Quantumstate, I see that you said:
Saying that ‘PHP is code and CSS is styling’, is trying to make me out as a fool, given what you know of the significant changes I’ve made so far. Thank you very much for that. That is the attitude of a nasty person. But I won’t return the favor, I’ll try and educate you about the conveyance of information.
From:
Several n00b Questions, and a Suggestion
From reading the forum post linked above, it appears that juggledad was extremely thorough, providing point-by-point explanations for each of your questions. He went, in my opinion, above and beyond through and through.
It did, however, become clear you expressed little to no understanding regarding the process of customizing a WordPress theme. As you admitted, you’d just started learning CSS, etc. However, it appears you had no understanding for what css and php are, how they interact, or why they are different and what their purpose is for.
php is the language used to code the theme template pages themselves. That’s the raw code telling WordPress how to display the structure of the pages themselves – such as where to place different things on each page.
css is the language used to code the appearance of the web pages, telling the php code how to render the information on the pages.
For example, the theme’s php code tells where your information will appear on the page – sidebar on the right, menu at the top, links on the bottom, etc.
On the other hand, the theme’s css code tells what your information will look like on the page – making the text content justified, the background a particular color or image, to make buttons change color when you hover over them, etc.
Lastly, there was one very important thing that juggledad failed to mention when he said this:
If you have changed anything in the theme files, those changes will be wiped out during an upgrade.
What he didn’t mention is that you should always use a child theme with any WordPress theme. When you use a child theme, what you’re doing is overriding the default php and css code with your own while making no changes whatsoever to the original theme itself. That way, when the main theme is updated, your modifications will remain intact and not wipeout your changes. When an update for a theme is performed, it does, as juggledad said, eliminate all your changes.
Again, I do hope you don’t take offense at this, because I’m trying very much to help.
A final thought in general, I’ve always been amazed at how many people download themes from here only to spend hours, days and months trying to change things. This means you really didn’t like the theme in the first place if all you planned to do was radically change it from the way it was originally. I’m guilty of this all too often myself too. 🙂
Happy WordPressing!
-Len
