An HTML file is essentially a big text document, but with “markup” baked into it to explain the specific meaning of the various bits of text. It stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. HTML isn’t really a “programming” language, it’s a “markup” language. HTML is the one universal part of the web: every page you see on the internet with content inside of it is marked up with some version of HTML. If you do need to learn one or more of these languages, good news: You’re about to learn something that, per hour spent, is the most useful and marketable thing you could possibly learn! (For example, you might be able to write a plugin without CSS, but not a theme.) If what you read below confuses you, you’ll need to learn the basics of that language before proceeding with the part of WordPress development it involves. If you have a basic knowledge of these languages-enough to understand the text and examples below-you should be good to go. These are HTML, CSS, PHP, and (optionally) JavaScript. This chapter works with the first topic: the languages used in WordPress programming. You’ll need to know two broad types of things to be able to program in WordPress: languages and concepts. It’s very powerful, but it’s also the only one of the four languages that you don’t really need to understand to get started in WordPress. JavaScript is a programming language that can run in your browser, helping to make webpages more dynamic and interactive.PHP is the core language of WordPress: WordPress core itself, and nearly all WordPress themes and plugins, are primarily written in PHP, and so out of all technical languages, it’s most accurate to say that “WordPress is written in PHP.” PHP can perform all sorts of dynamic operations, and outputs HTML to send to the client’s browser at the end. PHP is a programming language that runs on a web server, the machine that hosts a website. PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is the most important language to truly understand WordPress.CSS (Cascading StyleSheets) is another declarative language: it’s a flexible, powerful, repeatable way to style-control the appearance of-HTML markup.
It’s a declarative language rather than a programming language, and also the web’s most important markup language-basically, a text file with “markup” baked into it to explain the specific nature of various bits of text. HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the fundamental language of the web.You’ll work with four primary languages in WordPress: HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript.