I just spent a whole day learning wordpress cause it's mandatory for my graduation project and I'm still not quite sure what I'm doing.
I'm proficient with HTML, CSS, Javascript and PHP enough to make the damn thing in less than a day, yet here I am strugling with the damn plugins and themes... It just looks too chaotic for me.

Stopped reading at 'wordpress'. Good luck dude. You'll need it.

I'm in a very similar situation

@Letmecode It's not that I don't understand one particular thing. It's just too chaotic for me with all plugins and theme settings.
I download a theme, open the page, but nothing's there. The page itself is empty in editor, it's just a bunch of widgets and plugins which are added and edited from somewhere else.
Guess I'm just not used to every single thing on every page being controlled from somewhere else.
I seriously don't know how people can tell me with a straight face that they find this easier and quicker.

Ignore the WP hate, once you learned it you can spin up sites in minutes while giving you/people you work for a nice admin interface.

One tip though; ignore template parts for themes. All you need (for the beginning) is:

style.css
functions.php
header.php
index.php + Conditional Tags
footer.php

@nordlicht thanks for the tip

@nordlicht agreed so much hate for WP Wordpress is a powerful framework when you take the time to learn.

WP-CLI and multiple sites = less effort.

Make sure you get debugging enabled so you can see where problems are white screens general mean you have error output turned off (good for production not development).

Look for WP_DEBUG in the Codex and it's defined in wp-config.php

And make sure in Apache2 or whatever you use error are enabled.