Building a website for a hotel - is WordPress the best idea? - wordpress

I'm researching to see if building a full website for a hotel be a good idea to do on WordPress.
I read that wordpress is okay but there are better options.
I want to design and code my own front end look to the website, but have the backend on a stable platform that can take all the reservations seamlessly.
My main concern is to be able to have a backup of all the files and easily switch to another server in case something goes wrong.
I can host the website on my server or host with the service you suggest that comes with the platform all together.
Any ideas and/or suggestions are greatly appreciated!

There are other options, no doubt, but yes, it can and is really possible to build it using WordPress as CMS.
If you want to design and code your own theme, you'll need to study the WordPress Theme Structure and, since you'll build it by yourself, you'll also need to develop plugins to create custom post types (aka CPT) to make the hotel management easier on the WP back-end.
About the theme structure, files, child themes and everything, I'd recommend you to read https://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
About the plugins development: https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/
About Custom Post Types: https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/post-types/registering-custom-post-types/
About the backup: it's super easy and you can even make a full backup using free plugins via back-end. But if the site goes down you can easily do it via FTP downloading only wp-content folder and the database. It's really simple to migrate from one WordPress to another, or from host to host.
About the hosting, you'll need to use a server if you want to build this project. There's a difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org
The .com is simpler, you are not able to build everything you want. The .org is the open source project, which you get the files, upload to your server and connect to database (MariaDB or MySQL). Most hosts offer automatic installation for WordPress and, from there, you can change whatever you want and need.
Note: many developers create CPTs INSIDE the theme's code, but this is not recommended by WP as you can see in We recommend that you put custom post types in a plugin rather than a theme. This ensures that user content remains portable even if they change their theme.
WP is not really hard, after 1 week studying you'll see yourself getting over most difficulties. Even if it takes longer, don't give up. There's a huge community to help you with WP questions.
Hope it helps and I'm sorry my bad writing, I'm not an english native speaker.
C ya

Related

Best way to build convert a Shopify store to WordPress

I have a website through shopify, hosting through Shopify, and want it rebuilt in WordPress.
What would be the best way to do this while keeping the original website live until the new website is done? The new website may take a while to be created since the database of products needs a lot of modification.
I was thinking about creating a new hosting account and building it there without connecting it to the domain name, and when it is ready I'll connect it. Does this make sense or is it even possible? Or should I build I'd offline and upload it when it's ready? I'm not quite sure how I would build it offline though...
Thanks in advance!
Like the others said, you can build it offline on your computer using a program like XAMPP to create an offline server, however I prefer to build the new website online on a sub domain of your current domain, and switch it over once the website is done.
For example, if your website is amazon.com you can create a sub domain dev.amazon.com and build it there. You will most likely have to use a search and replace plugin to replace all instances of "dev.amazon.com" with "amazon.com".
As for transferring all your products etc. you can export all your products from Shopify as a CSV file and then re-import it into WooCommerce using a plugin called WP All Import along with the WooCommerce add-on.
Good luck!
You can build it in a new hosting environment set up for wordpress hosting. And yes, you can reassign your domain to the new site when it is ready. I don't think building an offline wordpress site would be wise if you aren't familiar with apache servers or transferring wordpress sites to different servers, it can be a headache.
Funny enough you're asking this. I currently am working on a project that is more or less the same task. The best and most optimal way would to just develop the website locally on your machine, using a program like XAMPP or WAMP.
Here's a link on how to get started using a virtual machine that is localized on your computer: https://managewp.com/blog/how-to-create-a-local-wordpress-website-in-windows-with-xampp
After installing WordPress on your machine, you can proceed by installing Woo-Commerce. This is the best e-commerce plugin which works with WordPress and is highly recommended due to how frequently updated it is. There are tons of themes out there which can help you change the look of your shop depending on what look and feel you want your shop to be.
Since you're porting a Shopify website over to WordPress, I assume the Shopify site didn't have anything crazy over-the-top when it comes to the look & feel...That being said, I would 100% recommend the "Storefront" theme for WooCommerce, which is a great theme, both for developers and non-developers to use. Here's a link to the Storefront theme, which is free:
https://woocommerce.com/storefront/
In terms of hooking up the domain to the website, this can be done once you actually are ready to launch the website. There's no need to have a live domain working for developing.
Good luck! I hope this helps!

