I’ve been having some serious WordPress funkiness going on, something to do with mySQL and stuff. Hardly what I want to talk about today but anyway, if you see an error message, it’s not me having a laugh, just so you know.

Every couple of months I jump into a new software package and gut it to try and make it sing for me. I’ve found that this is a way of keeping myself on the learning curve. Always pushing myself, because it’s incredibly easy to reach a comfort zone once you get working, and your brain turns to mush after a while. That’s something I realised early on in life, directly after leaving University, I knew that’s what I had to do to keep my brain sharp.

Last 4 or 5 months I’ve been concentrating on CSS and only dabbling in PHP. My Achilles heal though, is without a doubt my lack of PHP skills. In effect I have none. That however is going to change. I’m determined to change that. WordPress sites run on two languages, CSS to style it and PHP to run it. In order to get things done I can see where the PHP code is coming from, however for some reason I never thought that maybe it would be a good idea to actually try and make sense of the code, by learning the basics, I mean how hard can it possibly be?

Turns out, for me at least it’s not really that difficult, because I’m already very familiar with the concepts surrounding the coding language. I’m an Electrical and Electronic Engineer. I studied C and C++ at University, I know what a function is, an array, an integer, string and what all the operators mean. I never enjoyed it, because I never understood the joy of the C. I still don’t and don’t particularly want to try and find out, as the actual use, is probably lost on me. PHP however is a completely different story.

I scouted the internet and found these incredibly useful tutorials. Go to the tutorials by Melonfire.

By going through the first couple of tutorials, I assure you you’ll have a much better appreciation for how your site works. You’ll realise that things aren’t a black art any more. I feel soo much more comfortable hacking the plugins I’ve got running the site to actually work in the way I want them to. Which basically means a lot more work on my side. I guess it was inevitable for me to dive into PHP, if you’re feeling scared of diving into PHP, seriously I think you shouldn’t worry too much. The hardest step is the first one.

Not that I plan on writing any plugins any time soon, that’ll take at least another year ^_^.