Wordpress and the PHP beginner.

I would say no. Mainly because you won't be working with PHP as much as you think, unless you want to edit/create plugins for Wordpress. I would definitely recommend a learning by creating. The only way I have been able to "understand" PHP is either by creating or reading.

I wish that Team Treehouse focused more on PHP, seeing as it is more widely used than Ruby and will stay a standard in the server-side scripting field.

I would definitely not recommend learning a framework though. Check out the Treehouse tutorial here on Team Treehouse, maybe that will give you a good start.

Hey Matthew,

I agree with Aaron. I've spoken at a number of WordCamps and met with a lot of people who build WordPress sites. You can get pretty far with WordPress without writing much PHP. (It still surprises me when I talk to seasoned WordPress developers who don't even understand the basics of foreach loops.) I think that's a great thing about WordPress, as well as other more-general frameworks: they do a lot of heavy-lifting for you. The drawback is that you don't learn how to do that heavy-lifting yourself.

If you are looking to add server-side technology to your resume, I think it's helpful to build some simple things from scratch, end-to-end without a framework. This will give you a good a solid grasp of how web browsers, web pages, web servers, and databases all work together. I wouldn't shy away from frameworks altogether, though. Once you grasp the basics, they can give you a lot of lift. (One example: I've built sites for clients on top of frameworks that the client couldn't have afforded to pay me to build from scratch.)

Ditto the above. I tired learning PHP by breaking down other pages and trying to understand what was going on. However I didn't really truly grasp it until I looked at a blank notepad page, determined what it was that I wanted to build, and then started to look up how to use PHP to do exactly what I wanted and build it from ex nihilo.

PHP is helpful if you want to create great WordPress themes from scratch, but I think great Wordpress sites are built more from great CSS than anything else.

If you don't already know PHP, you won't really learn it by working with WordPress.

But if you do already know PHP, you can do some really amazing things with WordPress. I've built a number of client sites with custom themes and plugins, integrating with social services to schedule automatic tweets and Facebook updates, perform location-based with latitude and longitude, integrate with credit card processors, send data to fancy ERP systems, and a lot more. I've built site for clients who pay over $100,000 for custom development on WordPress; to do that, you're going to have to write a lot of PHP. If you already know PHP, WordPress is a great platform to build on top of.

Personally I chose not to start with Wordpress when starting to learn PHP. The main reason was that the code base was at the time messy. The OOP principles for large scale projects don't exist in Wordpress natively. I forget the actual name for the structure they use but I do know its not MVC which is about the cleanest way I know to use PHP

I'd say no as well, but It's my first exposure to php for the most part, it's like the concept of jQuery, you're using a whole different library and mindset even if you're coding in javascript.

It's all been mostly said here, but learn how to build a simple CMS from scratch in PHP and then when you use Wordpress in future you'll find it a piece of cake - plus you'll be able to hack and extend it far beyond what comes 'out of the box' as it were.

Write your own WordPress in PHP...that will certainly build your PHP skills in a hurry. Start out with a basic blog functionality and once you have that down you can expand on different features. This should teach you the basics about PHP, objects, models, database connections, and more. Authentication and session handling will probably take you the longest to wrap your head around and implement correctly.

Wow - all really great tips. It would be interesting if Team Treehouse were to create a course through what's been said (if they have the bandwidth to create the courses) - more as a primer for PHP that would parlay into Wordpress or just getting our toes wet in PHP.

Hey Will,

I'm developing the new set of PHP tutorials right now: Build A Simple PHP Application. They are meant to be a primer for PHP. We're building a simple ecommerce store, but I've strategically picked the features to build for that store so that the tutorials will cover the basics of server-side programming and PHP.

I'm about one-third of the way through developing the tutorials now. I'll definitely talk with Zac (he's developing the WordPress courses) to make sure they support each other: thanks for the suggestion!