How to version control with WordPress

I want to set up a system where a developer can work on a separate server on a wordpress website.
My question is: If in the meantime changes are made to the live site (like plugin updates, new plugins, new posts, new comments, etc), how is one able to import a new feature (e.g. a new page) from the development server on the live site while making sure that previous changes on the live site don't get deleted?
I am looking to understand how this all works. In a sense, I would like to have some kind of version control system.
Thanks in advance :)
You can version control your own code using git. Basically we would init a new git repo and commit changes onto this repository. This can lie separately outside of the core files. i.e you only need to include the wp-content directory and ignore all the other core wordpress files.
Here is a good article on how to do a really good versioning system for a website.
http://toroid.org/git-website-howto
The posts and pages (basically content) in a wordpress site however lies in the database.Any changes made there will be permanent.
The only option is to keep taking regular backups of the content. You can do this by using an automated backup tool.
If you really want to version control your database, here is an article that helps:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/get-your-database-under-version-control/
This one is a tricky one. You cant host a single website on two servers. Just imagine a website having 2 hosted urls..!! No way.. You can never do that.
You better create a new user and give access to him. Look carefully in the settings and be a admin. You will have a chance to approve or reject what the second user changes.
Hope this helps.

Migrating from Joomla to Wordpress advice

This is my first time migrating a website from Joomla to Wordpress. The website: www.sfspas.com
1- I am worried that the website will not transfer well or that I will loose functionalities.
Can I duplicate the code and just transfer that version to Wordpress? (Keeping the website live via Joomla and creating in parallel a new website www.sfpsas222.com in wordpress to test things out?)
The website has to be live 24h/7 and It can't just break. How can I make sure the inventory will be uploaded correctly and the website will look as it looks now?
2- Once transferred. If I want to change the appearance of the index.php can I simply upload a newly designed index page on Wordpress? How can I go about it? Any suggestions will be highly appreciated!
Thanks!
I recently transferred one of my sites from Joomla to Wordpress and I can say, that it's not just one-click action. Both frameworks have their own structure, you can't transfer content and users directly.
In short, for transfer you need to create a simple plugin which will take all require info from Joomla (articles, users, etc.) and inject it into Wordpress database, converting prior to that, if necessary.
And no, you CAN NOT do this on 24/7 running site. Don't even think about it. Duplicate your site, convert its database to WordPress, check, that everything works properly, and only then put it online.
It's not an easy process and it requires some knowledge. Even if some kind of Joomla-Wordpress converter exists, you'll have a lot of things messed 100% guaranteed. I've made a lot of transfers in my life, so I'm pretty sure of it.
Providing you have a required knowledge of database management and PHP, just be patient and spend some time. If you don't - hire a professional. There's no easy way here, because Joomla and WordPress are like car and bike. Both are a transport, both run fast, but you can't convert one into another without any effort.

Migrating from concrete5 to wordpress

I need to convert a concrete5 site to a WordPress site.
I can't find any plugins on both sides. There might be a solution via a feed ex-/import but it does not support all the contents and images.
Is there any idea how to do this?
I don't know of any pre-packaged solution for this. If there aren't too many pages (under 50 or 100), your best bet is to do it manually -- hire a temp worker for a day if you're a developer with a non-trivial rate.
If there are hundreds or thousands of pages, though, then you'll want to come up with your own automated solution. You can get some kind of XML representation of site content I believe via the Dashboard "backup site" functionality (not the "backup database" one). Or look into the concept of "Starting Points" in Concrete5 -- there's a free addon in the marketplace that lets you export site content in another XML format.
Then look into wordpress importers, and figure out how to transform the C5 output XML into whatever format your wordpress importer requires.
Best of luck.
There's a plugin at the WordPress plugin directory for an automated migration. It supports to migrate posts, attachments (images and videos), content images and list of other things, so it might answer your request.
The quick guide to the process includes following steps -
You install the plugin on your WP website
Create the account at the service
Download the bridge folder and connect to your concrete5 website via FTP
Choose the entities you want to migrate
Try the demo migration (it migrates up to 10 posts)
If you like it you can try the full migration (it's not free)
You may refer this for more info & this service is also represented in WordPress Codex.
Hope it helps.

