I’ve been hand-coding HTML for 20+ years, and know basic CSS, but I want to transition over to a CMS, and I’ve heard nothing but good things about WordPress. I’ve purchased several WP books, but all seem directed toward getting a blog on-line, and that is NOT my interest – my interest is in general websites (which may have a blog, but probably not).
So, using Sitepoint resources, what are your recommendations for starting. FYI, with my 4-monitor development setup, I much prefer Ebooks to hard copy books, and in somewhat prefer Ebooks to on-line courses – book on left screen, editor in center, browser(s) on the right.
Learnable has some good resources on Wordpress (here: https://learnable.com/topics/wordpress). I’d strongly recommend that you learn some php as well as you’ll need it to be able to make any substantial changes to a theme.
Out of interest, what do you have on the fourth screen in your development setup?
I don’t know of any books. A good under-the-hood Wordpress development book would be handy, that’s for sure. As far as getting started, are you looking for information about using Wordpress, writing, publishing, basic administration, using Wordpress as a CMS? Or are you looking more for programming resources, developing themes and plugins and that sort of thing? I have a bunch of links in a file somewhere. I would have to look for it.
You don’t mention any experience with PHP. Maybe you are more interested in the HTML and CSS of Wordpress?
You may have heard good things about Wordpress, there are a few drawbacks as well:
Wordpress is big and bloated and without the use of a caching plugin consumes more than 100 times the server resources of a static HTML page request
Wordpress is prone to hacking if a security vulnerability is found meaning that anyone using Wordpress has to check for updates regularly, preferably every day.
I worked with three monitors for years, and icons kept getting in the way. So I purchased a used 15" monitor that swiveled to portrait aspect ratio and it is now my icon corral. It’s off to one side – only used a few times/day.
Don’t discount the “WordPress as a blog” articles. First step is to get WordPress setup and knowing it in & out from a user’s perspective - which section is where and how to adjust a setting, how to use the software. And then comes the part where you take a peek under the hood and start developing over WordPress.
