I am planning to learn web development during these summer holidays so that I can do some freelancing once I learn it, but I am a bit confused as to where to start and on a few terms. I was hoping to receive some recommendations about what to learn and in what order.
I’m doing my bachelors in Computer Science, have done a lot of C++ so I have a fair amount of concept for programming language. I’ve done a course of database, so I know a decent amount of database and SQL.
I also know a fair amount of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP (very basic PHP, just enough for interaction with MySQL).
An obvious path to me is to improve my PHP skills. but then there are frameworks, and CMS. I have read online but I can’t quite grasp as to what exactly a framework or CMS is? and is there something other than a framework or CMS? which to learn first? Should I just learn a framework/CMS first?
Also, there seem to be a lot freelance projects for WordPress, so when it comes to CMS I would rather do that.
A framework usually provides premade code that you can use to “speed up your workflow” in the long run, once you’ve learned how to use the framework. It’s not necessary for everything. I’ve been developing without any particular frameworks for years, though could probably benefit eventually from doing so.
A CMS (Content Management System) is the back-end or administration section of a website that the webmaster/company/client uses to insert content onto the site. It’s an interface for the non-technical, which makes changing pages / updates / products etc easy. A good PHP based, free CMS to look at is Joomla, or you could look at WordPress. Joomla generally takes no more than a couple of days to learn how to use.
Hope this helps.