What's a good resource for learning PHP, HTML, and Wordpress?

Philip J. Fry

Philip J. Fry

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I have a promising employee. I also have some Wordpress dev jobs that needs to be done for XXX sites every quarter. I can either do it myself, hire an in-house developer, or train him in Wordpress, PHP, and HTML so he can do it.

I'm leaning on #3.

Can you recommend good WP/PHP/HTML courses? I'd like a book but, maybe, Linda (or something else) would work too. Links to syllabus or table of contents would be appreciated.

After training, his tasks would be:
  • Create child themes
  • Edit child themes so the on-page SEO is good
  • Create custom Page Templates if needed
Thanks!
 
HTML / CSS book (jon duckett)
PHP pandas (daryl lee)
Wordpress = lots of fucking around with the desired child theme framework and reading official docs of course
 
Training is an investment, both in money and time.
I'm not saying don't do it, but make sure its for the right reasons, and that you have the means to do so.
Doing it for cost reasons hardly ever works out.

They are cheaper to hire because they will require a significant amount of time to become productive (their time, which you will be paying for, and your own / an experienced member of staffs time, which will damage your / their own productivity).

And once they are experienced enough to be productive, you will need to pay them market rates anyway, or someone else will.
 
Michael said:
HTML / CSS book (jon duckett)
PHP pandas (daryl lee)
Wordpress = lots of fucking around with the desired child theme framework and reading official docs of course
Click to expand...
PHP Panda looks good but I'd need something where the hand in homework/projects. I'd need to ensure that they properly learned the material.
 
Codecademy would blow him through HTML / CSS / PHP enough to know what he's looking at once he starts digging into Wordpress. And for Wordpress functionality itself, nothing beats the developer documentation. I think beyond that he'll just need time to accumulate knowledge and for puzzle pieces to start clicking together. It's usually a matter of learning what's possible so you know to do a search for it.
 
Following this thread.

So far I've taught myself by copy-pasting different snippets of code and seeing what it does but I really need some structure to my learning
 
Ryuzaki said:
Codecademy would blow him through HTML / CSS / PHP enough to know what he's looking at once he starts digging into Wordpress. And for Wordpress functionality itself, nothing beats the developer documentation. I think beyond that he'll just need time to accumulate knowledge and for puzzle pieces to start clicking together. It's usually a matter of learning what's possible so you know to do a search for it.
Click to expand...

+1
Additionally, udemy has a lot of discounts in almost any course you might be interested in, something crazy like 91% off. I snatched a pair of React courses on Sunday and they cost me $20 so it's really cheap.

If you're on a budget, try Microsoft's dev essentials, it includes a free, 90 days sub to Pluralsight, a site with a ton of high quality courses on a wide variety of thigs.

https://www.visualstudio.com/en/dev-essentials/

Once you learn the basics, start building things with what you have learnt. The more challening you find a task, the more you'll learn from it. The real way to learn something is solving a real problem, so put in practice what you learn, doesn't matter if it's something trivial.

Hope this helps.
 
I'm really trying to compress this, so stick with me. I want to talk about how to learn first, as I think that's most important. I'm speaking more broadly for those that come across it and can take something useful away from it that helps them learn more effectively, and/or helps them help others learn how to learn more effectively.

The modern day culture of MOOC is awesome, and has created some really cool opportunities. That being said, classes are now limitless. Basic supply and demand. The volume of educational content is such that most content is practically worthless now. It's finding the few that have useful and effective presentation that's the issue. There is enough educational out there to keep a student busy perpetually learning fundamentals. It's something that really takes great care to guard against these days.

All people really need is:
  • Concise fundamentals (not all, just common, useful ones)
  • Learning to perceive problems
  • Learning how to ask questions about problems
  • Learning methods to code fearlessly + break stuff + problem solve
What I mean by that last part is, you have to quickly get to a point of trying things, breaking them, then learning how to fix them.

Doing it live on a mission critical production site? Uh yeah, maybe not. In cases like that, finding a senior developer to help you get started with "Git" for version control, so you can break your own local copy to your heart's content, would be useful.

For the average blogger, in some cases doing it live can be fine if it means you'll get to doing it a lot more quickly. Though you'll want to learn how to copy and save the necessary stuff carefully so you can revert things quickly if need be.

Man, when I first got started, I straight up broke live Wordpress sites RUTHLESSLY................for seconds at a time. Maybe 1 or 2 visitors suffered from it, maybe $5.00 was lost. The knowledge + productivity gained = priceless.

Here's a brief and awesome article on breaking things: Code Fearlessly

Although I don't have any easy answers, these are things I would look for in training resources:
  1. Can I learn enough to do useful things in 1-2 hours or less?
  2. Is it well-structured so I can pick and choose what I need?
  3. Does it have practical examples like things I need to do?
  4. Does it help me learn how to ask questions and find answers?

