The State of WordPress and Perhaps Writing a Book About It

I have been preoccupied with certain features of WordPress and building plugins lately. It has been good knowledge to pick up and interesting, but I have not had so much time to work on my WordPress theme, nor on my portfolio WordPress "themed" website. Then, I haven't had time to do preparations for my bachelor's thesis neither.

So the list is probably:

• WordPress plugin work
• WordPress theme work
• Portfolio site and features
• Bachelor's thesis preparation

Which I consider my main items of attention at the moment. During some downtime I started to do a project in Laravel, and that is also an item that can be added to the "should do more of when I get around to it".

But lately I have been thinking about what I want to focus more on. There are some stuff I thought I would do related to my Portfolio site but haven't started. I thought I would create a small web shop type thing with possibility to subscribe through Stripe.

Of course, it would mostly be an exercise at this point, but potentially a real world project. One problem though is that I would need to create some material for the subscribers. It wouldn't be much of a subscription service otherwise.

So I'm thinking about what I should add. And as of recently my mind has gone to writing some sort of WordPress book. I have already posted about a few WordPress related topics on this blog but the idea would probably be to expand on those and write some more from my experiences with this classic CMS.

I don't think it would be a introduction type book "Learning WordPress for Beginners" and bring up too basic topics, because I think that is covered a lot elsewhere. But rather, a book where I try to expand on a few topics, so it hopefully can be an interesting read for someone who is already somewhat familiar with WordPress.

The question now is of course if there would be a market for a book like that and if WordPress is worthwhile to write about in 2026 still. Personally, I would say that those "cookbook" type programming books can usually be good for advanced beginners, intermediate and even expert users. And regarding the topic itself, I think WordPress is still relevant.

The reason for it being relevant could be a few things, like:

• Still being used for a lot of websites
• A "standard" type of website that is flexible and possible to tailor to the needs of the user
• Lots of plugins for various purposes helps in that regard
• A good content system that allows the users to easily change the content of the website without having any particularly advanced computer skills

I would also reason it is a good choice for a beginner developer who wants to use traditional web technologies such as PHP, SQL, HTML, JavaScript/jQuery and CSS. Sure it is not the latest and greatest, but it works and is a nice way to repeat some of that knowledge you probably already know.

Then, you can even advance into more difficult areas where WordPress is possible to adapt, such as the REST-API endpoints, writing Gutenberg blocks in React and more. You can also learn how to setup things like e-mail and CAPTCHAs. 

A lot of features that you might think should be easy to have on a website, you will realize usually demands a lot of code. A simple way to achieve those features without having to reinvent the wheel can be to use third party plugins. Often they are free, but can also have premium features. And eventually you might find out that you are missing something in the plugins that are available and then it's a good opportunity to create it yourself.

However, why I think WordPress is still relevant is mainly because it's a good content management system, as in a good system to store content: from blog posts, html pages and images, to custom post types with custom meta fields, making it possible to adapt the system to practically *anything* you want it to represent.

There is also a good taxonomy system for categorizing the data, using both hierarchical and nonhierarchical taxonomies.

Last but not least, there are good opportunities to create a nice front-end that is SEO compatible, because it uses simple server rendered technology. While it's not a Single Page Application typ website, if that is the requirement, headless WordPress can be used for back-end and the front-end framework of your choice as front-end.

This can serve as a good start before moving on to more complex and dedicated back-end framworks.

It's always difficult to say what the future may hold. Especially at times like these where AI builders and other sites and software becomes available for creating websites but WordPress has survived longer than people might have expected and I don't think it's popularity will decrease for a particular group of people, who enjoy the option of being able to easily modify the system.

Code preview

In this post I'm trying out to add "code" text block, for better overview of code.

This might work...   

  Your code here

Or this... using: https://codeformatter.blogspot.com/

 function hello() {  
 echo "world";  
 }  

Another option seem to be to embed gists from Github.

No syntax hightlighting though... to be continue.

The Difference Between Hierarchical and Nonhierarchical Taxonomies in WordPress

The Difference Between Hierarchical and Nonhierarchical Taxonomies in WordPress with regards to slugs and public (frontpage) access.

I'm mainly writing this as a reminder for myself but this is how I believe it is organized and I believe it could be helpful if someone ever run into the same issue.

So the main different between hierarchical and nonhierarchical taxonomies in WordPress is that hierarchical taxonomies are the typical "category" taxonomy and nonhierarchical taxonomy is a "tag" taxonomy.

When you set 'hierarchical' => 'true' or 'false' in the taxonomy settings, you define this behavior which also impacts the access to the taxonomy on the front-end of your WordPress site.

For hierarchical taxonomies, like categories, you may name it like such:

'custom-category'.

Now you can access it: example.com/custom-category

And the template for this is archive-custom-category.php in your theme folder.

The template for the single is single-custom-category.php.

Now you could assume, it is the same way for the nonhierarchical taxonomy.

Lets say you have a nonhierarchical taxonomy called "custom-tag".

But trying to access example.com/custom-tag/ will yield a 404.

Why? Because the taxonomy is nonhierarchical and it doesn't have an archive page.

However, you can access example.com/custom-tag/tag-term

which will list all posts associated with the taxonomy that are also "tagged" as "tag-term".

(This is also possible for hierarchical categories: example.com/custom-category/category-term)

Now, you might still want to have a /custom-tag/ "archive", and to achieve this is to create a "page" that you call "custom-tag" with the slug "custom-tag". Leave this page blank.

Then create a template in your theme folder with the name: page-custom-tag.php and set the page you created to use this template.

In the template you need to create some code that lists all your posts for the various tags, using the WP_loop and some filtering.

Now you can visit: example.com/custom-tag/ and have it list all your posts assoicated with the custom tag taxonomy.