With tomorrow being arguably one of the largest holidays in the world, I thought that it might be a decent change of pace of the posts and offer up something a little bit shorter and a little more open ended in hopes of getting some feedback from the rest of you WordPress designers, developers, bloggers, and other users.

So here’s the deal: Back when you first became acquainted with WordPress, you started at ground zero. We all did.

Sure, there might have been a few things that we knew – like how blogging work, or how HTML and PHP worked together, but we weren’t necessarily familiar with WordPress templating nor the WordPress API (or any part of the API for that matter).

But with diligence and over a long enough period of time, we get better at what we do. Sure, we end up realizing just how much we don’t know, but we also continue to add more and more tools to our arsenal.

The thing about doing this is that sometimes it takes us longer than we’d like, or we learn things the hardware. So here’s my questions:

Knowing what you know now, if you could go back to teach yourself WordPress or, rather, something about WordPress the proper way the first time around, what would that be?

I’ll go first: Unashamedly, it’d actually be three things (in no particular order):

  • Better techniques for writing plugins
  • The Settings API
  • WP_Query

Okay, the question still stands. Your turn. Don’t leave me hanging as the only person answering my own question.

That’s like being the only one showing up to your own party.