After breezing through this weeks Codecademy PHP lessons, I thought I was well on my way to building my own site. Although we didn’t seem to learn anything too complicated, and I’m not quite sure how I will be practically using arrays and loops yet (I’m not going to create all of a 500 word post by typing “This”, “is”, “my”, “post”, and then echoing a loop, and I’m not going to spend too much time counting to 100 by 10s), the concepts and syntax were simple enough to follow.  Much of it had the same JavaScript syntax; always include semicolons, use brackets or curly brackets to tell the computer what to actually do or print out.

Reading through the codex for WordPress, however, I started to come across some foreign concepts and potential problems that I didn’t realize could happen. While child themes make a lot of sense (I always wondered how the site would be able to update and stay compatible with WordPress without breaking completely), as well as plug-ins to save time, and I realized that different post types could be formatted differently, I never thought there could be so many naming conflicts and additional things to worry about like hooks. I’m not sure what hooks are, or what they are supposed to do, but if I’m making a custom post template, WordPress assumes I already know what they are and offers me the best one to use.

It also bothered me that not all themes did not support all post formats, which I thought would be a benefit of using WordPress. I guess this means that some posts are just more complicated than others and that some themes are too simple, but I assumed that this all could be modified to work in some way. I guess I still have a lot to learn about the way WordPress’s templates, themes, infrastructure, and modification coding all work together.