Wordpress PHP Help needed...
- Started
- Last post
- 9 Responses
- isakosmo
got asked for a job to build a site in wordpress... how easy is it to to customise the layouts... do you need to know much PHP or are you ok with just HTML/CSS?
any help appreciated... cheers
- JamesBoynton0
Ive done a few wp sites over the last few months, i knew notihng about php but found it pretty easy, i just took the basic template and started moving things about and seeing what happened... just using html and css will only really change how it looks rather than what info is being displayed. But yeah, all quite easy after i asked some newbie questions to a few friends.
- isakosmo0
cheers james.... thats what i thought but wanted to check, never good committing to a short timeframe for something you havent done before least of all if its php cause i know v little on that.... think ill need a PHP coder for advice... if anyone reading this can help out (ill pay a bit..) pm me pls
- JamesBoynton0
No worries, unless you will be looking for special functions i doubt you will need a php coder to be honest... but im sure there are plenty people on here to help!
- ********0
You might find a reset theme handy. Something like this:
http://elliotjaystocks.com/stark…
Most of my wordpress woes were caused not by PHP, but shitty HTML markup.
- FallowDeer0
Ive been doing quite a few WP sites over the last month and its pretty easy.
My PHP knowledge its pretty much zero, all you need to do is build the site in HTML and use the codex to replace the content with the PHP tags.
Its pretty much that simple, although I did have a read through this which helped a little
http://rockablepress.com/books/r…
- isakosmo0
lovely, thanks everyone!
just accepted the job, hopefully like you say once the HTML is done its fairly simple to piece together. looks like WP is the way to go nowadays
- forcetwelve0
i've been having a crack too with wordpress. once you get your head around the structure of the loop it all makes sense. there's a couple of people on here that are really helpful so post here for help - i know i do!
- acescence0
i suggest the starkers theme as well. you certainly don't need any php knowledge, but learning some bits can make a huge difference in what you can do. i think the developer documentation is really good.. http://codex.wordpress.org/Devel…
the first thing is understanding the template system and what files are used for what pages. you can have 1 file and every page uses that 1 template, or you can have a category template, a single post template, etc., based on what you name the files. there are also conditional tags, which let you check what page was requested and load other templates or display markup based on that. http://codex.wordpress.org/Condi…
here it's necessary to grasp how if/then/else conditional logic works in php.the main ingredients then are the template tags, they let you access the fragments of data that make up a page: title, content, link, date, etc.. some of them insert html on the page, others let you access just the raw bits of data to insert into your own markup. http://codex.wordpress.org/Templ…
a big part of the template tags is "the loop", and understanding how loops work in php in general. loops let you repeat a block of code to deal with collections of data, in this case a collection of posts on a page. wherever you see "while ()" or "for ()" in the templates, these are loops.
once you understand the loop, you can get into using multiple loops on a page to get additional data, like a related posts section, or building pages with categories displayed separately, or showing both post and page data, etc..
the last super jedi level is writing your own sql queries, which lets you do whatever, like getting posts based on custom field / tag / category. oh yeah, check out custom fields, these are good for adding extra data to pages. i use them for thumbnails, flash slideshows, mp3 playlists, artist / album / format data (which you can then select and sort on with your own queries). the possibilities are vast.
- meffid0
wordpress is utter pants now.