I’m not a programmer and never have been. In high school I dabbled with PERL, possibly the most idiosyncratic of the popular scripting languages. I still hold a certain fondness for PERL, but year by year I find fewer reasons to bother with it. Later in college, I made a few abortive attempts to learn C and C++, neither taking me beyond the absolute basics. I still have a great deal of regret that I never got immersed in any of the standard development languages to pick up more than a loose smattering of the lingo.
Since then I’ve been involved in making wordpress websites and acting as a network administrator. As a net admin I occasionally play around with bash or modifying other people’s python scripts, but my shop is small and scripting is almost always unnecessary. With wordpress my clients are looking for very quick and very cheap. Neither criteria lends itself to projects that go beyond a few stock plugins. As such, I have a user’s familiarity with php, but only the barest vocabulary to write it. The wordpress hooks and API however, I have a limited but growing capacity.
In the last few released of WordPress a number of features have come out that make it easier to develop functionality that would otherwise be time consuming and difficult. I still don’t consider myself a programmer or even a developer (rather a do-it-yourself website account representative) but its a testament to the WordPress API that I can bumble through and still manage some rather expansive projects usually with only a few hours of labor.
I’m six months late in my reporting, but this last week I’ve been brushing up on some of the nuances of wordpress taxonomy and custom posts. Since I never did delve into them previously I wanted to toss up a few links that have been invaluable in getting all the functionality locked down.
http://sixrevisions.com/wordpress/taxonomy/
http://sixrevisions.com/wordpress/wordpress-custom-post-types-guide/
The short summary is these two features combined allow a developer to use the general WordPress framework to create arbitrary objects with arbitrary fields of data which can then be organized, sorted, parsed, edited, and presented using WordPress functionality. WordPress has always had ‘blog’ like functionality down pat, but with WordPress 3.0 its grown substantially as a general CMS, which really just means that it has become that much easier to work with as a larger platform. I still regret never learning how to be an actual programmer, but release by release I’m being absolved of my crime…and its great.
