A suggested curriculum for WordPress newbies

This question comes up a lot, and a couple months ago I took a stab at answering it here.

I've had some free time this morning, and am attempting to expand upon my question in a blog post, presented here for your comments. Please let me know if I've gotten anything wrong, confused, or if you have any other suggestions! Please note that the actual post has links embedded to the appropriate courses/tracks mentioned, but is otherwise the same.

DRAFT

I’ve been a member of Team Treehouse for several years now, and overall it’s a great learning resource. If there’s one major complaint I have, it’s how the tracks/courses are currently presented. It can be very difficult to tell which courses/tracks you should take before or after others, which courses have superceded previous versions (for example: CSS Foundations (current) and CSS Basics (previous)), and how recently a given course has been updated or created. This makes it hard to design a reasonable curriculum for yourself.

This post assumes two things: first, that you’re new to HTML and CSS, and second, that you’re new to WordPress. In addition, it is written from the perspective of a Treehouse user who has gone through a majority of the courses currently available on Treehouse, barring the Java and Android tracks (although I certainly make no claims of expertise in any of them :)). This is my suggested curriculum for a Treehouse user for whom the beginning assumptions are true.

Tracks and Courses Let’s clear up any confusion about the differences between these two things. A course is any set of one or more collections of videos/quizzes/coding challenges pertaining to a specific topic. A track is a group of courses, in relative order of difficulty, related to an overall subject, such as ‘Front End Web Development’ or ‘Learning WordPress’. So while all tracks contain courses, not all potentially applicable courses are tied to any given track. For example, the Web Design track contains the courses ‘CSS Foundations’, ‘CSS Layout Techniques’, and ‘Sass Basics’, all of which are related to CSS development. The Front End Web Development track contains ‘CSS Foundations’ and ‘Sass Basics’. There are a number of other CSS courses available through the Library, but which are not included in any track. Now, let’s get started!

HTML and CSS Given that these two technologies are the basis for presenting web pages (and WordPress sites), let’s start here to get up to speed. At this point, I don’t think there’s a need to go into a ton of depth (although you will almost certainly want to once you’ve gotten more familiar with WordPress and/or web pages in general).

1. How to Make a Website: a gentle introduction to HTML and CSS.
2. HTML: the bones of your site in more detail.
3. CSS Foundations: CSS in more depth. I believe you can skip the final section of this course, ‘CSS Gradients’, for now. It’s fairly long, can be somewhat confusing, and isn’t immediately applicable to getting started learning WordPress. Do come back at some point, though.
4. CSS Layout Techniques: possibly optional at this point, although you’ll definitely want to check it out, especially if you get interested in theme design/development.

WordPress! The first thing you probably need to do is get WordPress installed. In general, this means installing the wordpress.org version on a server. WordPress.com offers free WordPress site hosting, but your site will have much more restricted functionality than a full (.org) install.

1. Go through the courses in the Learn WordPress track. Note: If you have difficulty with the WordPress installation as presented at the beginning of this track, take a look at Installing WordPress. The first section of this course goes into more detail about how to install WordPress. The WordPress and Treehouse forums are good places to ask questions.

After you’ve done all that, congratulations! You know more than you did than when you started. From here, there’s lots more to explore.

Treehouse offers another WordPress track, WordPress Development, which goes beyond setting up a WordPress site and basic administration. I’ll cover things you should know before starting that track in another post.