Hello there,
I am new to codecademy and want to ask what kind of courses on here would help me enhance the customization of wordpress if needed. I want to build a woocommerce store, ,but f.e. my cart page right now is not that customizable with the theme builder from flatsome. So could you please suggest me what courses to take so that i could enhance that customization? Thanks in advance!
Edit: I just started “Build a Website with HTML, CSS, and Github Pages” I don’t know if this is a good one for that case? Any suggestions about othre courses too?
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Go to Appearance > Themes > Customize > Additional CSS and you can manually change the CSS with the knowledge you’ve gained here. It’s a bit of a pain to work with, but it works.
My advice: make use of the page inspector (look up chrome dev tools, also on Firefox) to get the class names and ids for elements and see the current styling applied to elements, and back up your new css in a .css file on your local computer.
great, thanks a lot. I already thought that it would be a bit of a hassle with those ids and classes haha.
Can I just ask, for what purposes would you need programming if you have page builders like elementor for example? okay I know the bloat is a lot but isn’t it faster to develop/design the site?
Wordpress themes are faster but have limitations built into them. Basically, you can only do what they are built to do - if you want to do something else it can be challenging to implement (moreso than on a site where you actually have control over everything) or simply impossible. There are plugins or whatever that can extend the site’s functions, but each of them has their own limitations, potential security risks, sometimes incompatibilities with eachother, and possibly expense. And you might want specific functionality that doesn’t have a good, safe, up to date plugin or widget for it.
But for individuals and smaller companies who want something simple and relatively easy to maintain and can’t afford to hire a dedicated web developer, it’s not a bad choice (though, also not the only choice for CMS). Of course, someone who knows php can do a lot more, by customizing their themes with child themes, or making new ones from scratch.
On a non-wordpress site, if you have the necessary technical knowledge you can program the site to do basically whatever you want, with full control over the appearance, maintenance and security, and how the site functions. You don’t have to find, and possibly pay for a plug in to do something you need your site to do when you can do it yourself (and that’s assuming there IS a plugin that does what you need).
Writing your own code can be easier than working around wordpress’ limitations, depending what you need your site to do and what you know how to do. Honestly? I’ve had less struggles building apps from scratch than fighting wordpress. I hate wordpress. (Haven’t built any commerce apps yet though).
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Thanks a lot for all the info!
I can tell you from the beginning that that is COMPLETELY true… too many conflicts happening in WordPress, already from the beginning…
I was opting for Shopify but didn’t go, and now I kind of regret lol.
Can I also ask you (if you have any knowledge about it) if it would be possible to customize Shopify then for example easily with only HTML & CSS (i don’t know whether I could apply JS there though? Cause in Shopify all the security issues etc are all handled by Shopify themselves…
Thanks in advance!
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I think so, but I’ve never used it. This tutorial on customizing Shopify Themes and Emails shows themes’ css can be edited directly with a code editor, while this page covers shopify’s option to embed buy and shopping cart on your own webpages.
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Learning “Build a Website with HTML, CSS, and Github Pages” will help you to understanding a lot of things, principaly CCS Customization… as said @vmimas. However, if you wanto to change the woocommerce structure, i do recommend after you learn HTML and CSS, consider learning PHP (the wordpress language) . Another thing sould consider buying some paid plugins (woo plugins and extentions. Theare are great oneas at: WooCommerce Plugins | 109 WooCommerce Extensions) that enable you to do all the customizations tha you whant.
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Thank you for this great reply! The reason I got to Codecademy in the first place but out of my frustration with WordPress and I thought that by learning to write code I would come back to WordPress more confident. I even got frustrated at Codecademy for not having PHP tutorials right from the start, but know I have grasped the basics about HTML, CSS and Javascript, I am no longer in a hurry to learn PHP, I am not even interested in coming back to WP at all.
Thanks, will be checking those out!
I Appreciate your answers a lot. Helped me make the decision… as @damianroiz said, I had the same frustation upon looking at the courses, but now I feel llke I wasted so much time for that (and money) on wordpress while still being at square one with all those errors instead of using that time for more useful things.
At the end of the day… If you don’t try it you would not know it right 
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