As someone who learned (and is still very much learning) PHP to work with Drupal, my recommendation is to focus on first things first: Basic syntax. Basic commands. The various conditionals arguments, especially. (if, elseif, case, switch)
You can gain a lot of understanding, potentially, by going through some of the existing contributed themes and see how they approached different things. That's a start.
Then maybe going into the theme snippets and php snippets in the handbook would be next. Refer to your textbooks for background and deeper understanding. (There are many online resources and books out there. I've used the O'Reilly and Visual Quickpro Guide books, both titled "PHP and MySQL".)
I hope this helps. My philosophy is it's best to learn by doing, whenever possible.
Laura
pingVision, LLC 4450 Arapahoe Ave, Suite 100 Boulder, CO 80303
www.pingv.com 303.415.2559 inquiry@pingv.com
On Jul 14, 2006, at 12:40 PM, brendan carney wrote:
hello! my first post in this list.. what areas of PHP should i get familiar with (first) in order to really customize themes?
a little background: i've been poking around drupal for a while, and am starting to get a feel for it. i consider my knowledge of modern table-less xhtml/css practices to be somewhere between intermediate and advanced. my knowledge of PHP (and programing in general) is very limited. i've made it through a few tutorials, and parts of a rather poorly written php book. in short, i know enough about php to be willing to experiment, but it's still a little scary. (but only a little) =)
i love xhtml/css, falling hard for drupal, and am excited to start learning PHP. as i'm a graphic designer, being able really customize themes is of extreme interest, and an area of the community i'd like to be able to contribute to in the near future.
i'm planing to start going through online php tutorials more regularly in order to become more familiar with php in general, and specifically so that i can customize and develop drupal themes to my heart's content. so again, what areas in php should i particularly focus on with regards to themeing?
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