I am a senior in a college computer science program, and therefore have a decent knowledge of code and several languages. However, I am doing a summer internship type program, and the company I am working with hosts their webpage on WordPress, which to which I am new. They want me to edit some of the code in order to do various things, such as enable a photo container to be a moving slideshow.
Figuring out the javascript and html to achieve the results they desire is not problematic for me. However, I am unsure how to get full access to the Source Code of the site. I have privileged access to the backend of the site but in wordpress when you go to edit it only shows some of the basic html tags while hiding the and tags and code. Is there any way edit the page in its source code format? I don’t want to have to go through the simplified and less expressive/less control WordPress interface, and I don’t even know if I can achieve the desired results with it.
Thanks for your help.
You don’t want to edit core WordPress code. You don’t need to edit core WordPress code to do what you need to implement.
First, you need to study the WordPress templating (i.e. Theme) functionality. Then, you need to study Plugins and the WordPress Hooks API, including its Action Hooks and its Filter Hooks.
To do what you’re describing, you definitely don’t need to modify core files. You just need to enqueue the appropriate script library, and then execute the script in your template.
You will need FTP/SFTP access to for decent development experience.
Natively posts/pages only hold HTML content (no code). That outputs gets combined by currently active theme with template.
If you want some specific page extensively customized you will likely need to create and add template for it in theme. But I am not too sure you are using correct terminology here, in WordPress posts and pages are different.
FYI official docs at http://codex.wordpress.org cover a lot of stuff, but are far from perfect. And of course you are welcome to sak question here, just try to make them precise and manageable – the more specific question is, the more likely you are to get good answers.
wordpress comes with a battery of things …. templates, themes, template tags, plugins, widgets, functions.php (in the template folder), and most important of all hooks …….. that means that you NEVER NEED to change a line of code in the core…. the key with wordpress is to figure out how to do what you want without hacking the core… and it’s always possible ….. what you need to do instead is to figure out roughly in this order how to a) add new themes, b)edit your theme and template files, c)create your own theme or child theme d)use filter and action hooks e)create shortcodes (good for experimenting) f)make use of the functions.php file in the theme (this is one place where you put your shortcodes) g)build your own plugins …. if you know all that then you will never want to change any core code