At BarCamp Delhi 9 someone asked me how I go about developing on WordPress and what would I advice to someone starting on it. We had a good discussion at length & though its been a couple of months since then, I thought I’d share my insights here as well.
Basics:
The usual basics and good development practices apply here as well, so keep them in mind. WordPress has documented & sane coding standards, so make sure you understand & follow them. Other basic principles like DRY, KISS, etc. also apply. If you don’t already, then document your code. Use code comments extensively, document each function and every complex code block.