I hate WordPress

Danger781

TL;DR WordPress seems to make everything more difficult as opposed to making it easier.

Maybe this is down to how I learned web development through college but WordPress really doesn't bode well with me. In college we learned web development from scratch. In other words, we opened Notepad++ and starting grinding out HTML / CSS / PHP etc. Obviously not the most ideal way of learning because it was often difficult to determine exactly where our mistakes were at without an IDE assisting.

As a disclaimer I only started using WordPress recently so a lot of this frustration may have come down to a lack of knowledge. A lot of that was because the basics are not explained well in the documentation, or maybe I was reading the wrong pages - Who knows. Something that is core to your understanding of WordPress is the template hierarchy and what you actually include in these files. I simply could not wrap my head around the hierarchy until a blog post pointed me in the direction of template-loader.php. The hierarchy finally made sense, a long time after I started. Why isn't this mentioned in the documentation anywhere?

Once I understood the order the files get selected this made the job somewhat easier. What I still struggled to grasp is what the hell I put in the files. This only started making sense when I looked at the Git repository for the twentyfifteen theme. Until this point I couldn't find any examples of how a template was supposed to look in terms of PHP code. Documentation utterly unhelpful.

The site I'm making at the moment has three pages; Front page, Gallery and Contact page. Gallery and Contact were both created via WordPress Pages menu and utilize Page.php. However my front page is a custom coded .php file to output the front page. This has no wordpress involvement whatsoever other than being named front-page and using one or two wordpress functions. This goes against everything I learned about WordPress in that everything is dynamically called using functions, however I don't have a clue how to make the page look customised without doing it this way. Someone mentioned I could widgetise each section but this seems to make my life infinitely more difficult!

Why is WordPress so feckin' awkward? I'm not seeing any benefits in using this whatsoever compared to manually coding in new features via php / js etc..

Am I just stupid? Am I misunderstanding WordPress entirely? :pac:

From what I can see WordPress is more-or-less becoming the de-facto standard nowadays and for the life of me I can't see why..

Graham

WordPress isn't designed to make theme design easy for beginners, it's a CMS (previously blogging platform).

Most people start using WordPress with an existing theme rather than trying to create their own from scratch. Unless you're planning to use this project as a theme-design-learning-exercise, find an existing theme that you can customise. Maybe even look at themes with a drag & drop builder.

FYI, last time I searched Google I found approximately 23.4 squillion references to 'theme design' and 'learning theme design'. If you really want to learn theme design there is an abundance of material to help you.

Danger781

Graham wrote: »

WordPress isn't designed to make theme design easy for beginners, it's a CMS (previously blogging platform).

Most people start using WordPress with an existing theme rather than trying to create their own from scratch. Unless you're planning to use this project as a theme-design-learning-exercise, find an existing theme that you can customise. Maybe even look at themes with a drag & drop builder.

FYI, last time I searched Google I found approximately 23.4 squillion references to 'theme design' and 'learning theme design'. If you really want to learn theme design there is an abundance of material to help you.

It's for my uncles business, so a custom theme was somewhat of a requirement. I actually spent a considerable amount of time going through random tuts on theme design, looked at two udemy videos, spent time trying to learn the hierarchy, and it took me ages to find anything that finally made the whole thing 'click' with me. Like I said I was probably looking at the wrong guides / wrong documentation, but the whole thing just seems so unintuitive to me. I'm just frustrated because I normally grasp things pretty quickly - WordPress is the first thing to get the better of me..

JackHeuston

What I can suggest is that you find a nice, basic theme, possibly similar to what you had in mind, and then you create a child theme of it.

Coding child themes is a lot easier since most of the stuff Wordpress requires is handled by the main theme, and you'll work only on what you'd like to change/add/remove to the main theme. And if you get stuck, you simply go look at the code for that page for the main theme.

This will save you some tedious work, and you will be concentrating only on the details you actually want to work on.

Graham

Danger781 wrote: »

It's for my uncles business, so a custom theme was somewhat of a requirement. I actually spent a considerable amount of time going through random tuts on theme design, looked at two udemy videos, spent time trying to learn the hierarchy, and it took me ages to find anything that finally made the whole thing 'click' with me. Like I said I was probably looking at the wrong guides / wrong documentation, but the whole thing just seems so unintuitive to me. I'm just frustrated because I normally grasp things pretty quickly - WordPress is the first thing to get the better of me..

