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I am new to web development. I have familiarity with CSS/HTML/Wordpress and Expression Engine Content Management system. I want to be a well rounded professional web developer desperately, and trust me, it's been a struggle to do all I do and still have time for self-development with other languages. I take care of several Wordpress Sites at my job and am currently learning Expression Engine 3.0 for a new, much large Expression Engine site. I love the Javascript language, but I am concerned if learning it right now would be good given my current type of work. I was told that learning Javascript would be helpful for customizing things in Expression Engine as well.

That said, here is my question....is learning JS beneficial for Wordpress Dev or/and Expression Engine development? Please forgive me if this is a stupid question. Eventually I would like to design my own EE add-ons and Wordpress themes/plugins with the ability to customize them as needed for my client, maybe even make web games? Is learning JS a good skill for my current career direction? I'm also trying to learn BootStrap as well to my language learning TODO list.

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  • The reasons you need to learn HTML & CSS, are the same reasons you would want to learn JavaScript - to improve frontend websites. Specifically JQuery would give you more scope and benefit in the future. But it is irrelevant to ExpressionEngine or WordPress (which use PHP) - as JS is purely to enhance frontend use and not related to EE or WP - hence this is not the best place to ask such a broad question. If you're new to web development, focus on good html/css and learn JS/JQuery as you go. Commented May 2, 2016 at 18:03
  • Hi, Greg. I'm going to close this since it is not an ExpressionEngine question and is pretty open-ended. But feel free to post if you have ExpressionEngine questions in the future. See What topics can I ask about here?. PS My two cents is yes: definitely learn at least some JS and jQuery. It's an indispensable part of front end development. Commented May 3, 2016 at 18:06
  • BootStrap is not a programming language, is a front-end framework, using CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Jquery Commented Apr 15, 2018 at 20:51

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Greg is right - javascript is primarily a front-end resource: you use it to program activity within the user's browser.

While you can construct EE Sites that don't use any javascript at all - if you want to include any kind of locally dynamic behaviour (UX / UI) you'll need some kind of javascript running somewhere. So it is hard to imagine that you could build a modern EE site without some knowledge of javascript.

But there is also another factor - many of the 'new generation' of web development tools make use of javascript as an automation language - so if you run anything that uses "Node.js" (e.g. gulp, grunt, bower etc.) these all require some familiarity with javascript to configure their operation. So it might be worth learning a bit of javascript for that too...

HTH

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