Working in a company on multiple WordPress sites for years and would like to learn something new, both to provide new ideas and develop myself a bit.
53 years (yes very) old, atm I’m merely installing WP on servers over cpanel and filling the content to WP sites, installing and setting up 3rd party themes and plugins and that’s basically it. My knowledge of Web 1.0 when I made sites in the 90s by typing html code in notepad is now useless and today I feel like I’m falling behind big time.
Where should someone at 50+ “go” from here?
I’d love to dive into making my own plugins (any hints, online education and tutorials?) but am open to your thoughts. Or should I just forget it and do what I do and be happy about it. I’ll appreciate any sincere reply 🙂
Tnx!
Hope it’s not considered as some type of taboo but I really recommend chatGPT if you are familiar with it.
My main stack is react/svelte combined with next/svelteKit or .Net.
I’m familiar with PHP, but when I need to create plugin I always start with some chat with good old AI, and it learned me a lot.
You should definitely not give up on that dream, coding can be incredibly empowering and I’ve had plenty of students in various age groups that have picked up programing with no prior experience with it before.
Codecademy has pretty easy to follow courses on PHP which is a good start.
WP has also adapted a lot of React for the gutenberg/block editor which you might see later as you develop your skills.
However I’d recommend you stick with PHP (for now) and then when you feel you have a ok grasp at that [wordpress.org](http://wordpress.org) has lots of tutorials on building themes and plugins.
YouTube is also a good source when it comes to educational content.
I’d say “try Laravel”.
Brush up on your HTML, CSS, JS, and PHP skills. If you’ve mostly been working with third-party themes, you’ve missed a lot. All frontend development will involve knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JS, so take some online courses specifically on these topics. HTML and CSS should be relatively easy to refresh, but make sure to read up on and truly understand flexbox and grid if you’re not familiar with them. They are the cornerstones of modern frontend layouts and are used in every frontend library or base development.
Once you’ve caught up on what’s new in HTML and CSS, you need to determine the path you want to take, and there are many. I’ll focus on WordPress (WP) as the path. Become familiar with modern Full Site Editing (FSE) WP and build one or two basic themes (learning about theme.json, patterns, and templates). That will get you pretty far with modern WP. When you’re ready to get more advanced, it’s time to start learning the basics of modern JS, React, and TypeScript. With this knowledge, you can start building your own blocks and features for WP. For most basic blocks, WP has some command line scaffolding tools that make simple block development pretty straightforward, but there is a learning curve. There will be a learning curve with all of these JS tools/libraries.
If you’re feeling really rusty, you might even want to start by setting up Local by Flywheel for easy local development. Then, look into using a different IDE, such as VS Code, Sublime, and many others. VS Code seems to be one of the most used these days.
Finally, JS is where a lot of jobs are and a lot of frontend is happening. So, getting familiar with modern javascript is definitely something you should be looking into no matter your path… Unless you prefer to stick with backend only. There is React, Vue + Laravel, and countless others, but those two seem to be pretty popular on the job boards.
Watch this Playlist, build alongside this guy and grasp the fundamentals of a plugin.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLriKzYyLb28kR_CPMz8uierDWC2y3znI2&feature=shared
I’ve done it (m55) and build plugins on the daily that have subscription patlyment models
I’m 40 and I’m in pretty much the same situation, years of WordPress managing but no real knowledge beyond html and css. It was too late for me when I realized I was good for coding and should’ve gone that way back in college so all my life I’ve had this idea of learning advanced PHP and js, right now I can read both just enough to find errors or malke sense of the code chatgpt generate when I ask for something but I can’t really develop anything.
Created my first website in MS Frontpage (my first bit of code on a Commodore 64!)… I am also ‘so old…’
As another commenter mentioned – my first advice is ChatGpt. As a kid my learning came from books. Later on it came from fellow geeks. Then it came from web-searches in the days of Dogpile and AskJeeves. Now it comes from ChatGpt.
I’m not really certain where it’s going – but AI is going to take some share of web development – probably front-end. So it could be seen as ‘stealing our jobs’. On the other hand, it’s also the best teacher I’ve ever had – infinitely patient, giving clear answers, can be asked the same question 20 times without getting cross, doesn’t care that I’m naked, and has a large part of human knowledge to call on!
I’m kidding of course, I’m wearing sandals.
Anyway – as one door closes, so CGpt is opening another and making it much easier for people to learn code – or just have gpt write it. Watch the trends, follow where GPT is going, because our workable space will be the gaps that remain – and ironically gpt itself may help us inhabit them.
I’m 44 myself and have been in and out of web development for the past 25 years. I recently discovered webflow and have been getting more into building sites with no code.
I recently took the leap to Astro using WP headless as backend. I think it’s the most soft learning curve for someone like you to get into node / JS while building on existing skills. At least it was for me.
Good luck!