Greetings, I am new to wordpress and have several questions about the ecosystem, best practices and the best way to develop websites using WordPress.
Context: I am a software engineer by day and am super comfortable coding up things but have practically zero experience with PHP. I came across wordpress and wanted to consider it to help with setting up a lot of the boilerplate code(logins, style schemes, billing, etc.) while also giving me the ability to build off that.
Some questions I have are:
1. Persisting changes – I make changes on the WordPress UI and save them. Then, for some reason, I redeploy my codebase and all the changes are gone. My plugins have to be redownloaded as well – Is there a way to persist all my changes that I make from the UI?
2. Local Development – My current workflow is to make changes to the codebase(add new plugins, etc.) on VS Code and then deploy them to my server(AWS) and wait for the changes to work. I’d like to be able to make changes to my PHP files and test them out locally(ideally using localhost) without having to deploy everytime – how can I do this? PS: i found a local WP software(localwp.com) but it only reloads changes of CSS files
3. In several of the built-in wordpress themes(2022,2023, etc.), there exist html template files with lots of commented out parts that are actually just code snippets – why are they commented out and how are they being used?
4. What is the best way to connect my backend service to my wordpress website? For example, I’d like to submit a form, send a response to the backend, and give back a picture to display on the frontend.
Even if you do not know answers to all, please do help, I’d really appreciate it!
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