Wordpress for dummies?

December 18, 2012 9:15 AM

Wordpress question: How difficult is it to learn wordpress for someone with no experience or knowledge of it? Assume that the student is around 18 years old and has basic computer literacy but has never heard of wordpress before. Thanks for your help!
posted by tessalations999 to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

The documentation is extensive and there is a globally active community of users who participate in user forums.

So, its difficulty depends entirely on the person's willingness to learn and persistence in the face of failure.
posted by dfriedman at 9:18 AM on December 18, 2012

It depends on what you want to do with Wordpress. If you're just using it to blog, most certainly.

If you want to create custom templates and muck around with the internals, it might help to have some experience with HTML, CSS, and PHP.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:19 AM on December 18, 2012

Response by poster: Are HTML, PHP and CSS hard to learn?
posted by tessalations999 at 9:21 AM on December 18, 2012

HTML, PHP and CSS, like Wordpress, have a global community of users and extensive documentation. So, the resources to learn are out there. What really matters is the persistence of the person trying to learn them.
posted by dfriedman at 9:26 AM on December 18, 2012 [1 favorite]

Learn to install, or learn to use?
posted by Lyn Never at 9:32 AM on December 18, 2012 [1 favorite]

I started with Wordpress just a little more than one year ago with a minimal knowledge base (HTML only), and now consider myself to be moderately proficient. HTML, CSS and PHP are the core proficiencies, some jQuery helps. dfriedman basically has it right on all counts.

One of the things that helped me a lot was starting off with a premium custom theme where you can see the theme developer provides consistent support to users. Find one you like on themeforest.net, spring for the $25 or so to purchase it, and try to manipulate it to suit your needs. Check the support forums to see if anyone is trying to do the same thing you are. After creating a site or two using this method, you could move on to a boilerplate theme to create something more from scratch. And if you get stuck, Google helps a TON. I pretty much picked up CSS and PHP using this method. It takes time and perseverance for sure, but it's definitely worth it and it can be a very lucrative skill!
posted by seldomfun at 9:35 AM on December 18, 2012

Are HTML, PHP and CSS hard to learn?

For some people yes, for some people, no. I've picked up HTML and some CSS because of my job, and am teaching myself more via some of the zillion free tutorials on the internets. It's really going to be a matter of him finding the combination of things that makes it easiest for him to learn it. For some people, that will be "Jump in the deep end and go!" and for others it's going to be "Gimme those water wings for now."

I've chosen the water wings route in part because I've got limited time and energy for futzing around reinventing wheels that other people have perfected, but that's not the ideal for everyone.
posted by rtha at 9:44 AM on December 18, 2012

Best answer: There's a big difference between "learning to use WordPress" (the software) and "learning to develop websites with WordPress". Furthermore, the latter skill set can vary widely, too.

Learning to use WordPress is fairly straightforward. Register for a blog on wordpress.com and familiarize yourself with the administrative interface. In particular learn the difference between posts and pages, categories, etc.

At it's most basic level, learning to develop websites with WordPress could mean installing premade themes and plugins and entering content. This is trivially easy to learn if your webhost provides automatic installs of WordPress. WordPress is a powerful system, even on this level, and you can do a lot of things without ever touching a line of markup or code.

You could take it further and learn to modify existing themes with some basic understanding of xhtml/css. This allows you to do stuff like change fonts and colors, move some elements around, etc. The more xhtml/css skills you have, the more you can effect changes.

From there, one could learn some php and start to customize the functionality.

Finally, you could start coding custom themes and plugins on your own. This requires years of experience and lots of specific knowledge.

There's a lot more subtlety in these levels, of course, but maybe this basic breakdown will help give you a perpective on what it takes to "learn WordPress".

Good luck! WordPress is awesome!
posted by maniactown at 10:02 AM on December 18, 2012 [2 favorites]