1) If I'm a couple hours in and I've yet to see anything that looks even remotely useful, I'm probably going to ditch it. Probably even after an hour. By 1 hour, I want stuff I can copy paste. I want stuff I can tweak in my text editor. I want to already be DOING some things. Some of these courses read like collegiate dissertations. Nobody's got time 'fo that!

2) I find it to be extremely useful to learn, in a non-linear manner. Once I've learned just enough that I have my "training wheels" on, I start thinking of problems to things I need to do regularly. Then I start looking for answers to those problems. Stuff like manipulating the appearance, content, or state of a "thing". Stuff like reading from a file and changing it or outputting new info to another file.

3) This is a big one. Sooooooooooooo many teachers use examples that have no relation to anything. Like bro is this even real life programming? Seriously. Show me what implementing the problems from (2) looks like! Everyday tasks. Don't show me lambda expressions. Don't talk about functional programming with the latest BroJS™ when all I need is to change some object onclick.

I'd also be looking for classes that include additional resources like:
  • Links to GitHub repos so you can get your copypasta on
  • Links to other third party resources
  • Quizzes
  • Demo sites + projects to build
I'll stop there on the how side of things, since this is already long. More actual resources to come next.
 
Up first, resources on YouTube.

As far as actual resources, one channel I can highly recommend is Dev Tips. He has a LOT of stuff, particularly on the HTML, design and CSS side of things. Also a bit of JS. A bunch of stuff on getting started with different HTML, CSS, and other frameworks like Bootstrap, which is a great way for beginners to get started in a more organized manner. The thing I like about him is his laid back presentation style. Also, he doesn't code "perfectly", so you often get to see him in the process of diagnosing and problem solving issues. That's great, because that's EXACTLY how a beginner needs to learn to think.

LearnCode.academy is also pretty good. If you're looking for tutorials on JS, newer JS frameworks, and tools like advanced text editors, using GitHub, etc. has a lot more coverage of those sorts of things. He also has some total beginner's playlists which are pretty decent and well-rounded.

Alex at Codecourse covers more the PHP side of things very well, including frameworks like Laravel and some more intermediate / advanced programming stuff. He also has a decent PHP basics course, which would be great for a total beginner.

Traversy Media has a pretty broad range of tutorials, covering HTML, CSS, PHP all the way to database-level stuff, scripting languages like Python, creating your own custom widgets for a Wordpress site, etc.

For the aspiring Python scrapists out there, Chris Hawkes does a great job of covering a variety of foundational Python tutorials, as well as some fun scraping-related stuff even using PhantomJS and CasperJS. Beware though, you're going to want to hone your Xpath skills if you're looking to get into that scraping stuff. He also has tutorials for quite a few other languages like VueJS, ReactJS, and even @SmokeTree's own favorite, the Elixir programming language.

*Edited to add. LevelUpTuts is pretty darn good too. He covers a MASSIVE number of languages, frameworks and tools from beginner to advanced.
 
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@turbin3 Thanks for the reply but that's the last way we're going to implement WP/HTML/PHP training.

Think about it for a second. I currently have 1 employee who'd like to be trained to be able to configure WP themes. If we double production, I'd have to train another one. No way would such an irregular training schedule produce consistent results.

That might be good for a solo-entrepreneur who does not have a formal CS education but, for an organization, that's a no-go.

I'm leaning on shipping him PHP, HTML, and WP books. These books usually start from 0 and end with a project. Lets say its 1 book/month. Thats 3 months to give him a thorough knowledge of PHP, HTML, and WP. Then, 1 month of on-the-job training.

Then, those same steps can be applied to any other employee in the future. This would work for 1 employee or 20 employees.
 
Sorry about that, I really should have clarified. In hindsight, I apologize if I've hijacked the thread. Mods, feel free to move my posts if necessary.

Looking at the general subject, and seeing several others like @built respond, I was in the frame of mind of general recommendations for the average solo-entrepreneur that may come across this thread.

So I absolutely didn't intend those as recommendations from an organizational standpoint. You're absolutely right, there needs to be more structure, focus, and specific goals for that purpose.
 
I can't say more than all you have to do is to exercise what you want to learn everyday, it doesn't matter if you don't know the basics of programming in any language of script, you should practice every single day, that's how you will learn.
There is many free sources to learn from, but the best way to learn is to practice them every day.
 
Guys, I took this waaaaaayyyyyy off track in making assumptions and not reading carefully into what @Philip J. Fry was actually asking for. Please don't derail his thread further.

What he needs is recc's for educational resources, for a structured training program that can scale across a team over time.
 
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