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Gabriel Ward
20,222 PointsUsing frameworks vs starting from scratch.
I'm working through the Wordpress Development track, and well into the Front End Development track.
I'm finding myself wondering how much coding from scratch professional web designers/developers do, in terms of html and css for the basic layouts of websites. Do they mostly do the coding for this from scratch? Or are they likely to use plugins and frameworks?
Just as an example, the theme development course in the wordpress track starts with html and css templates. Would I need to write these from scratch if I wanted to make my own theme? Or could I use a framework?
Any opinion/advice/discussion is greatly appreciated :)
2 Answers
Navid Mirzaie Milani
6,274 Pointsmy advice would be to dive in html / css / javascript without any framework yet and try to discover the languages yourself first. Learning the base is very important because those frameworks most often use some advanced techniques to make things done and to understand those frameworks well knowing the base is good.
I would even advice you to leave wordpress alone and start making your website plain html / css and javascript and after that focus on wordpress. Specially wordpress the way they have setup their front-end is not easy to follow if you're a beginner.
Goodluck!
Stephen Van Delinder
21,457 PointsYou need to know HTML and CSS well enough to read and manipulate the code, that's for sure. In answer to your question though, most developers will use some framework and build custom additions from there. I highly recommend you check out the bootstrap framework if you are starting out. http://getbootstrap.com/ For example: You should understand how a grid system works for page layout, and know how to incorporate it, but it would be redundant to sit down and code out something thats already available. A lot of front end coding will be rearranging and refactoring code from sites that you or your client really like. However, no framework, template, or plugin will serve as a substitute for understanding code.
Hope this helps.