Morten Rand-Hendriksen has put together one of the more thoughtful posts I’ve seen about the complexity of WordPress.
As he notes, “the way we talk about WordPress to new users and clients gives them a distorted picture of what the application is and sets up unrealistic expectations. WordPress is not easy. Learning WordPress is.”
That was a very good read… it helps put reality into WordPress that it’s only easy to a certain point. For anyone new to WordPress and wanting to build their own website other than a simple blog, it’s not easy. Ultimately one should have a basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and even some PHP would be beneficial, but more so, a basic understanding how the core of WordPress works. Being able to open theme files and have some understanding what does what gives a greater flexibility to modify things to suit your needs.
This was a great piece. Web development in general is hard, doing everything right requires a lot of know how. Instead of people thinking of WordPress as making web development easy, I see it as making it a lot more powerful while adding another layer of depth and required competence. I’ve been building sites for quite a long time now and I still feel like I’m scratching the surface.