codeigniter with wordpress - wordpress

I am planning a new website with codeigniter using wordpress.
this site will contain creating online albums, selling presents and gifts, and another one for selling cameras and their accessories.
is it recommended using this combination?
what are the advantages and disadvantage of this?
is there a better solution for building with framework and cms?

Personally (Having experience of both) It all depends on what your objectives are. Are you wanting to quickly and easily pull the project together, or do you have unlimited time and want everything to be feature rich and customized to your exact specification? CodeIgniter will allow you to build each aspect exactly as you want, where as WordPress (through the use of plugins) will allow you to get the end result you want without quiet as much customization.
However, that being said there is nothing saying you can't use CodeIgniter and direct traffic to the WordPress part for certain aspects, all down to your personal preference.

Why did you decided to use a working cms and a php framework together? Just using one of both is enough. The advantage you will have with wordpress is the fact that there are many plugins that are easily to use. For Codeigniter you will have to do all of the codings for yourself but you can build your website like you want it to be!

Related

Building a commercial website using wordpress

does anyone know what building a WordPress commercial website actually means? Does it involve just learning PHP or other programming langs? Tried looking online, but couldn't find an answer.
WordPress is a blogging platform available under a license which allows reuse. Anyone can download the WordPress source code and use it to make a website. This may be a commercial website.
WordPress allows plugins. Many plugins are available under the same licence as WordPress itself, or similar licenses. Others can be purchased. Or you can write your own or pay someone to write them for you. These plugins can radically change the behaviour of a WordPress site. You can build all kinds of complex applications on top of WordPress.
Whether this is a good idea is another question. In my opinion, WordPress is a decent blogging platform, and the well known shop plugins are well tested and probably reasonably well behaved, but using it as a basis for bespoke complex applications is a bad idea. It certainly can be done, but the data structure tends to be weird. I speak as someone who has rebuilt from scratch a couple of applications originally based on WordPress, and both times wasted hours of my life trying to make sense of the database.
As per my opinion wordpress is not suitable for enterprise level applications, because due to lot of data it will get slow your site.
However if someone want to built commercial website on wordpress but on smaller scope, yes he/she can build on wordpress.
Building a commercial website on wordpress requires php basic knowledge and wordpress theme hiearchy and tags knowledge.
You do not need any high skill knowledge to build your commercial website.
Yes its involved learning of different fields like html, css, javascript or jquery, php, mysql.
But it depends on requirement.
If you have purchased a ready made theme and require only small changes then it will require frontend skills like html, css, jquery.
And if its need heavy customization then it will require backend skills like php or wordpress loop structure and theme structure.

Which CMS should I use when I hand a website over to my non-techie friend?

I'm designing a simple website for a friend - four static pages to advertise a yoga retreat she is running. I have a couple of requirements:
My time is short; I want to quickly build a theme template.
She has no technical skills; she wants to log in to the backend and update page content.
Working for myself, a static site builder such as nanoc or jekyll would be ideal: I can build a template.html with room for some content, then update content files, rebuild the site and redeploy. As a bonus, the whole site could be hosted free on GitHub pages. This satisfies requirement (1) but not requirement (2).
I've also considered Wordpress, because I've got plenty of experience running WP sites and developing custom themes. This satisfies requirement (2) but not (1). There is simply too much development overhead building a WP theme - it is not straightforward to modify the markup structure of all those template files, and there are plenty of snags involving ugly page titles or "Comments are disabled" strings which need to be removed.
It shouldn't be this difficult. I want a site engine which has a simple template.html file for easy re-theming, and an accessible backend for content changes. Bonus points if free hosting is available somewhere.
Perch - http://www.grabaperch.com - is made for this sort of thing, though it's not free (£).
Could you hack a site together using tumblr pages?
What about Google Sites? Dead simple.
If you're open to .NET i think you should look at n2cms.
WordPress using a premium theme bought in any of the many sites offering quite nice themes for a reasonable price (60 USD). Then, you just change the logo and ready to go.
Since I'm not a web designer myself, this is what I´ve done myself for my sites and I´m quite happy with the results

