I have been making plans to create a site that would contain several different sections, such as several blog feeds for reviews and articals, a forum, and also a stock site where people can sell/buy photos.
I was planning on doing this in PHP, but have recently started using wordpress and found it to be very powerful. is a site like this too "advanced" to be done in wordpress?
WordPress can be used for more than just blogs, having recently won an award for best CMS proves that!
The reviews and articles would just be posts, in different parent categories.
The forum could be implented with bbPress (http://bbpress.org) or SimplePress (http://simplepressforum.com)
The buying/selling photos could be done with a combination of either the built in WordPress gallery or a wordpress plugin such as NextGEN (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery) and a shopping cart or paypal plugin.
It would take some integration work, but it certainly is all possible with WordPress :-)
This is not the question you should be asking IMO.
The question to ask is: "Does using wordpress make creating this website easier ?"
If the pages you will be creating are related to the blog posts, then yes. For example, with Wordpress, your posts categories can be listed as sub-menu items.
But, if your pages are not related to the "main" blog, why bother using Wordpress?
You mentioned you were gonna do it in PHP but now are thinking about WordPress. I just found that funny because WordPress IS written in PHP ;). Wordpress has been used as a CMS for a while now and I think it's often a great place to start. I love WordPress but it's not the only CMS out there you should look at Drupal, Joomla, Movable Type, or one of many other Open Source or even commercial CMS'. You may also want to look at other products in the Automattic family such as WordPress MU, BuddyPress and BBPress. I would say using someone else code can save you a lot or time but not always. In certain situations writing your own CMS may be faster and better.
Hope this helps.
But, if your pages are not related to
the "main" blog, why bother using
Wordpress?
It's a well known plataform, tested and used by millions of people;
A Huge plugin ecosystem that deals with SEO, Backup, Twitter, E-commerce, you name it;
A great documentation;
A great admin interface with WYSIWYG editors already implemented;
An interesting approach to use "static pages" along with your posts, so you can have a full blown CMS application.
These are just some advantages. I don't recommend Wordpress for huge enterprise portals, but if you're not doing a complete different way of interaction (like stackoverflow, which is unique in it's way of work) for a website, I think it's a better approach then trying to code everything from scratch.
To write plugins you just use php, html and some functions aviable at plataform's core. No useless XML configuration files, no proprietary template languages inside the plataform, nothing. Write a bunch of php inside a directory, put inside "plugins" and you're done.
Here are some sites that I've done with Wordpress that are more than just blogs:
Driia's Dreams, which is blog and online store for my wife's jewelry business. (I take no responsibility for her theme.)
Barking Mad Productions, which is primarily a CMS for an event production company, with a blog.
Ludus, which tracks the games that we play each week (blog), along with information about the games themselves (CMS).
Craig's Chaos Machine, which documents everything I'm learning about Chaos Toy and Chaos Machines. (Still a work in progress.)
Related
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.
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
I'm building an estimate for a potential client. I'll do some more research if I get the project, but need some ideas for now. I'm trying to figure out a good solution that won't take several months to develop but will still provide good flexibility for future enhancements.
My options I believe are:
cms+e-commerce plugin (e.g. drupal+ubercart)
e-commerce platform that is extendable (e.g. magento)
framework+e-commerce platform (e.g. ci+magento)
cms+e-commerce (e.g. wordpress+magento)
The site will be similar to etsy where users can have items that they sell with their own portfolio page. The client wants to add many custom features as well. Also, the site will serve up a lot of images and audio.
I'm concerned that using strictly a e-commerce platform will give me a lot of obstacles to overcome rather than use just a cart+framework. I know Magento is written on Zend, but while I have used Magento, I'm not very familiar with Zend and it seems to take quite a while to learn.
I have never used ubercart,wp e-commerce, or virtuemart, so I'm not sure of the limitations. The products will not need to be configurable. But we will need to store financial information. I'm thinking braintree's vault or authorize.net cim.
I'd like to do the framework+ecommerce platform route. But the client would also like a lower price option, I'm leaning towards drupal+ubercart.
Just would like some opinions from personal experience.
Thanks!
If you use drupal and ubercart in future please read the book http://www.usingdrupal.com/ Using drupal by reading its chapter of ubercart you can easily create e-commerce website after reading this book ubercart chapter within a day . There is a book which is completely wriiten on ubercart https://www.packtpub.com/drupal-e-commerce-ubercart-2x/book. These both books will be very helpful to you for ubercart.
I've just created an e-commerce store with Wordpress and using the plugin Jigoshop for the ecommerce.
We use Wordpress as our CMS for all our clients and we've also branded it via plugins so there's no mention of Wordpress, it just acts like OUR cms.
Jigoshop is very easy to incorporate, it can be used very easily straight out of the box but as our site was very bespoke we tailored a lot of it just by using CSS. Very easy to use and comes complete with everything you need.
I tried various other ecommerce plugins for WP but they were quite difficult to tailor.
All really straightforward providing you have a basic grasp of HTML, CSS and PHP.
I worked with wordpress and some free open source commerce plug-ins. This was really a pain! I ended up programming my own low scale solution. Later I also worked with ubercart and drupal. The latter was one of my most motivating experiences with drupal. I found that drupal with ubercart can do everything what i and my customer wanted. I strongly recommend drupal...but i've never worked with magento...
I think wordpress is enough because wordpress is now a biggest platform in wordpress with millions of plugins oops sorry not millions, billions of plugins you just have to find a plugin which suits to you and your site content well for e commerce i recommend e-shop 5.0 its a great plugin.
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.
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