Patrik

I became proficient with PHP long before I started building WordPress sites, and in my opinion, WP isn’t a great place to begin to learning PHP. No doubt it’s a great tool for building blogs and non-enterprise websites, but it’s a poor demonstration of PHPs object-oriented capabilities, and its going to make learning PHP more confusing than it has to be. WordPress uses LOTS of globals to automagically track array indices and communicate between modules, which is going to make your head spin when you start to learn the internals of WordPress. The developers utilize many of these non-standard (and often obscure) programming conventions in an attempt to simplify the coding work for theme developers… which is smart since most theme developers aren’t programmers. However, if you are serious about learning the ins-and-outs of WordPress, even if you don’t intend to become a PHP guru, you would be best served by completing one of the online courses like the one you mentioned. It will give you a foundation in good programming practices, and that will help you to navigate the WordPress internals and understand why they built it the way they did. You should also start building your own little web apps. I learned PHP by building simple tools to track my appointments and finances, and every time I ran into a wall, I would just do some research or post to a forum. Because I was actually using the answers and not just reading them, the information stuck in my head.

Hope this helps! Sorry if you’ve passed this point months ago 😀