Interviewing a Wordpress Developer
Nowadays more and more business owners choose WordPress as a platform for their websites because of its user-friendly admin panel combined with a wide range of customizable themes, templates, and plugins. No matter if you are going to upgrade your existing website or create a new website from scratch, you need to hire a professional WordPress developer. In this article, we will focus on technical skills that you should take into account when interviewing WordPress developers.
12 Key Technical Skills of a WordPress Programmer
During the technical interview, an expert that stands out among other WordPress programmers should demonstrate the following knowledge and skills:
- Plugins: Ability to configure, debug, and create standard and advanced plugins.
- Themes: Ability to edit the existing themes and create advanced themes from scratch. Other skills include looping, retrieving, and displaying the custom post meta and other core post fields.
- Templates: Ability to modify the existing templates, overwrite templates in child themes, create templates from scratch, and understand template hierarchy.
- Custom post types: Ability to generate both basic and advanced custom posts.
- Custom post meta: Ability to add basic fields and integrate third-party libraries.
- API/codex: Ability to use common functions and filters without reference.
- Shortcodes: Ability to create shortcodes with arguments.
- Coding standards: Ability to write valid code that is compliant with WordPress coding standards as well as review the code to be compliant with those standards.
- Security: Understanding of key vulnerabilities of WordPress and secure coding practices, ability to review the code to be compliant with those practices.
- CMS: Ability to use and customize the WordPress CMS.
- Updates: Ability to run the updates and lead the update process.
- WooCommerce: Ability to install, configure, and use WooCommerce in CMS.
These are the WordPress-specific skills that are typically required from WordPress programmers. More general skills include HTML/CSS, XML/JSON, JavaScript/AJAX, PHP, SQL, Git, Photoshop/Illustrator. It’s up to you to decide which of them are most important for your project. Anyway, we hope that you choose the right candidate from a variety of WordPress developers available on YouTeam platform and the skills & expertise of the chosen candidate will be a valuable contribution to your next project.