which is no surprise, because the depth and quality of their articles often reflects in that kind of expertise.
Smashing WordPress is recommended for the user who is looking to move past the WPBeginner stage to a more advanced area, maybe take their work to the next level, and make coding and site development a large part of what they do. It’s a good place to find that first “advanced” WordPress project to implement on your blog.
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3. Lorelle VanFossen – Lorelle on WordPress
Lorelle VanFossen is an experienced and talented blogger/WordPress expert, and her blog is a reflection of her passion on the subject. Molded in a nice niche for the blogger/non dev, she has lots of great content that can be helpful to people looking to stay updated on WordPress without going as deep as knowing how to create a responsive-advanced-Android-enabled-checkout-cart-splash-page-social-plugin.
Since WordPress is at its core about blogging, too, she offers a nice hybrid site as her emphasis often falls back to that as well — which is probably your need as a person who is probably a blogger, first, and a hesitant-and-forced WordPress developer, second.
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4. WPMU.org – WordPress Tutorials and News
Full disclosure — WPMU.org is a client. Despite that, it is my biased-unbiased opinion that they deserve to be on this list, in their own way. WPMU is more of a news site than the other sites on the list, and they do a higher volume, but there is still a large volume of tutorial-type content to help beginners.
Along those same lines, the “news” type format of WPMU gets you new plugin and theme reviews quick, to stay on top of new trends and jump on the fresh new functions WordPress has available. If you’re a serious blogger with multiple domains — but not quite the super-advanced developer, WPMU is a good fit for you.
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Although these four sites are a good start, they’re not the start-all-end-all for WordPress online. You can find dozens of sites to learn about WordPress, and that number will likely grow in the future. As a blogger, though, it behooves you to keep up on the current trends and get a baseline of knowledge — it’ll help you grow your business — and audience — in the years to come.
Ross Hudgens works as a marketing consultant for WPMU Dev, helping them grow their premium WordPress theme, plugin and support community. He is a frequent blogger and can be found on Twitter here.
