[ad_1]
I’ll start by saying that I know HTML and CSS pretty well, and a little JS, and have made my own photography portfolio website and another website with it. I create and manage websites for my small town city government and I’d like to keep using WordPress, as I know it can be a powerful tool but I feel that Elementor is holding me back.
I initially used it to get websites up and running quickly, but over time Elementor has become increasingly harder for me to optimize for our use cases. I’d like to apply my other skills and am open to learning new skills so my question is this: where do I start? Do you have any guides that you recommend?
[ad_2]
Are you looking for a builder type solution?
Bricks Builder or Oxygen Builder might be appropriate.
If you’re looking for something more builder like, maybe Breakdance.
How’s your PHP and custom theme development knowledge? I’d say that’s where you’d want to focus. Even if you choose to use a framework, custom theme dev knowledge is incredibly valuable.
Kadence Pro is worth looking into.
What’s holding you back is your back-end (PHP) and WordPress core understanding.
Go read the “developer handbook”, theme development guide, and plugin development guide. That will lead you to questions for you to answer in your investigations as you go.
Read the chapters, sections, titles and note what “can” and “should” be handled by WordPress, then investigate each of the details as you feel they fit in.
I would HIGHLY recommend you bounce ideas off chat-gpt while you learn to ask basic questions and guide/mentor you into a fuller understanding of a standard and core development ecosystem.
Working with a basic custom theme, custom post types and fields, templates, and a nice custom front end, will give you a WAY more enjoyable development environment.
Also, do yourself a favour and investigate the WP official docker image and wp-cli for your dev workflows. Thank me later 👍
Edit: links
– [Codex](https://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page)
– [Theme handbook](https://developer.wordpress.org/themes/)
– [Plugin handbook](https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/)
Carbon Fields.
If you just want to move away from the ugly E the easiest transition is going to be to Breakdance. It’s back-and editing but the UI is very similar devs actually care about performance and security.
You can, of course, use most builders with most themes. Including custom coded themes. If you want a great introduction look for the classic WordPress coding course on Udemy.
Learn how to build a WordPress custom, then explore ACF fields to scale WordPress and shape it to fit most all client needs. PHP/JS/HTML/CSS
F Elementor I used some of the best and some of the worst frameworks/builders and Elementor is pretty restrictive if you don’t fully understand UI/UX and how to customize it much further to get the desired result. Grasping both is always helpful I think to be versatile in this field.