Kenny flatters me (though I think have better hair than Trump) asking this:
If I wanted to be a millionaire, I’d ask Donald Trump, which is why I’m asking you…What would you recommend as a learning path or in specific resources to gain foundational knowledge and expertise in WP/ hosting? Knowing what you know now and if you had to start from the beginning today, what would you do? Thank you.
The same place I did when I started.
I would download WordPress, install it, and use it every day for a while. Understanding how to use the product tells you more about how it works than almost anything else. All problems you have will, eventually be traced back down to code if that’s how your inclined, or documentation, or just plain understanding.
See, how I got good at WordPress was because I used it, I had problems, and I decided to learn how to fix it instead of relying on the kindness of strangers. If I had to do it all over again, I’d do it the same way because it let me learn at my own pace and in my own way. WordPress was a place where I could (and still can) sit and study how and why things work, ask questions, get answers, and learn from them.
How did I learn about hosting? Same way. I had problems and I asked my host. “This code I want to use says it needs PHP 5 and my server is PHP 4. How do I change that?” It was really that simple. They moved me to a new server for PHP 5 and I looked up why that was necessary. That was how I learned what a nightmare server upgrades are and why they’re so complex.
The secret to it all is I never said “It should be easy to…”
Weird secret, right? Well, how many times have you heard someone say “It should be easy to fix this problem!”
It’s not. It never is. If it was, we’d be done. It’s always hard or weird or prone to conflicts, which is why that wasn’t a statement I made. Instead I asked myself “Why isn’t this easy?” I wanted to know what made things hard.
But I’m blessed with a natural curiosity about the world and I want to dig into things to see why they do what they do. This is especially true when I’m trying to use them and they, for whatever reason, don’t do what I want. That spurs me forward into research and reading and understanding and then writing. Eventually I get to the coding part. Because isn’t that how we all learned in the beginning? We wondered and we played and we learned by doing and experiencing.
If I did it all over I’d do it the same way and use the heck out of WordPress.
