I’ve been coasting along with WordPress for several years, relying on the CMS to handle all the heavy lifting while I focus on front-end theme development. It’s been good, and I owe a lot to the WordPress engine, but this one-sided relationship can’t continue forever.
My not-so-ambitious goal is to start building robust mobile apps a year from now. So, a few weeks ago, I made a public declaration to step outside of my “safety zone” and get down n’ dirty with more intimate web development work, starting with MySQL.
Today, I’d like to up that challenge a notch, and learn more about the language that WordPress is built on. I’m going to be lurking on forums like StackExchange and /r/PHP. I’ve also picked up a couple of Head First books from O’Reilly, and I’d like to dabble in PHP frameworks, too.