Setting up multiple small sites

I have no experience with Drupal.
I'm looking to use a cms but I have a requirement that, while it sounds simple, I'm not sure how easy, or possible, the implementation will be.
I have many small sites (let's say 100). Each site is basically setup the same way except the content and images are different. Each site would need an admin(s) that would manage content and have the ability to add new pages where needed.
Is Drupal the kind of cms that could handle requirements like this or is there another cms that is more suited for this kind of implementation?
Drupal is definitely suited to this, you should use the latest version (Drupal 7) and perform a multisite installation. That way you can keep the same core code base (which will make updating Drupal a cinch across 100 or so sites).
Have a look in the /sites/default/example.sites.php file for instructions on how to set it up, and if you get stuck post another question on here and I'm sure someone will be able to help.
EDIT
In fact there's a guide to the installation here.

Architecture ideas to allow customers to build their own site, based off external site's data?

I'm not entirely sure how to properly ask this, so please bear with me.
I have an idea for a site I would like to build, which would basically be a site for members to create some data and have it housed in my database. I would like to offer a value-add to the site which would allow people to spin off their own website via my own "website builder" tool (probably some sort of CMS). Their website would be able to communicate with my master database to display their data.
Getting down to the crux of the topic, I'm looking for architectural advice/ideas/etc. regarding what services I could use to do this. I'm not looking a 100% automated solution, but something along these lines (which may not be completely correct, I admit):
Customer puts in an order to create their own site, using my tools.
I setup a separate domain for them, roll out the CMS foundation to the site, and the customer has full editing control of the CMS to design it however they would like.
The CMS would have some customizations so that it includes functionality to call APIs located on the master site, which would return the relevant data.
In the research I have done on SO, I've seen a lot of mentions of Umbraco which honestly looks like a good start. I'm just worried that when I go to upgrade a version, I have to deal with overwriting my custom API functionality. I'm guessing this is the nature of the beast, and requires me to accept/plan for it.
Does anyone have any thoughts about this? Some high-level starting points? Thanks!
I've been thinking about this same issue for my customers.
It is not hard to automatically roll out a stock cms such as Wordpress or Joomla. This sort of thing is done all the time by "1 click installers" that DreamHost and others have.
Including custom widgets or plugins for the CMS that can connect to your main app is also not hard.
For dns, you can use Amazon Route 53 or other DNS services that include a good api at the dns management level.
I suggest that you focus on using a CMS that is very popular (eg Wordpress or Joomla) rather than something less well known such as Umbraco. Using a more popular system will drastically reduce your training costs--remember that if you supply the CMS to your customers, then they'll also expect you to supply the support for it...

