wordpress beyond confussion

bpb101

Started looking at word press and it seems ****e. However people rave about how good it is.

Can somebody explain why its so good?

Like It come pre loaded with a fúck load of side bars and things like that.
Im in the middle of making a simple website which will register student and allow them to Enter data into a database about where they are going off for work experience.
I dont know even how i would start it in word press and i could bash it out in a few hours in html and php (however im using bootstrap to make in Nice looking and make it mobile and what not)

Graham

Wordpress is a tool and like any other tool it's good for some things and not so good for others. Like many tools it requires a certain amount of understanding about how it works.

I'm not particularly a fan of the 'Wordpress can do everything' mantra but the truth is it's often a very good starting point for straightforward web based projects for a couple of main reasons.

1) with an appropriate theme, WordPress can give you a reasonable looking website with an inbuilt CMS fairly rapidly.
2) if you have a specific use case or set of features you need, there's a reasonable chance somebody has already built a plugin to provide that functionality.

If you're new to wordpress and you're trying to build your own solution you have a few hurdles you need to clear. You need to learn Wordpress as a CMS, you need to understand Wordpress theming (to do your Bootstrap what nots) and you'll probably need to learn to write custom plugins.

Have you looked to see if there's a theme that suits your project rather than trying to build your own? Have you looked to see if there are plugins to provide the functionality you need?

If you can't find an appropriate theme or suitable plugins there's a reasonable chance Wordpress is going to get in your way rather than help you.

It might be worth asking your students, in each class there's usually at least one student who thinks he's a web designer because he knows how to install Wordpress with a theme and a couple of plugins.

Talisman

Technically you don't need WordPress. It gives you a lot of bells and whistles that you won't need for your project. You could write your own PHP front end that populates a database.

Primarily WordPress gives you a nicely polished admin interface that clients like, beyond that it's just PHP. If you don't want to arse about with WordPress themes, there's nothing to stop you from creating your own wrapper for WordPress - it's just PHP.

Take a look at the index.php for WordPress:
[PHP]<?php
/**
* Front to the WordPress application. This file doesn't do anything, but loads
* wp-blog-header.php which does and tells WordPress to load the theme.
*
* @package WordPress
*/

/**
* Tells WordPress to load the WordPress theme and output it.
*
* @var bool
*/
define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);

/** Loads the WordPress Environment and Template */
require( dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/wp-blog-header.php' );[/PHP]
As you can see it does very little. If you set the 'WP_USE_THEMES' constant to false then WordPress won't load a theme.

Where you go from there is up to you.

daymobrew

bpb101 wrote: »

Im in the middle of making a simple website which will register student and allow them to Enter data into a database about where they are going off for work experience.

For this I suggest creating the form with Contact Form 7 and using Contact Form 7 to Database to store the info.

I use WordPress for everything.