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General Talk: PHP, Word Press Themes, and a Lot of Newbie Questions ...

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    • CommentAuthorXSQueen
    • CommentTimeMar 26th 2008
     
    Hi! Just started a new project (website for a professional group I belong to) and some of the things I am required to do is 1) customize a wordpress theme to match the site I have already started for them 2) create a calendar and poll function, and host those on the site.

    I DO have dreamhost.com which has great one-click installs for both polling tools and for a calendar, but both are written in PHP which I have never used before. So my questions in this are as follows:

    What would you recommend as an ABSOLUTE beginners tutorial for PHP .. like a php for coding idiots or something ;) .. and what is the best way to customize a wordpress theme? I will post links to the site once I have customer approval (not getting paid for developping it - just portfolio piece) for feedback and suggestions but any help you can point me to in the meantime would be GREATLY appreciated!
    Thanks in advance ... and does anyone know if you can "imbed" posts from wordpress in a website the way you could with livejournal? I am very new to wordpress as well as PHP and definitely have a lot of studying to do!
  2.  
    I'll readily admit that it's been a while since I started into PHP, and even then I had a bit of a leg up because I had done some smaller C/C++ projects, and the languages are similar. However, there are a few things that I would recommend. First, dreamhost.com offers PHP 5, so take advantage of that. Learn PHP 5 and pretend like PHP 4 doesn't even exist. It will benefit you in the long run. As for tutorials, I honestly don't know of any real quality beginner tutorials. Instead, I would recommend that you get a book called "PHP 5 In Practice" by Elliott White III and Jonathan D. Eisenhamer. It covers all the basics and then some. Lastly, I would say that you should get a quality IDE, as it will help you as you learn. I prefer Zend Studio, and would recommend it wholeheartedly. It's not free (or even cheap for that matter), but it's good. If you need something free, you can look into PDT for Eclipse, but it's just not in the same league.

    To learn WordPress, I suggest that you subscribe to the wp-hackers mail list, and read it. Then, as you learn PHP you'll start to understand more and more of what they are doing.
    • CommentAuthorXSQueen
    • CommentTimeMar 27th 2008
     
    Unfortunately for a number of the apps I am required to use, the version of PHP that is supported is 4.x. What is the biggest difference between the two versions? Thank you BTW for the suggestion of the book. My main concern is (at least in the short term) to cobble a template together to use that matches the rest of the site (mainly patriotic colors of reds and blues) and work on functionality as more is required. As I am not getting paid for the site I am trying to use it as a learning experience...

    OK, just subscribed to the wp-hackers list - this may seem like a dumb question but is there a (relatively easy to access) way for me to customize my WP template myself via CSS etc, beyond just picking a "theme"? Thanks so much for all the info!!!
    •  
      CommentAuthorgnome
    • CommentTimeMar 27th 2008 edited by gnome on the 27th March 2008 at 16:40:05 EDT
     
    http://www.w3schools.com/php/
    http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/vaska20050722.php3
    http://www.php.net/manual/en/
    XSQueen: You could start with a known theme, or use this Wordpress Theme Generator or Joe's Themes Press. Themes Press is probably the better of the two for your project.
    • CommentAuthorXSQueen
    • CommentTimeMar 31st 2008
     
    Thanks - I actually managed to do an OK job of a "redo" of a current theme .. take a look: http://www.wid-mi.org/hitech/ but I will check those two sites out! DO you know of any WYSIWYG type app for php? It took me over half a day to modify this from the "greenish" template that WP has ... mostly because I had to make changes, preview, make changes, preview, etc etc ad nauseum ... LOL. Thanks again for those links - will try them out. BTW the Themes Press site is blocked here as a "SPAM URLS" site?!? Bizzare!!!! cry

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