What are the advantages / disadvantages of building in WordPress

I work at a more traditional ad agency and I am the sole web guy here. Recently a designer here redesigned our website based on the popular blog style seen about on the internets at the moment. Design is similar to this blog: http://effektiveblog.com/
I put forward that this would be a WordPress job, due to the designed features (tag cloud, dated/categorized posts, ability to be updated, rss, etc)
However, the non-web people at my workplace are saying they don't want to "do WordPress" and are planning on out-sourcing a custom CMS for this blog-look-a-like site!
As you can imagine, this is very frustrating and back-to-front.
However, as I haven't really delved fully into WordPress enough I don't fully know what arguments to put forward in regards to advantages/disadvantages in building it with WordPress vs a custom CMS.
Any thoughts on what to suggest to non-web superiors? or links even pointing to similar discussions?
I've been in the WordPress world for a few years and my observations have been that most of the "WordPress vs. other CMS" arguments boil down to a couple things:
Ultimately, you could use WordPress for nearly any CMS task, and you could use a general CMS to build blog content
WordPress was designed primarily as a blogging platform, so that's where it really shines. Yes, it can be used for other CMS tasks, but it does blogging best and that's where you'll find the most support and robust features.
More general CMS systems will offer features designed for a variety of content (not just blog posts or static pages), but they won't offer as many features (or as easy of an experience) for the blogging component as WordPress will.
Generally I tell folks that if the focus of the site is frequently updated content that is managed in a chronological fashion (like a blog), go with WordPress. If they're looking to integrate a bunch of disparate content and blogging isn't really important, they'll probably be better served by a more general CMS.
Wordpress is great for blogs and mid size simple websites. It's "static pages" approach is really useful, because you can create hirarchies that are fully editable from admin panel. It's plugin ecosystem is very good also - from SEO to automatic backups.
When I needed to convince some people that Wordpress would be a good idea to a CMS solution (not just a blog one), I created a prototype, and said that I just needed to edit a few php files (all copied from the default template), a few administration tasks and a few plugins and I was all set.
This prototype was really simple: no design, just structure. I made it in a saturday afternoon, and I made a challenge to everyone involved if they could create the same structure I created, with a full admin interface, in less time. No one could. And it's a tested plataform, yes, it's not "all MVC based", but it works and its administration is great to use.
I don't know if you have time to do it, but since is really fast to do it, I'd rather show them instead of just saying it.
One disadvantage of Wordpress is its performance. You may need to look at some cache plugins for your installation, like WpSuperCache. And be warned that if your website, in a long run, is going to have a lot of different requirements, Wordpress may not be the ideal solution.
WordPress is definitely the world's most popular CMS. The script is in its roots more of a blog than a typical CMS. For a while now it's been modernized and it got thousands of plugins, what made it more CMS-like.
Advantages -
Easy to operate-
WordPress does not require PHP nor HTML knowledge unlinke Drupal, Joomla or Typo3. A preinstalled plugin and template function allows them to be installed very easily. All you need to do is to choose a plugin or a template and click on it to install.
It's good choice for beginners.
Community-
To have a useful support, there must be a large community of users, who will be a part of e.g. a discussion board.
Plugins-
The script has over dozen thousand of plugins available on its website. They are the reason WordPress is considered a CMS, not only a blogging script. Strong majority of the plugins is available for free.
Templates-
On the scritp's homepage you can view thousands of graphics templates, that can change your website's look. You can find there both free and paid templates. The paid ones are often more advanced as well as more interesting.
Menu management-
WordPress menu management has extended functionalities, that can be modified to include categories, pages, etc.
E-commerce is available on WordPress
At Designed to Connect, we generally use Woocommerce – an e-commerce add on to WordPress to build our e-commerce websites. As an e-commerce store, you will often find yourself updating your products, pricing, sales, coupons and more. Woocommerce is extremely effective in doing all this along with offering great reports features.
Disadvantages -
WordPress updates their software frequently-
WordPress is constantly changing and growing and it needs regular updates. This is not a big deal unless you are looking for a set-it-and-forget-it solution, in which case this might not be the solution for you as it needs periodic updates.
Customization of a theme can be costly-
If the website was built upon a theme and you decide that you want to make major changes to it, it may be time-consuming to have a programmer make changes to the layout of the theme. If you anticipate needing to make major changes to the theme, consider having a theme built from scratch to meet your needs instead.
Advantages:
Low cost to upkeep / maintain website is cheap
Easy and good with usability on back-end
Tons of plugins (which can slow your site down significantly)
Write your own functions if you know PHP.
codex.wordpress.org, the documentation is so easy
Tons of updates for security
The community, the millions of users
SEO possibilities (when compared to other famous CMS)
Can make a big corporate to small website
Disadvantages:
Not the the most optimum use of its resources (but its getting better every update)
Security (also improving)
Advantages:
Simple
Huge number of themes and plugins
SEO
Easily convert site to Ecommerce
Disadvantages
Customization
Source: Advantages and disadvantages of wordpress

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