Labs are hands-on coding projects that you build along with Tonya as she explains the code, concepts, and thought processes behind it. You can use the labs to further your code knowledge or to use right in your projects. Each lab ties into the Docx to ensure you have the information you need.
Each lab is designed to further your understanding and mastery of code. You learn more about how to think about its construction, quality, maintainability, programmatic and logical thought, and problem-solving. While you may be building a specific thing, Tonya presents the why of it to make it adaptable far beyond that specific implementation, thereby giving you the means to make it your own, in any context.
Congratulations! You made it through your first coding lab. No, you did not write code…yet; however, this lab gave you the initial fundamentals to prepare you for the next step of writing some code. The next step is to setup your Sandbox website and local building and testing environment. There’s an article in the Help Center that identifies the components of such a setup. But I do invite you to setup your own. Links are below.
This is the second part of the Intent of Each Language. In this episode, you will learn about PHP and SQL. PHP runs on the web server to handle the web request, business logic, interacting with the database, making decisions, building web pages, and then sending HTML and resources out to the browser. SQL is the language of the database. The database holds and retains your site’s content, users, settings, etc. It holds the information and data that is necessary for a website. You use PHP to interact with it to run queries to fetch or save information (records) or […]
Let’s talk about the different languages of a WordPress website which includes: PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and SQL. Let’s talk about the intent of each of these languages. This is a big picture overview of the languages. HTML is the markup and structure of a web page. It runs in the browser. Its markup provides the meaning and intent of the content for other software, such as screen readers and web crawlers. It is not dependent upon CSS or JavaScript, as it can standalone. CSS is the styling language that adds all of the personality to your site for sighted […]
I use the word “intent” a lot, as I want you to think about and select what you are doing based upon the intent. In this episode, you will learn about the intent of a theme and plugin. Their intent is very different. Both of them are used to customize WordPress, which means in all websites that you build, you will build and configure solutions using both themes and plugins. A theme is a skin. It is used for presentational purposes. Its intent is to provide the HTML structural markup and styling. Themes give a website its personality and uniqueness. […]
In this episode, you will see how the code files become an actual web page. You will take a look at the View files in my Catfish (sticky footer toolbar) plugin and then see how they are rendered in the browser as actual HTML markup. You’ll learn more about the architecture and structure of code as well as a couple of instructions. Then you’ll see how it looks to the browser as you explore in Chrome. Instructions in this video include: include require
Let’s take what you learned in the last episode and look at some real code. You will want to go to my GitHub repository and look at this file. You will walk through the code as I show you how easy it is to read. Just ignore the syntax of it and read the names. The names tell you the intent and what is going on.
Let’s do a big picture overview of programming. What is programming? Why does syntax have to be so exact? Programming is about logical thought, that step-by-step details of how to do a task. You are capturing those details in a sequence such that the computer can then understand and execute it.
It’s time to pull all of the above episodes together and give you an overview of how the web page is rendered, meaning it is built and sent out to the browser. You will learn about the full round-trip including how PHP immediately renders out as the HTML is being built. You’ll also learn about how the browser requests the resources from the web server. Remember, these files are stored on the web server’s hard drive(s). The browser can cache these resources to save page loading on subsequent visits. But on the first visit, the browser has to ask the […]
A web server is just a computer. It has hard drives, RAM, and processor. It runs software. The website you developed is stored on its hard drive(s) along with WordPress. In this episode, let’s talk about how the files are copied from your computer to the web server. The intent is to help you visualize where the website files are so that you are able to follow along and grasp what the web server does and how it serves up files to the browser.
In this episode, you will learn about how the web address is converted into a query for WordPress to know what data to pull from the database and what files to call. Let’s talk about how rewrite patterns are stored in the database. WordPress will compare the web address to these stored patterns in order to determine what request it is.
Know the Code develops and empowers professional WordPress developers, like you. We help you to grow, innovate, and prosper.