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
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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.
I'm an amateur so be gentle. I own a Shopify store and I am in the process of creating a product forum hosted outside of Shopify in Wordpress, using a subdomain. (Why? Because embedding a forum like Tal.ki, didn't quite work so well)
I want to make the transition as smooth as possible when navigating to the forum; ideally the customer wouldn't even know they have left the store. Problem is, my sexy liquid theme from Shopify doesn't play nice with php and wordpress.
Is there anything out there that will convert liquid, particularly for people without an enormous amount of technical skills, like myself.
Thanks in advance
W
I'm no liquid zen master myself, but if I wanted to do what you're describing, I'd take a look at the php port of liquid: https://github.com/harrydeluxe/php-liquid
Without having looked through that carefully, my guess would still be it's not going to be particularly simple to put together the specific solution you've described.
Fwiw, it looks like you can embed disqus in shopify product pages (and therefore elsewhere, I'd presume): http://docs.shopify.com/manual/configuration/store-customization/disqus
Presuming that you largely want customers to be able to discuss particular products, working at it from that angle would probably be an easier path. I can think of a lot of ways that could work well (beyond having disqus threads on specific product pages, you could create shopify pages with or without product collections on them to serve more as discussion hubs, and also integrate that all more easily with the native shopify blogging functionality).
Since you are doing nothing here but "Skinning a forum" to look like your Shopify theme, there is no Liquid for you to even deal with. Your forum HAS NO LIQUID. It is what it is. If you want your forum to look like your Shopify store, just copy your CSS over to the theme and hack at the theme of your forum.
Therefore, this question is off-topic and instead should be asking how to take a set of CSS for one application and apply it to another.
I am a web Designer that recently decided to expand into developer waters as well :). What I have in mind is to build an elaborate portfolio site that will also contain a blog. The sites sections will be standard for such a project - something like Home, About, Portfolio, Contact and Blog.
The Home page will contain some static parts but also feeds from the latest additions to the portfolio and the blog.
The Portfolio page will have sections on the different types of portfolio pieces (like logo, print, web etc).
The About will be completely static.
The Contact page will be static and will have a contact form.
The Blog page will basically have your standard WordPress blog structure.
At first I was thinking of doing the whole thing in WordPress (since I already have some experience with it) but what got me thinking about different options was the portfolio part. I want the portfolio page to be quite differently stylized than the blog page and yet I want to have the possibility of doing quick and easy additions to it trough an admin panel.
So please give me suggestions and direction about what would be best for me to do? Is this thing possible with WordPress? Should I instead code the whole project with CodeIgniter (or a similar framework)?
I am quite good with HTML & CSS. Comfortable with jQuery. Trying to get better with PHP :).
I am willing to learn and improve and wouldn't mind trying a CMS or a Framework that Ive not had experience with before.
Thank you.
Wordpress is more than sufficient. You might want to find some plugins that allow you to add special content like videos, scripts and other things to portfolio pages. Also knowing html, css well is important if you want to build or modify a theme a lot to your liking. It is also very helpful to know some php if not be very experienced with it. MySql is helpful as well but not as need to know.
This Wordpress PHP function sheet is very helpful at times.
The Wordpress Codex page is also very good. Not an end all be all, you'll still need to know how to do things on your own, but it defiantly will get the ball rolling if want want any custom functions, or want to modify functions.
If you know wordpress a little bit, I hope you will able to make your desired project. Using wp you can do several types of project.
Read some wp books or tutorial and learn wp functions.
Essential wp functions sheet https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference
I hope it will help you.
Thing I plan to do is to make many websites based on Drupal core.
All of these websites will be quite small, but there will be many of them (in matter of hundreds).
I'm working on this with one HTML / CSS coder, guy who should make themes for every website we make.
He doesn't know much of a PHP (enough for PHPTemplateEngine tho) therefor I what I want is to make as little interaction between me and him as possible. He shouldn't touch PHP part of themes, I shouldn't touch HTML part of themes.
My question is:
Can you tell me what structure of theme folder should I use, what's your opinion of Zen theme for beginning of Drupal theming and how can I make automatic JavaScript and CSS loading script for themes?
Also I'd greatly appreciate any tips concerning multi-site Drupal setup, best practices and so on.
Thanks in advance.
With regards to drupal theming you have a couple of options:
If all the themes will share 98% of the same code base and just have different classes etc to style it visually different (say a different heading colour), then you can get away with one drupal theme and use theme settings to alter the configuration of the theme on each site. This has the advantage of having to maintain only one code base. Zen can still be used as a base theme if you wish
Another option is one you have mentioned above, in which you have a base theme which declares all inherited code, and sub themes to which override specific parts of the base theme to create the necessary effects. I would suggest that this is the better option if your themes vary wildly from one site to another. There is a administrative burden with this option though, as say you have 100 sites, you could potentially have 100 sub-themes to maintain and provide fixes for.
For creating wordpress themes, people usually follow one of these two methods
Design Mockup in photoshop or similar tool and code the HTML & CSS from the scratch
Choose a base theme and design the mockup keeping the base theme in mind and code on the selected base theme.
Which is the better way of these (or anything other than these) on tackling the Wordpress theme creation?
It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. I lean and develop using Option 1, with using option 2 as a way to glean ideas from.
The main reason is that the photoshop mock-up, no matter how close you ask the designer to follow a existing template, "usually" is different in some fashion, so that by the time you get into the middle of the theme you find that the existing template you could modify doesn't accomplish everything that the client is asking for (unless the client is a relative, in which case you could say too bad).
The other reason is call scope creep. Meaning that the original scope that was presented has now grown past your theme. You'll then have to ask yourself if you can dive into someone elses code and figure out what they were trying to do and then see if you can hack it up enough to fulfill you clients new requirements or if you're better of developing from scratch and then when scope creep comes up, you know right where to go/do in order to meet their requirements.
Anyways, something to think about.
It really depends on what your company/client requires. If they have specific requirements that cannot easily be met with a theme, you'll probably be better with option #1. If they are asking for a design submission, and are leaving the implementation/design up to you, go with option #2.
Some of the premium wordpress themes out there are quite good. Note that for either tool you'll be doing a mockup in Photoshop, so start with that and see what your company/client thinks.
You'd probably want to use an existing theme as a base for a new theme, or at least as a reference, for knowing which Wordpress Codex functions to call to retrieve data to use in your theme.
The HTML/CSS design is only half the solution - you still need to retrieve the data from WP to show.
Use Sandbox to start your theme with, it is free and it gives you many classes to do a lot of the design tricks you see is great wordpress themes.
http://www.plaintxt.org/themes/sandbox/
Another great theme to start from would be Thesis:
http://diythemes.com/thesis/
I always start from a theme that allows me to do things easier in the long run.
I always start out with a Naked theme (like Starkers, by Elliot Jay Stocks), and otherwise build everything from scratch.
If you want to save time, or are not (and don't care to become) very familiar with Wordpress PHP logic, then I'd start with an existing theme.