Interested in finding out about how I learn HTML, CSS and PHP? Let me share with you some of my tricks.
Confession
I am self taught and have not completed a college or university course in programming.
History of how I got involved with Word Press and fell in love with Thesis Theme
- I only learnt very basic ‘Pascal’ and ‘C Basic’ in the last year of school when “Computing” classes started. Mostly “go to” loops and “if then” statements. This was back in 1987, my final year of high school in Australia, back in the days of 5 1/2 inch floppy disks.
- I got onto the Internet for the first time as part of my university studies in 1992 and got the Internet on at home for the first time in 1999. It wasn’t until late 2007 that I really started considering starting my own website - just to learn how to do it and later to make some extra pocket-money.
- In late 2008, my husband and I dabbled in a free Word Press site and after a few months and many hours of research, realised that we had to have a privately hosted site. We registered our first domain name and grabbed some hosting with WebCity in Australia.
- After several weeks of trying to work out what free theme we wanted to use, we decided on Options by Justin Tadlock. Since then, Options (his first Word Press attempt that I know about) morphed into other free themes. The problem was customizing the theme to make your site look unique. With Tadlock’s themes (and many other free themes) you have to:
- really know what you are doing with code
- modify many different files – and do it again every time you upgrade the theme files and/or Word Press
- code a child theme yourself to add on many things we take for granted using tick boxes in Thesis Theme
- pay $25USD each and every year for membership to the Theme Club for access to support forums and tutorials. I’d prefer to pay for Thesis Theme once for $87USD and have lifetime access to support, tutorials, upgrades, future theme releases and tick-box customizing without playing with the code.
- pay for somebody to code your site for you – which defeats the purpose of a free Word Press theme!
- While this was and still is a great theme, I couldn’t do what I wanted and did not understand coding to any great extent. I spent hours customizing only to find that what I wanted couldn’t be done.
- So I went exploring, found Thesis Theme and instantly fell in love with it. I could have any look I wanted by just surfing the Thesis Forum, checking out tutorials offered up by the prolifically helpful and large Thesis Community (my site is one of these helpful sites) and exploring the back-end of other Thesis sites that I admired for their look or functionality.
- And so, with this realisation, I started peeking at other sites’ back-ends. Sounds a bit rude but is exactly what the helpful guys in the Thesis Forum were doing to help diagnose code problems. I thought, “I can do that!”
- By knowing the structure of Thesis Theme files, you can guessimate what the url is of files, images, etc. I know for example that most Thesis sites will have their custom.css file - the magical file that allows a site to look different to other Thesis sites – at the path http://siteurl.com/wp-content/themes/thesis/custom/custom.css
I have 5 main “ways and means” to learn HTML, PHP and CSS
To find out more, read 5 Sneaky Ways and Means To Hack A WordPress Site.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hey I was actually looking for the ways to hack the wordpress site which is already created.
hope u let me know the details regarding the above mentioned request.
Thank you.
Let me be clear that the hacking I’m talking about is reverse engineering how something is done so that I can recreate it. For example, when I like a design I see, figuring out how to replicate parts of it by viewing its code, working out how something is done, then taking the techniques to adapt for my own purposes. I do not mean the kind that results in malicious damage.