I have been asked to create an eCommerce website for a client on a strict budget. I figured using WordPress would be my best bet in this case. I am new to both WordPress and developing an eCommerce/online store. I intended on designing and developing my own bespoke theme for the client, however their limited budget does not accommodate the fee I quoted for designing and developing a bespoke theme. Therefore, I thought that a free theme would be the most suitable option in working within the constraints of the budget.
My questions regarding using the free theme are:
What are the limitations to using a free pre-made theme in terms of its styling, look and layout (structure)? For example, could I easily move the logo or other elements and graphics to elsewhere on the same page if I wanted or I am stuck with having those items wherever they are originally placed? In other words, what flexibility do I get in changing the design?
How 'unique' could I expect it to look with some customization?
What are the limitations on features and functionality?
Would I get more design flexibility with a premium theme instead?
There are pretty much no limitations.
You can make a child theme out of the free theme, then you can customise the css and php files which make up that theme, as much as you like. That will allow you to do everything you mention in point 1. See http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes for details.
Wordpress provides a simple web interface that allows you to view and edit the files, or you can just edit them using your favourite code editor.
The idea with a child theme is that any file which you customize overrides the file in the original theme. This means if there are updates to that theme in the future, you can safely download them without wiping out the customisations you've made.
I would recommend you start with something like the twitter bootstrap theme for wordpress, which gives you a neutral design and quite a lot of useful javascript functions. That will help you with point 2 - ensuring uniqueness, as you don't start with something that already has a distinctive look and feel.
re: point 3 - that's the great thing with wordpress. Just add plugins and widgets (or even develop your own). There really are no limits.
To answer point 4: Premium themes typically provide more sophistication in terms of design features and add-ins like scrollers, slideshows and shortcodes. Sometimes they also provide customised interfaces that allow limited customisation such as colour schemes and page layout, but essentially the wordpress interface for customisation is the same, whether you've paid for the theme or not.
Related
I have built WP sites in many different ways over my career, and I am always curious of peoples' methods for building custom WP sites. In the past, I have done everything from hacking together premium themes to do what I want, to building each file in my theme from scratch. Over my evolution as a developer I have currently become mostly satisfied with using a 'starter' blank theme like underscores or understrap. I then use ACF Pro along with custom post types, and that usually covers the majority of what I am trying to accomplish. I have a design background so I design my own stuff sometimes, and I also work with a few very talented designers that push their designs, which I love. This frequently requires highly customized layouts, headers, and footers that I try to couple with an intuitive backend, so the client can change any content on the fly, while having some control over appearances like placement and adding columns.
Second to the Underscores / ACF method, I and surprised how easily I can accomplish the same result with something Like Divi (page builder), where I almost total freedom with code, templates, and custom react modules. Also, the client still gets a drag and drop product that looks very nice on the backend. Sometimes more so than my preferred method. Through both of these methods I always use a child theme so I have very few boundaries when building stuff, but still get to benefit from the theme updates without everything breaking two years down the road.
These are just my own experiences, and since there are many people on this site that have far more experience and know-how than I do. I am interested to here how other people go about always starting with a versatile theme. I am open to trying new types of themes, and also ways to build custom fields, meta-boxes, and taxonomies.
Can anyone help me to get this answer with a small example as I have been trying to be cleared about this two things.
According to, and elaborating on the WordPress Codex:
Plugins
Plugins are ways to extend and add to the functionality that already exists in WordPress. The core of WordPress is designed to be lean and lightweight, to maximize flexibility and minimize code bloat. Plugins then offer custom functions and features so that each user can tailor their site to their specific needs.
So this should be thought of as a way of extending WP's underlying / core functionality. Remember, WP's Roots is that of a blogging CMS, but developers over the years have been hell bent on making it do anything and everything treating WP kind of like a framework, but not to be confused with one. For example, WordPress does not have a contact form built in for users, therefore I can plug in a 3rd party module which will permit the administrator to set up and use such functionality.
Widgets
WordPress Widgets add content and features to your Sidebars. Examples are the default widgets that come with WordPress; for post categories, tag clouds, navigation, search, etc. Plugins will often add their own widgets.
This is not as straight forward due to the concept being quite abstract. Think of a widget of extending the template dynamically by allowing a webmaster to deploy 3rd party plugins (as well as default plugins). Developers tend to use such functionality to display information that is not mission critical, non intrusive and easy to use / manipulate.
However, to clarify, you don't necessarily require widgets to use plugins. In the case you use Akismet, it will simply extend WP to prevent against spam without ever displaying anything to the user.
This is a serious question, specifically relating to the many frameworks out there for Wordpress and Joomla - Warp, T3, Gantry etc. What I dont understand is how they are different to a starter template and what exactly you are supposed to do with them - simply child theme them or is it a whole other codex to learn? I mean, all of the native codex is there with Joomla and WP anyway to construct a theme simple enough so what good does a whole proprietary app do between your design and the CMS? Are they faster to develop with?
What confuses me is that people seem to love them and claim that they make life easier but I dont get how adding another technology to learn can make things easier. Like I say, it is a serious question, not one for effect to make a point.
