Growing Through WordPress

Having coded on visual studio for quite a while an older fellow of mine got me more interested in web and developing for web by saying “developing for a desktop is not as fun and as challenging as developing for web, things can get very boring soon on desktop, on web you have more problems to solve and more things to learn” This was all enough to get me interested in programming for web. With a bit of Yahooing ( googling was not really common or even known back then) I learned about the simplest ui factors of web, CSS and HTML, so thought CSS is the first thing I would like to learn. You know I love colors, colors are attractive after all, specially compared to all the skeleton looking HTML which was never fun enough for me to learn about its font and color attributes.

CSS and the appetite to learn more got me to this lovely blog of Chris Coyier, namely css-tricks.com. Man you could find a lot in there and most interesting was the videos he did to teach new stuff every week or so. There was this converting photoshop mockup videos and designing for WordPress videos by him that brought me in touch with WordPress. Promise you won’t laugh and I will reveal a secret; before watching these WordPress templating video I was always mistaking WordPress logo for of that of Volkswagen, and was always really confused about the sentences on wordpress.org homepage and how they could relate to Volkswagen. Add to this my bad English, yea my English was even worse than what you see now in those days.

I was already making some little money developing in vb, but the exposure to WordPress brought an even more fun and well in demand skill-to-be to my plate. I was learning more and more about WordPress here and there, getting a few clients to create some kind of online catalogues for them while trying to bring a CMS out of this blogging platform. Back then without all the fancy custom post types and custom taxonomies and all the rest that came with them was not an easy thing to treat WordPress as a CMS.

Expanding to the web

WordPress was great company for the situation of those days. I was a freshman university student with very little computer science education, almost no money to buy extracurricular courses but very eager to be independent and learn things on my own with the help of not-so-fast internet of those days. jQuery was just around as well and I was making JavaScript more fun and easy. Remember, JavaScript demand of those days was hardly anything other than manipulating the DOM, so the ease and fun of WordPress and the life-saver jQuery was empowering me to get clients and make them happy. Honestly I learned WordPress before even learning PHP, HTML, CSS, a bit of jQuery and some knowledge about WordPress was just enough for me to create websites, mostly in the online-catalogue realm.

In those days Joomla and Drupal were much more advanced than WordPress since WordPress hadn’t added the more advanced features we have today.

So as I was learning more about WordPress, Web, and PHP, WordPress was getting bigger and more advanced.

Perfect timing right? It was small when I had little knowledge but was getting bigger and more advanced while I was educating myself more about WordPress.

How WordPress makes things easy keeps me using it and developing for it even after  good experience with a couple of other PHP and JavaScript frameworks.  This is why after developing with some other PHP frameworks I was thrilled to receive an email from WPMUDEV telling me about their job vacancy for WordPress plugin developer, so I applied for this position with them and was lucky enough to get back to work with this lovely and fun tool after a while being away from it.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.