Editing Source Code in WordPress

I am a senior in a college computer science program, and therefore have a decent knowledge of code and several languages. However, I am doing a summer internship type program, and the company I am working with hosts their webpage on WordPress, which to which I am new. They want me to edit some of the code in order to do various things, such as enable a photo container to be a moving slideshow.

Figuring out the javascript and html to achieve the results they desire is not problematic for me. However, I am unsure how to get full access to the Source Code of the site. I have privileged access to the backend of the site but in wordpress when you go to edit it only shows some of the basic html tags while hiding the and tags and code. Is there any way edit the page in its source code format? I don’t want to have to go through the simplified and less expressive/less control WordPress interface, and I don’t even know if I can achieve the desired results with it.

Thanks for your help.

You don’t want to edit core WordPress code. You don’t need to edit core WordPress code to do what you need to implement.

First, you need to study the WordPress templating (i.e. Theme) functionality. Then, you need to study Plugins and the WordPress Hooks API, including its Action Hooks and its Filter Hooks.

To do what you’re describing, you definitely don’t need to modify core files. You just need to enqueue the appropriate script library, and then execute the script in your template.