Is JavaScript Used Often In Theme Creation?

Yes. You probably need to be familiar with JavaScript and JQuery. JQuery comes with WordPress and is very useful in helping you to write cross-browser compatible JavaScript.

Best of luck.

PAE

Thank you peredur! I did a little searching on google before your response and it seems that people have to resort to “hacks” in order to get JavaScript to work. The WP Codex says that if you can do with PHP what you aim to accomplish with JavaScript, then do it in PHP when at all possible. I’m curious, is JavaScript in themes rather standard? That is, do most of the big commercial theme developers use JavaScript to achieve such flashy results and functionality?

I’m just trying to figure out how important it is going to be to learn JavaScript when developing high quality professional themes. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

I don’t know what you mean by hacks. Or what you mean by getting javascript to work.

You won’t find many themes that don’t use JavaScript for something or another. A quick look at one of my more-or-less standard twentyten installations shows seven header links to JavaScript files. Plugins are even more likely to use JS, I’d think.

Any problems getting JS to work probably owe more to cross-browser JS implementation inconsistencies than to anything in WordPress: which is why it makes sense to use JQuery, since JQ sorts all that out for you. JS is a client-side technology so the interaction is between the client and the script – something that is entirely out of WordPress’ control.

So as with any other site development, you need to do whatever needs to be done on the server using PHP and whatever needs to be done on the client using JS. Of course, you can do just about anything server-side if you have the programming skills, but you’re likely to finish up with a site that runs at a snail’s pace due to the number of post backs required to get the functionality you want.

But this isn’t the place to go into a detailed discussion about server-side vs client-side processing. So I’ll just restrict myself to repeating that most themes do, in fact, make use of JavaScript. So if you’re talking about developing a lot of individual sites with a lot of individual needs it seems unlikely to me that you’ll be able to do that without a full grasp of all the technologies that web sides use.

Just my 2c.

PAE

Thank you very much peredur. I will go ahead and add Javascript to my list of languages to learn. Going to be a busy year =P.

Note: Upon going back and looking a google I see the problems people have are with adding javascript to posts and pages. And upon reading a few of these articles it isn’t too difficult to get around. A big misconception on my part. Thank you again perdeur!!

No problem, and good luck. I rather think you’re going to need it.

Cheers

PAE

Can I ask what you mean by you think I am going to need good luck? Is this task particularly unlikely to succeed given I am 110% new to both PHP and JS? I know HTML about as well as a person can. I know CSS is more about memorization when it comes to learning. Wielding it like a samurai sword will take practice, but I don’t think it is frightening or unlikely to succeed. Am I shooting too high?

Nevermind. That really doesn’t have anything to do with the thread. I went ahead and created a new thread if you wouldn’t mind commenting.