Well, I think so, but I've been programming for something like 20 years in lots of different programming languages and in PHP for at least 5 years so I'm hardly the best person to decide what could be considered basic. Basic PHP knowledge is quite easy, most of the functionality in PHP comes from all the available functions and you don't really need to know them. You just need to know what you want to do and then find the right function in the PHP manual.
Of course, once you know most of the important functions by heart the programming is much quicker. =]
