If you’re anything like me, you probably worked with WordPress for years as a hobbyist – running blogs, publishing articles, adding/removing plugins etc etc. Unlike Drupal WordPress is very much beginner-friendly and thus suits hobby purposes just fine.
Learning WordPress and working with it is fun – and the more fun you’re having with it, the more likely it is that you’ll get a WordPress-related job one day (at the very least you’ll get a lot of requests about WP related jobs if you’ll list it as a skill on your resume).
There’s a couple of things you can learn before diving into a WP job – both of those will save you and your future boss countless headaches of dealing with broken sites and lost data. Even if you’ll decide to remain a hobbyist, those two things might still come in handy – we’re talking about revisions and child themes.
Revisions
If you’re familiar with version control systems such as Git or Subversion, you’ll see a lot of parallels between those and revision systems in WordPress. According to WP Codex:
The WordPress revisions system stores a record of each saved draft or published update. The revision system allows you to see what changes were made in each revision by dragging a slider (or using the Next/Previous buttons). The display indicates what has changed in each revision – what was added, what remained unchanged, and what was removed. Lines added or removed are highlighted, and individual character changes get additional highlighting.
To browse revisions, add new post/page and look at the top right corner of your WP editor – you’ll see “Publish” column at the top and underneath it a number of different options including “Revisions”. From there you can browse, compare and save different versions of your posts.
Child Themes
Another way of saving yourself (or your boss or your co-workers) from endless headaches is to use child themes. Those are copies of your original theme which you can easily edit without damaging main WP files/parent theme.
Elegant Themes did a wonderful post on how to get started with child themes (which you can read here). As they point out:
By creating a child theme, you create a separate set of files that you can use to customize the theme without affecting the original theme at all. Not only does this make updating easier, it also makes sure that you will never ruin your original theme as you are never actually modifying the files. You can always turn off your child theme and fall back on the original.
Both revisions and child themes are wonderful time-savers and whether you’re a hobbyist or a pro using them will make your life as a developer much easier.
Further reading
How to Control Post Revisions in WordPress (Sitepoint)
How to Undo Changes in WordPress with Post Revisions (WP Beginner)
Post Revision Display (D’Arcy Norman)
How to Create a WordPress Child Theme (Gabfire)
WordPress Child Theme: Say Whaaaat? (DesignWall)