Josepha Haden, Executive Director of the WordPress project tweeted out a fun and interesting question.
Think back to your first #WordPress site. Do you remember which task first made you head to a search engine for learning? Mine was creating menus.
Josepha Haden
When I first started using WordPress for my Web 2.0 review site, I used a free WordPress theme that I hacked apart. I remember having to Google how to change a plugin’s parameters in order to achieve the desired effect.
Back before a lot of plugins had options, knobs, and panels in the backend, I would need to edit the plugin’s code at a certain line to alter how many items were on a page or which order they displayed in. WordPress themes were pretty much the same way. I can’t tell you how many times I edited Functions.php only to turn my site into a white screen of death.
People responded to Haden’s question with some awesome answers that made me feel nostalgic. Here are a few of them.
To this day, phpMyAdmin still scares me although I mostly know what I’m doing. It’s still dangerous and I try not to venture into it if I can help it. Jake’s answer is comical in that I remember a bunch of tutorials published in the WordPress community that explained how to have custom bullets for Listed Items. I think I used one of those tutorials to switch my bullets to an image.
Another pain point that led to a bunch of tutorials was drop-down menus.
Thankfully, WooThemes created WooNav which eventually became the foundation of the menu management system in WordPress 3.0. Nowadays, creating a drop-down menu is fairly simple to do, if a theme supports them. Check out some of the other responses in the Twitter thread and let us know your response. Also, despite all of the tutorials and attempts, I could never figure out how to add sidebars to a theme. I’m glad I don’t have to worry about that anymore.