How to make money with Wordpress
I have just graduated from uni, and am preparing for masters next fall. I'm a humanities student, but have some programming knowledge. Currently I'm looking for literary translation jobs, but should I fail that, I want to find some light freelance work (so that I can spare more time to my studies), and looking at e.g. freelancer.com, Wordpress is still quite popular.
What are some good introductory material for Wordpress and PHP, that preferably does not assume total beginner to programming? How much can I expect to make, for how much effort? I'd be content if I could make $200-250 w/ 3-5hr work per day, or a couple full days a week, that's all I really need and such hours would mean that I could keep on doing such work even when I'm writing my thesis. I'm in Turkey, FWIW.
… don't. Yes, wordpress is popular. No, this is not a good plan to make some side money. Looking at freelancer.com in general is not a good "side money" plan; that place, like many other freelance websites, is polluted with wordpress shops from india and bangladesh. You will not stand out.
If for some reason you specifically want to work with wordpress, a better plan is to make some commercial wordpress plugins. If you're good, this isn't even just side money, it can become serious money.
My advice though is going to be the same I give to anyone else who's blessed not to be an american, british or other native english speaker: Find your niche in your own country and sell that. Most non-english speaking countries are greatly underserviced online; a majority of many non-anglophone-countries' residents do not speak any English. You can easily look at even pretty simple services on the English web and find that there's nothing for your language. So you can just… do that.
The nice thing is this scales to all skill levels. You can do a local version of Uber/AirBNB just like you can do a local version of candy crush.
Incidentally, doing something like this would be a lot more valuable than freelancing on very basic website setup jobs.
I can't recommend Freelancer. It's full of scams where they want you to work outside of Freelancer, and for the ones that aren't, Freelancer immediately charges you a fee for getting accepted. Before you've even started the service, part of the money you're potentially going to make is taken out of your bank account.
So for the instructional material I'd wholeheartedly recommend teamtreehouse.com. It can be expensive, but you absolutely get what you pay for. Their beginner and intermediate instruction in all sorts of web development technologies is second to none. Some may disagree with me, but I'd honestly rather hire someone with a great treehouse record than a degree in the subject matter (depending on portfolio and interview, of course).
As for making money with WordPress freelancing, I'm not really sure. I'd defer to @Adys here. I think he/she has the right idea. I will say that where I work we avoid paid plugins and themes like the plague and the few we have we only bought because the developer had an extremely long history of development and support.