WebDev Update: PHP and CSS3

For the last two months or so I have been scurrying about trying to tie up loose ends - finances, visas, finishing my online course, and the like. This has not to say that my self-study projects have fallen by the wayside. Rather, I've had to lessen the time devoted to them.

Image by Sai Kiran Anagani at Unsplash.com

Despite that, I did find the time to finish a PHP and MySQL course, which cleared up the link between PHP code and MySQL databases. That will prove to be a large step forward when I begin to build my first eCommerce site.

These are, in short, a list of my current accomplishments in the WebDev area:

• Made a list of CSS3 and HTML5 elements I want to experiment with in future projects (includes flexbox, box shadow, transitions, etc)
• Finished this Udemy Course from Infinite Skills on PHP and MySQL.
• Started playing around with Joomla and Blogger. I even added a dropdown bar to this site.
• Started outlining revisions for my personal site and created thumbnail templates for some future projects.

My next project is to revise my personal website. Currently I've had some issues with creating a sidebar and keeping the alignment consistent - which is in part due to the fact I haven't fleshed out my media queries yet. 

However, since I'm working with Bootstrap, I've found that trying to alter the original code can be more time consuming than it seemed. That isn't necessarily a bad thing - I've learned a lot about how to override the original sets. But given the alignment issues, I'm still not sure whether I want to continue applying bootstrap or now. Since I've already set the wireframes, I'll probably finish it in bootstrap though, with some heavy emphasis on CSS3 properties. 

Once I get this settled, I'd like to create a blogger template. I've noticed that there's a lot of similarity between the set-up of content management system (CMS) themes, in that there are sections already defined, and you have to arrange them using the CSS. So I'm hoping I'll be able to transfer this knowledge into creating Wordpress and Joomla themes from scratch.

As I'm also planning a big educational project, a kind of digitized and interactive textbook, I'm taking notes from all these smaller projects!