The first step in learning WordPress development is to answer a few fundamental questions, one of which is "What language is WordPress built-in?" "Should I study PHP or JavaScript first?" is another prevalent question. We'll go through all you need to know about Word Press programmer programming languages.
"WordPress uses four primary code languages!" says the response to the question. WordPress uses HTML and CSS as declarative languages, as well as JavaScript and (particularly) PHP as programming languages.
We'll go through each of WordPress' technical languages here.
Take a look at a sample chapter that is already up and running.
Up and Running, our video "learn WordPress development" tutorial, has been revamped and extended to incorporate content from this article. It contains a video overview, Key Takeaways, a Summary Limerick, and a Quiz to evaluate your comprehension, much like the rest of the Up and Running chapters.
Have fun with the article! Up and Running is a great place to start if you want to learn more about WordPress development.
Let's have a look at the WordPress programming languages and see which ones we should learn first.
Important Points to Remember:
• In WordPress, you'll use four main languages: HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript.
• HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the web's primary language. It's more of a declarative language than a programming language, and it's also the most essential markup language on the web—basically, a text file with "markup" baked in to describe the precise nature of certain sections of text.
• CSS (Cascading StyleSheets) is a declarative language that allows you to style—or control the look of—HTML markup in a flexible, powerful, and repeatable fashion.
• The most crucial language to really comprehend WordPress is PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor). PHP is a web server programming language that runs on a computer that hosts a website. PHP may conduct a variety of dynamic actions and then output HTML to the client's browser. WordPress's basic language is PHP: The WordPress core, as well as virtually all WordPress themes and plugins, are predominantly written in PHP, making the statement "WordPress is written in PHP" the most accurate of all technical languages.
• JavaScript is a browser-based programming language that helps to make websites more dynamic and interactive. It's a strong language, but it's also the only one of the four that you don't need to know to get started with WordPress.
To develop with WordPress, you'll need to understand two forms of information: languages and ideas.
This chapter focuses on the first topic: the programming languages used in WordPress. HTML, CSS, PHP, and (optionally) JavaScript are the four languages.
You should be OK if you have a basic understanding of these languages—enough to read the text and examples below. If the information below perplexes you, you'll need to understand the fundamentals of that language before moving on to the WordPress programming portion that it entails. (For example, a plugin may be written without CSS, but a theme cannot.)
If you do need to learn one or more of these languages, the good news is that you're going to study something that will be the most practical and marketable item you can learn per hour invested!
HTML Developer: The Building Blocks of the Internet
HTML is the only aspect of the internet that is universal: every page you view on the internet that has material on it is marked up with HTML in some form.
HTML is more of a "markup" language than a "programming" language. HyperText Markup Language is the acronym for HyperText Markup Language. An HTML file is simply a large text document with "markup" included explaining the meaning of the different text elements.
This is a whole HTML page, although it's quite little.
Most components in HTML are contained between two separate tags, as you can see (the things inside the less-than and greater-than signs). The p>/p> tag is an example: everything between the p> and /p> tags is considered part of the paragraph, which is what p stands for.
Other components, such as meta charset... /> in our case, are self-closing. Another example is image tags, such as img />. Because items like photos don't accept text content within them, there's no "in between" opening and closing as there was with the p> tag.
Attributes may be assigned to elements. The lorem class was applied to the p> (paragraph) element in our example. We may use this class for a variety of tasks, the most significant of which is to instruct all items with that class how to appear using a single CSS rule.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets): Making HTML Look Good
Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, is the method by which practically all current websites are designed, or "given a distinctive look."
CSS is used to style HTML elements such as h1>s and HTML attributes such as the class of lorem we described previously. In any scenario, the syntax is quite consistent and looks somewhat like this:
.lorem {
color: #325050;
background: #fff;
font-family: 'Libre Baskerville', sans-serif;
font-size: .85rem;
}
We must first define which HTML element or elements the set of style rules applies to: in this example, only those elements with the lorem class are affected. (Classes in CSS begin with a period.)
Then we define a series of style properties within the curly brackets, as follows: the property, followed by a colon, the details of that property, and a semicolon. It's typical to add new lines following semicolons, although it's not required.
The difficult aspect of CSS is figuring out which attributes to employ to give your page the look you desire. We'll move on since whole volumes have been written on the subject.
WordPress's Engine in PHP: WordPress Developers
WordPress is handled by PHP on your web server. Regardless of what else is true about your WordPress site, it is built and put together using PHP on the server. As a result, it's the most crucial language to really comprehend WordPress.
PHP was created with the intention of making HTML page creation simpler. By default, it outputs the results of its activities as an HTML page, which the server subsequently displays to your site's users.
The fundamental logic and structures of PHP are crucial for WordPress themes.
There are a few key points to remember from this example:
• First and foremost, everything outside of PHP tags (?php and?>) is simply ordinary HTML. When the server executes the PHP file, it will simply show this information to the visitor, just as a standard HTML page would.