what the best solution for user driven content on my website

i have created a website for a non profit organization. People on the site want to post stuff . i want to figure out the best way to allow them to do this.
Can i host a wordpress site and somehow embed it into my website
Do i need to install some whole CMS solution?
Other solutions for supporting user driven posts.
to clarify, the functionality of wordpress is all i need (people posting content and pictures).
It's easy to integrate Wordpress into a static html site.
Integrating WordPress with Your Website « WordPress Codex. (You do need mysql, but almost every hosting company out there offers it.)
If you want to convert an existing html site to Wordpress, look at Theme Development « WordPress Codex. Developing Wordpress themes is no more complex than other CMS's, and here are lots of tutorials out there. You divide up your html into header.php, index.php, page.php, footer.php, etc., and css into style.css. If you do a standard Wordpress theme, then plugins will work fine.
Go ahead and do a full install of Wordpress; there's no option for a minimum install. WP is small, anyway.
If you need a finer degree of working with editors, subscribers and contributors than Wordpress offers out of the box, look at different plugins that offer role managing capability, giving administrators the power to give different levels of permissions to users to write, edit and publish. WordPress › Search for roles « WordPress Plugins
You can pull other content into Wordpress via RSS, too, and either have that content appear as an RSS feed, or have it integrated into published posts. FeedWordPress | simple and flexible Atom/RSS syndication for WordPress
You can get a free account at wordpress.com and try out a limited version of Wordpress, limited in that it is hosted by wordpress.com and you have a small number of plugins and css modifications you can make. But once you selfhost Wordpress, then you can do much more with it in terms of plugins and adapting the css to an existing site.
You could use a Wiki.
There are a few popular free Wiki packages out there these days. By far the most popular would be the framework behind Wikipedia - MediaWiki. Wikis' are a proven way to let users create the content, with systems in place to prevent vandalism/spam. MediaWiki also has a whole bunch of great plug-ins for anything you would need.
Another Wiki option is to use the Wordpress-Wiki plug-in for Wordpress. It lets you use Wordpress, but with some features of a Wiki. Not as feature rich as MediaWiki, but a good option if you really like Wordpress.
You do not need to install a whole cms solution, though wordpress can host an entire site, not just blogs.
You could hack it by using a hosted weordpress and displaying it in an iframe (this one might get some flames - but it works and it's easy)
You could also install wordpress on your server. By the sounds of it this is not your expertise, and while setting up wordpress is getting easier every release, for smaller sites I would much rather recommend pivotx
wordpress has a lot of overhead and requires a mysql database. The templated, while there are more available than in pivotx are harder to create. So I'm suggesting the other solution because it does the bulk of what wordpress does, and though it has far far far fewer plugins, it is a lot easier to theme, as it uses smarty.
This problem/scenario is pretty common. And the most common solution is to install a CMS. Our compagny installs Drupal to let end user manage their website easily. They can edit menus, and change content as easily as you write a document in word processor software.
But there is a lot of CMS out there...
Have you tried blogEngine.net?
I have two sites http://www.dotnetscraps.com and http://www.abhyast.com/ that are hosted using blogEngine.net. It is free and has multi user support, and the best part for me is that it supports both XML and SQL hosting. Anything that you post automatically ends up in the App_Data folder which is what you need to backup.
http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/
There are a plenty of themes to choose from, and if you wish you can customize your own theme without much effort.

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