Tag Archives: PHP

PHP Hasn’t Sent Me Through A Loop, Yet

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I say this often, and then regret my words days later, but I did not find this very difficult. PHP does not seem as bad as JavaScript and reminds me a lot of jQuery. Like these two languages, PHP seems easy to use  in the Codecademy setting. Again, like with jQuery and JavaScript lessons, putting the pieces together to create something more complex might be difficult. I imagine having the same issue, struggling to know where to start and how to put the many these we are learning together.

Now for some reason the jQuery and PHP lessons have been extremely buggy. It if had not been for the Q&A I would not have finished the lessons. This set did not have the same impending update warning like jQuery, so the bugs were unexpected and unexplained. I did, however, have to reload the page a few times to make the code work. Even after writing mine identically to the example or the hint, it would not work. Hopefully by next year, or the next time you are teaching this class, they will fix the bugs and cause their students less anxiety with unnecessary error messages. I also hope they add the button that gives the code so that we can see it and try to do it ourselves.

I did do something different this time around. I got the idea from the class forum while we all struggled with jQuery and the slideshow. Instead of just doing the lessons and hoping to remember them later, I began copying the notes and the correct code so I can reference it later. I’m not sure why it has taken so long to do this and I imagine the last few assignments could have been significantly easier if I had.  They will be great as a reference moving forward.

WordPress, PHP, You Name It

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Before starting to read the readings about WordPress, I was excited about the upcoming final assignment. I have some experience using WordPress in journalism classes at Wake Forest where I did my undergrad, but I haven’t used it to make something of personal significance. Moreover, it’s comforting to know that we’re not building everything from the ground up, but working off of templates that have been created. I think this will help with making the site more dynamic in nature and focusing on using code to customize the site to fit the subject matter. Not to mention, it takes some of the pressure off of having to think about both the big picture of a site and on a granular level with the functionality. WordPress will make it manageable to be able to do both.

Something that stuck out to me when completing the reading (that are now due the following week), that I think is important is: “Good themes improve engagement with your website’s content in addition to being beautiful.” At the end of the day, while we’re making this website for ourselves, we have to continuously keep the user in mind and ensure that they have a pleasant user experience. Otherwise, no one will want to visit our site. With that being said, in order to do this, I will have to work on both the front and backend of the site to be able to deliver a good site.

It was very helpful to go through each of the readings. It broke down, step by step, what we will have to do, including the taxonomy and naming of the folders. The guides, in particular the Child Themes guide, will be very helpful as we start creating our WordPress sites.

Other important information I noted:

  • WordPress debugging tool
  • Plugin: controls the behaviors of the feature
    • made up of PHP, CSS and JavaScript
    • builds additional functionality to what WordPress themes can already do
  • Theme: controls the presentation of the content
  • Development environment: develop the WordPress environment locally on your server (why we downloaded MAMP) and supplement this with a text editor like sublime or atom.

Surprisingly, I really enjoyed the PHP Codecademy lessons. It made sense. I didn’t feel as lost when I was writing out the code because I already understood variables, strings, functions, etc. I hope to be able to work more in PHP and continue developing those skills because it makes more sense.

PHP is HTML with flair

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I am a bit intrigued that PHP is its own language rather than just part of the HTML syntax. I like that the PHP is self-closing and makes it easy to find and, hopefully, easy to work with the code. It makes me chuckle that the PHP language started because a coder wanted to write some code for his own webpage, and it grew into an incredibly popular language used by so many people. It just epitomizes the way that coders live and work.

This week seems to have less concepts to learn and more syntax to learn. I am glad, because I have been feeling like we are constantly building upon what we have already learned, but we usually only did the things we just learned once or twice. Now that we are doing things that allow us to practice using the earlier concepts, I am feeling more confident with the earlier material. I think this is because I learn by repetition and doing something just once or twice isn’t enough to make me confident in the practice.

I’m not sure if this is because it is the summer semester or just the material, but I felt that the first few weeks were a firestorm of new information, and the next few weeks will be figuring out what information was vital and we need to get proficient in.