Newbie is lost and info overloaded (need some advice on what to study!)

Hello all!

I am an aspiring web developer and I’m working on a site in local host preparing to launch it. My goal is to be able to create wordpress themes for my self and others that are easily maintainable using the wordpress system.

I have a pretty good grasp of html and css, and while I may not know all the attributes and all the tricks, I feel like I understand the syntax and everything enough.

Where I am seriously seriously lacking is in JS and PHP, which I know I should be strong in to develop for wordpress.

So far I’ve managed to get WP installed on my local host (XAMPP), and I have a basic theme on there and it looks pretty much how I want it. The home page is pulling from a header.php and I’ll eventually make my footer.php. So I understand that most basic build of a page.

Where I start to get lost is creating templates and such. I created a template last night, but when I was trying to put text or what have you in the text editor on WP, nothing would show after update on the page.

I could edit the actual PHP file of the page and get it to display what I wanted, but that sort of defeats the point of wordpress i think?

I know this is sort of rambling but my problem is that theres so many techniques to do everything, and so much info out there I’m not sure what I should do to get to the skill level I need to be at.

For instance, on the site I am developing I would like to have a page called “Beat Making Videos” and a page called “Producer Interviews”

Originally I was planning to just to 4 column rows each containing a youtube video and a brief description. I know this will KILL my load time so I started looking into replacing a preview image with the embedded iframe on click using Javascript. Before I go too into that, I thought it might be a good idea to just have those pages display like blog pages, with posts or whatever. It would be a preview image and a brief description with a read more link that could take you to the post that contained the video.

It seems like I should be able to set something up in wordpress to where I can make a new post, and assign it to a page or whatever and it will show at the top as the most recent post on that page.

Because what’s the point of using wordpress if I’m just going to edit source files and not use the wp-admin area for anything lol.

TL;DR

I’m info overloaded and don’t know what to study to get the skills I need. Should I beef up my javascript, html, and css skills before diving into PHP and working with wordpress, or should I study JS and PHP at the same time????

I’ve tried reading the codex and it gives me a great broad picture of how this system works and what’s going on, it’s just that I feel like I’m missing pieces and can’t really utilize the codex info.

I hope someone didn’t mind taking the time to read all this and I hope it makes some sense!

Thanks in advance!

-Alex