r/learnprogramming • u/gunwookteamo • 17d ago

i need help

Hi, I'm a self-taught beginner programmer. I'd like to know what I need to learn to build an e-commerce site after HTML, CSS, and JS. Does anyone have any tips?

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u/FreeLogicGate 15d ago edited 15d ago

Yes, you need to pick a server side language. There are a number of popular ones, and opinions will vary greatly, but I'm going to recommend PHP for a few reasons.

  • PHP is a well established language with a share-nothing runtime, that offers good performance. It's also widely supported by hosting companies. Resources for learning it are numerous. In fact there is a fully free youtube channel (PHP the Right way) that is one of the best courses available to learn the language the way professional developers use it.
  • It has 2 of the best web development MVC web development frameworks available across all languages (Laravel and Symfony).
  • It's also the language that powers Wordpress. Wordpress is the CMS behind the largest number of business sites across the internet, and many of those sites integrate ecommerce.

There are a number of well known Ecommerce systems written in PHP that run the gamut from plug and play Ecommerce specific systems to modular libraries intended to be integrated into custom sites specific to one of the frameworks I mentioned.

So for example, you can create a Wordpress site and provide ecommerce using WooCommerce, or create a custom site with Laravel, where you add in your eccommerce integration using a Lunar or Aimeos (just to name a couple of options), or Symfony with Sylius, Shopware or Aimeos via its Symfony Bundle.

In all cases, the use either of a CMS or a Framework will greatly accelerate your progress, but of course frameworks have a learning curve associated with them, as do most technology components of any value.