One of the biggest challenges that WordPress newbies face is mastering the art of PHP. You don’t have know anything about PHP to get your WordPress site up and running, but you’d be surprised how much more you can accomplish if you know your PHP. Now, if you have never programmed in your life, picking up PHP may seem very difficult. After all, not only you are going to have to figure out how to program in PHP, you are going to have to learn how to work with mySQL and Apache.
Simply PHP is a training course that is designed for those who are new to WordPress but want to learn enough PHP to be dangerous. You don’t have to be the best PHP programmer to customize your WordPress pages or even tweak your existing plug-ins. You just have to pick and choose your spots — be a PHP hacker if you will. The same can be said about mySQL and Apache. Simply PHP is designed specifically for PHP beginners and teaches you how to get things done without subjecting you thousands of pages of LAMP theory.
Simply PHP shows you how to:
- personalize your WordPress pages
- set up your own auto-responder
- optimize your .htaccess file for your WordPress site
- use Javascript on your blog to enhance its functionality
- code simple games and online tools (awesome for link-baits)
- set up cron jobs on your server
- work with mySQL and myPHPadmin to change and backup your DBs
The fun thing about Simply PHP is that you don’t have to be a super geek to learn what you need to start customizing your WordPress blog. I know a lot of folks rather hire someone on rentacoder.com to do the job for them, but you shouldn’t really hire someone to install a plug-in on your WordPress blog. You are also provided with all kinds of scripts and examples that you can just grab and plug-in to your WordPress blog.
Verdict: B+. I found Simply PHP to be a very useful course for folks who are new to the world of PHP and WordPress. You are going to learn everything you need to know to customize your WordPress and work with databases. This course is not going to make you a PHP guru, and that’s a big plus. Your goal shouldn’t be to become a programmer but rather do what you do best. By learning the basics of PHP, you can things done faster than before without having to hire anyone to do the simplest things for you. Who wouldn’t like that?