I am trying to learn PHP, and am trying to create a website for the engineering company i work for. It will be essentially a portfolio with 'about the company' type info as well. My goal is to do it through wordpress with a custom theme to create a homepage menu that the owner has come up with (sketched idea at this point). It will be layout of different images of different jobs we have done that when clicked will take you to the page with those corresponding types of jobs. I know i could do this with HTML & CSS but id like to do it with PHP (if that makes any sense). I figure this will be a good opportunity to just force PHP down my throat. Tutorials are helpful for the specific task they are teaching, but tutorials alone provide a lot of info that i dont necessarily need to distract myself with. I'd rather just find out the specific functions i need to focus on and learn them I always find when learning something new like this (language/software) that its much more about understanding the uses and limitations of whatever it is that is much more helpful than trying to learning all the individual commands or whatever one-by-one. I know this probably sounds like a broad request, but anyone have any tips to start me off?
Firstly working with a CMS like Wordpress is not really creating something yourself through writing the application. By stating that you want to create this in PHP I guess you mean some kind of CMS system so new projects can be added, edited and deleted. If this is the case you need to learn mainly about working with databases and PHP has some very powerful tools for this kind of work. PHP: http://www.tizag.com/phpT/ MySQL: http://www.tizag.com/mysqlTutorial/ You will also need to learn sessions as you are going to need to protect the admin area with a login. Hope that helps you to get started, sorry I couldn't help more I am really busy at the moment. Good luck
Try to Learn from W3schools there tuts are very easy for beginner but there tuts are basic so when you learn basic then go for advanced with youtube Videos or tizag as HuggyEssex mentioned
thanks for the help, ill definitely check out tizag, but let me clarify, just to make sure my approach to this makes any sense: HuggyEssex it sounds like you are saying i would need to create a custom CMS and I was thinking that, through learning php i could create a custom wordpress theme, with custom homepage and layout, which would still use the wordpress cms so it could be easily edited like any other wordpress theme where a new page could be added using the theme-based custom layout. So i would be creating something myself but using it through wordpress, right? Or is this not possible?
You can create anything for WordPress it's open source software. I thought you meant that you wanted to create your own system which is certainly one of the best ways to learn PHP as you will make many mistakes and that will only teach you the valuable lessons you need to know. That's what I done anyway and it worked for me.