Is WordPress Cheating?
The feeling of creating something that is entirely your own handiwork is one of those experiences that fills the new web developers of the world with the same kind of pride reserved for the time you realise you’re riding your bike by yourself, and your parents let go several yards back.
Is the feeling of accomplishment marred by building a site using something that already exists though?
There are a lot of tools at your disposal as a foundation for a new website.
Rob teaches how to use two of the most commonly used foundations available in his complete web development course — WordPress and Bootstrap.
WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS), which allows you to design a site around ready-made themes and plugins, and provides a back-end control panel to easily add new posts and pages. It’s also the most commonly used tool in the world used to build websites, being behind an estimated 24.1% of all websites online.
Bootstrap is framework offered by Twitter that defines specific element types and how to display them. You can then create a website by adding elements that you assign as having a specific type, allowing Bootstrap’s pre-made libraries to do all the formatting for you, leaving a sleek, consistent, and (unless you make a special effort otherwise) responsive site.
If you’ve spent good hours, days, weeks and months perfecting your HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP and MySQL skills though, why would you then want to surrender them to a mass-use CMS or framework?
What would be the point in making the effort to learn the fundamentals if you can fall back on a framework to do it for you?
This is a question that I’ve seen asked a few times, and though it’s an understandable question to ask, it’s not really the correct question to ask.
Paninis & PHP: Three Challenges I Faced In My First Dev Project
I’ve tried to fight it over the years, but there’s no use in denying it anymore. My name’s Andy and I am a web geek.
Since February this year, I’ve worked with Rob at Eco Web Hosting to help him find more time to work with on his Udemy courses. If you’re an Eco Web Hosting customer, you may have seen my name before.
If not, hello!
I didn’t come to The Complete Web Developer Course as a complete beginner to web development.
I’d made a few static HTML sites in my late teens and spent the last couple of years working in the hosting industry, though until now, my focus had been mostly on supporting and maintaining the platforms, rather than development on them.
My last job meant I needed to know how to read PHP to an extent, but that extent was the writing of
<?php phpinfo(); ?>(this creates a diagnostic PHP page that lets you check various limits and settings in PHP).I’d never developed a project of my own in PHP though.
Rob had always managed Eco Web Hosting through the customer control panel and directly in the back end database, but there’s only so long a business can grow without an admin system to manage all the data.
It was time for a CRM. Here’s what I’ve learnt from my challenges so far.
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