Do I need to know php to customize wordpress themes?

Absolutely. Wordpress is written in php.

You'll be severely limited if you don't have at least a basic understanding of PHP. Even if you don't know how to write it well yet, if you can at least read the PHP and get a good idea what that code is doing, you should be able to do some stuff.

Hey Nick!

I think that you can actually do quite a bit of customizing a theme without knowing PHP.

I would recommend watching Randy Hoyt's first PHP video so you can see what the basic opening and closing PHP tags look like. If you don't edit anything inside of these PHP blocks you should still be able to modify the HTML markup quite a bit.

Once you want to start customizing the actual content that appears on pages or places on the site, you will need to know PHP.

WooThemes has particularly advanced and complex themes. In order to find a lot of the markup, you will need to be able to read PHP functions to locate the correct file to edit. It's an important note that a huge range of theme complexity exists on the market and you will find some themes super easy to edit and other ones incredibly complex.

I fully support using WordPress in order to learn PHP because you can learn a little bit at a time and progressively do more and more customizations.

Thanks for your expertise, the members contributing to this forum are phenomenal.