Recommend Wordpress training?

[etherealfocus]

I'm a big fan of Coursera and EdX, but neither seems to have a Wordpress class unfortunately. I'm basically familiar with the Wordpress interface, know how to edit pages and other basic stuff, but we hired a Wordpress developer to make us a custom theme that the company is unfortunately now tied to. I've been managing more IT stuff till this point, but relations with our dev went sour and long story short it's up to me to get good (or at least decent) at Wordpress on the double.

Among other issues, we're still running 3.4.1, our footer is buggy on IE unless Compatibility View is enabled, and one of our contact forms doesn't work. That and the design really just needs updating. Way too cluttered.

I found some starting points:
http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Lessons
http://www.theistudio.com/muse/1519/wordpress-how-to-update-to-the-latest-wp-version

But would really like something closer to an eClass format, preferably with materials that let me mess around on a test site. Suggestions? I've found some halfway decent Youtube videos too, which are a start... at least they're visual, which is good reference for me.

 

[Saint Nick]

The documentation that WordPress provides is about as good as it gets. They have a few PHP code samples, too. I managed to design a website and then integrate WordPress into it with ease. I didn't design a theme, though. So I probably did it the "wrong way"

 

[colonelciller]

http://www.peachpit.com/store/adobe-dreamweaver-cs5-with-php-training-from-the-source-9780321719843

i tought myself to make a custom theme from this book. get it

 

[etherealfocus]

Huh... never even thought about using Dreamweaver with Wordpress... I'm pretty decent at HTML/CSS; learning to code better always seemed easier than learning Dreamweaver. lol

Might make sense in this case though. What's everyone else think?

 

[colonelciller]

thenice thing with dreamweaver for editing wordpress themes is that you can live preview your theme edits as you do them. alternatively you can live preview them on your virtual localhost server through your web browser... assuming a correctly configured XAMPP install on your local machine.

this book is invaluable in that it walks you through exactly what you need to do to set up your localhost, how to set up dreamweaver, how to set up your wordpress installation, how to create and edit a child theme, how to use firebug+firefox to find the wordpress elements you need to edit, and how to edit those elements