Can anybody define the difference between a framework and a starter template? I ask in part because I am one of those anxious developers who always feels like I am somehow missing a trick or doing things the "wrong" way - what am I missing?
This is definitely mostly an issue of definition, and I can guarantee that some cases will not follow what I outline below. Obviously, anyone is free to call the template/framework by whatever they want.
Generally though, a template is comprised of basic HTML and CSS that works with the platform (Wordpress, Joomla, etc) that is used to build the output to the page. In Wordpress, this contains the loop and other constructs to get all the content for the page. In Joomla, it outlines all the module positions available and such.
Typically when you purchase a higher end theme, you will have significant choices on the backend to customize the theme without having to actually code. These parameters let you typically change colors and such.
Some of the theme developers and others have taken this parameter settings system to the next level and made it into a framework. In all the cases that I've seen, "framework" is really the basis for the template parameter system. In this way, you can have consistency between different themes and expect the same settings and features between different themes. This is why they use a different word, because it really isn't a "theme" any more. It really is like a "theme engine" in that it is a backend system for changing things in the theme.
Yes, many platforms offer some basic options for editing the theme out of the box, so in most cases, the framework is really an improvement on the base platform's theme engine.
It's been my experience that a theme will be a visual style along with a set of theme options available in the admin (in addition to Customize if it's supported).
Theme Frameworks on the other hand, like Thesis, are installed just like a theme but have a very vanilla visual style that you build your theme on top of. Usually the framework provides many added features that aren't available in WP core.
tl;dr - Themes frameworks aren't installed and used right away, they are installed and built upon to deliver a site.
First of all i don't have any experience on wordpress.. So please forgive my ignorance.. I've found a theme on themeforest. Unfortunately it's a wordpress theme. I want to develop my own admin panel. I don't want to use wordress. Is it possible?
Anything is possible, however this is a gum in hair scenario. Ask the theme author if there is an HTML version which is common on ThemeForest. If you do try to "extract" the layout:
Begin with the stylesheet and match up the styles with each page template's markup.
Also, why not use WordPress? The Redux theme options framework is very easy to use.
Since a wordpress theme is just a bunch of html/css/js/php files, yes, it is possible. Depending on what language/framework will used backend side, the easiest way would be to extract the html/css/js parts of the theme and than add your own "content-placeholders" which will be used by your own backend.
But: Think twice about doing this. First, there could be a conflict with the license of the theme (depending on what type of license is used by the author of the theme). And more important, second, you should think twice about building your own backend.
For the case this isn't an experiment and you're building a productive website, building you're own backend is a lot of work. Unless you need some special functionalities (or you would like to keep it very slim and basic), I would suggest using a ready made CMS for this - like wordpress.
My opinion: 95% of self-made backends for basic cms features I've seen (and was forced to work with) are very messy and far beyond available open source cms. It seems like many people don't balance the pros and cons of building an own CMS-backend and undervalue the effort to build a state-of-the-art CMS.
I hope this is not too basic to be off-topic, but I am wondering to what extent it is possible to customize WordPress to fit an existing design. I have a design in mind and read somewhere (WordPress manuals?) that it is possible to only manage a small part of a website with WordPress and then slowly migrate the whole site to be WordPress-managed. If one would like to preserve a certain design, is this preferred to tweaking WordPress templates? That is to say, should I start from a website and slowly move into WordPress, or should I start from the WordPress template, and try to tweak it until I arrive at the design I want. Are there any examples of WordPress sites, which fall into light-weight (but image heavy) websites, which exhibit freedom from the WordPress mold? (Is this too vague?)
Generally speaking, I think it makes more sense to start with WordPress from the start if that is what you intend to use at the end. It will be much easier to transition your site into being fully WordPress-managed after you have some small piece of it in WordPress. This is because, while a lot of the design will fit easily into the HTML WordPress with only minor tweaks, WordPress theming is kind of a specific subcategory of its own, and there will be less of a barrier to moving if your start with CSS that is compatible with WordPress.
WordPress also makes it easy to override individual page nodes, so the static portions of your site can be part of WordPress in a very loose sense, and you'll have full control over the markup. It is less to start writing your markup knowing what you've already had to do to get your design to work with WordPress than to transition to WordPress later.
If you are new to WordPress theming, here are some links to get you started:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
http://themeshaper.com/2009/06/22/wordpress-themes-templates-tutorial/
Your approach depends on the technical capabilities of you to setup two sites that live next to each other.
In general, you'll have to modify Wordpretss theme to fit your design. I prefer something of a skeleton theme - http://themehybrid.com/themes Skeleton/Hybrid one. The thing about this approach is that you'll have to build your design from ground up and fit it into Wordpress way of doing things. Wordpress likes to output HTML with additional CSS styles and it's usually much easier to use those elements then to modify them to fit yours.
My personal choice, I'd start using WordPress right away, learn as much as I can about the CMS aspects, you have great tutorials at WP101 (dot) com then move to create or built your own templates. I'd suggest you first start with a simple template like Twenty Ten and modify it then perhaps you can use Responsive which is my favorite or many others. This 2 sites for example were built in WP
http://www.philiphousenyc.com/ and
http://www.danielhopwood.com/
Good Luck,
Mike