When I first got into web development, all the way back in 2002, a tool like WordPress did not exist yet. As a matter of fact, it wouldn’t be until almost a year later that WordPress would be released to the public for the first time; not that I was ready to use WordPress at initial release. I actually didn’t start using it until 2004 (around WordPress 1.5), when my friend told me about this new blogging platform that I should consider instead of writing my own.
I instantly fell in love, hacking away, learning the platform, making my own changes (sometimes to the core1), and watching it grow over the years. What started out as a simple, open source blogging platform is now a super-powerful content management system (CMS) that can boast that it’s the most widely-used CMS on the Internet.2 In this book, I plan to teach you how to use WordPress, as well as how to leverage the API to create your own custom themes, plugins, and content types. In other words, I will show you how to make WordPress your own.