• In PHP, variables begin with a dollar symbol, such as $variable. You conduct arithmetic with them in the same way as you would in algebra. We set $variable to 4 and then added 1 to make it 5, which we kept as $math.
• The echo command is used inside a PHP block to "print stuff out to" the final HTML page. Both ordinary text strings (within the" characters) and PHP variables are concatenated (joined) in the two lines above. ?php echo 'One and '. 'two';?> is an example of concatenation using the. operator.
• PHP logic is in charge of any HTML included inside it. Because true is true, the HTML within the first PHP conditional statement, if (true), will appear on the page, but the HTML inside the second expression, if (false), will not (since false is not true).
There's a lot more to learn about PHP, but this will get you started.
Web Browser Programming using JavaScript: WordPress development
JavaScript was created to enable programmers to control how HTML pages behave after they've been loaded into the visitor's browser. If you click on anything and it vanishes, changes color, or slides out into something larger, that's most certainly JavaScript at work.
Without the use of JavaScript, a WordPress theme can function fine and operate smoothly. However, like with the rest of the web, you'll see an increasing amount of JavaScript in WordPress themes and the core of WordPress. This is because JavaScript enables considerably faster interactions and gives the impression that the website is really working for — and reacting to — the user.
If you're new to WordPress, you'll want to focus on understanding the other three languages, with HTML and CSS being the most important building blocks and PHP handling the intellectually intriguing heavy lifting. As a result, we won't spend much time on JavaScript in this book, and we suggest that you start by learning the other three languages thoroughly.
However, we'll offer a JavaScript sample that we use on WPShout for your education. Its aim is to define a minimum height for our left sidebar so that it doesn't "run into" our footer, and it makes use of JavaScript's super-popular and incredibly useful jQuery framework.
( function( $ ) {
// 1. Define variables
var navMenu = '.primary-navigation';
var pageContent = '.main-content';
var gap = parseInt( $( 'html' ).css( 'font-size' ), 10 ) * 2;
// 2. Define function to give min-height
function setPageMin() {
var height = $( navMenu ).height();
$( pageContent ).css( 'min-height', height + gap );
}
$( window ).load( function() {
// 3. Run function on first window load
setPageMin();
// 4. Run function every 120 MS when window resized
$( window ).resize( function() {
setTimeout( function() {
setPageMin();
}, 120);
});
});
})(jQuery);
Visit the whole post for additional information on this code and why we required it (and why CSS wouldn't suffice):
Hire Developer WordPress for the project: Should I study JavaScript or PHP first in order to create WordPress?
The subject of which language to learn first is a hot topic these days, particularly now that the new JavaScript-based WordPress editor (codenamed "Gutenberg" during development) is out. If you haven't already mastered HTML and CSS, start there. Those underlying declarative languages are used by both WordPress PHP and WordPress JavaScript.
We believe that after you've figured out how CSS and HTML operate (for most people, including me, they're essentially a single unified language nowadays), PHP is the next logical step. This is due to the fact that although you can create a WordPress theme or plugin without JavaScript, you will never be able to do it without PHP. Tags: woocommerce expert, best woocommerce expert, fast woocommerce solutions, woocommerce plugin, start fast, hire wordpress, full projects completed, easy design services, development project, hire developer developers, full experts hire wordpress, expert projects developers, build, programmers, work services developers, developers work services, developers project, hire developers services for website, build website project, experts developers services,
Furthermore, most things you'll need to perform in WordPress will be far more difficult if you're just mediocre at PHP but an expert at JavaScript. The powerful client-side interaction of the JavaScript programming language remains its greatest asset. However, WordPress servers are still PHP-only, so everything you attempt to do on the server will utilize PHP code to make changes.
WordPress development project: Why Is PHP Focused On Up And Running?
You'll note that subsequent chapters of Up and Running focus only on WordPress PHP levels (or APIs). This was a deliberate and thought-out decision that we still stand by today. Simply said, learning all of WordPress's PHP APIs allows you to accomplish most of the useful things you'll need to do for a client–create a new theme page template, obtain a different and better perspective of their material, improve server speed, or modify the theme's look.
Even with Gutenberg, WordPress's JavaScript APIs are still limited, unreliable, and poorly described. While there are certainly great things that are just difficult to do without JavaScript–most notably WordPress's block editor–PHP is much more reliable and powerful for a newbie developer to get their brain and arms around. After you've created a few WordPress themes or plugins on your own and discovered things you couldn't achieve with PHP, you'll realize it's time to learn JavaScript. As a consequence of your prior PHP-focused schooling, you'll be able to learn more quickly there.
You now have a better understanding of the languages that WordPress employs.
We've just scratched the surface of how these four languages function and how to successfully utilize them. But, now that you know what languages WordPress is written in, we hope you're ready to delve in further. Understanding these four languages and their applications is a wonderful place to start.
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