What's the business, I can almost guarantee you'll be able to find an existing off-the-shelf theme to suit. Even if it's some bizarro industry that only your uncle specialises in, there's thousands upon thousand of generic themes that could be customised to suit.

Theme design is a pain in the ass and to be honest designing a completely custom theme is just daft unless you have some incredibly bizarre custom requirements or a substantial design/development budget.

Seriously, designing your own theme for a one-off project is bonkers unless you're doing it as a learning exercise. Look for any theme that supports/includes visual composer and you can customise to your hearts content without choking yourself on the WP loop.

Danger781

JackHeuston wrote: »

What I can suggest is that you find a nice, basic theme, possibly similar to what you had in mind, and then you create a child theme of it..

Graham wrote: »

What's the business, I can almost guarantee you'll be able to find an existing off-the-shelf theme to suit. Even if it's some bizarro industry that only your uncle specialises in, there's thousands upon thousand of generic themes that could be customised to suit.

It's a local tarmacadam business. By local I mean it's run by brothers and they only offer services around Cork. The URL went live yesterday:
http://twomeytarmac.ie/

You can see by looking at it I still have a lot of work to do. The buttons on the homepage don't work. The gallery page is just some random images to test how the gallery feature works. Clicking on the images doesn't open the image directly and I haven't even looked into how to fix that. The background images on the homepage are crock but that's what they gave me. It also looks crap on mobile.

M.T.D

Wordpress can be a great tool. Creating a website is easy as well. Out put html from Word and upload to your server.
Wether it will look good, display in all browsers, work on a mobile and more importantly get new customers is entirely another matter.
To save you time and effort pick a theme from the Wordpress selection and concentrate on the content and SEO.
Then, if you feel it needs customisation get somebody that is familiar with Wordpress to do it for you.
You appear to have problems with HTML as well in the way you are attempting to style the page content.
Get an hour of training in using Wordpress it will then be much easier.

Graham

M.T.D wrote: »

Out put html from Word

:eek:

WHAT!

Don't, just don't, ever ever ever use Word to generate HTML.

(I'm sure you were joking MTD but someone is going to read that and think you meant it)

Danger781

Graham wrote: »

:eek:

WHAT!

Don't, just don't, ever ever ever use Word to generate HTML.

(I'm sure you were joking MTD but someone is going to read that and think you meant it)

I didn't even know what he meant by that.. Now I'm just confused..

L.Jenkins

What ever about Wordpress, I hate Web Development in general, but it's the way forward I suppose. All you can do is learn.

tricky D

The site you're doing is a basic local tradesman website. As Graham says, there's tonnes of themes out there of the shelf which will work fine for you and messing with themes for what should be a straightforward site is a bad idea for a one-off and overkill.

Graham

Danger781 wrote: »

I didn't even know what he meant by that.. Now I'm just confused..

You're making this much much harder than it needs to be.

1) get a theme (preferably one with a drag and drop builder).
2) customise it.

Done!

If you pick the right theme you may not even need to touch the html.

What you're doing at the moment is akin to buying a roll of fabric for someone that's asked for a new suit.

M.T.D

Graham

Yes HTML output from Word was meant as a joke, but I have seen it done - scary.

Graham

M.T.D wrote: »

Graham

Yes HTML output from Word was meant as a joke, but I have seen it done - scary.

Phew. I'll stand down the assassination team.

Terrifyingly I too have seen it done many times. Often when someone has pasted the entire caboodle into some corporate knowledgebase/CMT :mad:

tricky D

Graham wrote: »

You're making this much much harder than it needs to be.

1) get a theme (preferably one with a drag and drop builder).
2) customise it.

Done!

3) Populate it.
4) Join the social and search dots.

Done!

There's a basic formula I use for these kinds of sites as they aren't complicated once familiar with them. If you get a half decent theme you shouldn't need to do much stuff under the bonnet bar customising it. There's much lower overhead when you make the visuals work within the theme than making the theme work towards your visuals. That leaves much more time to spend on getting the content and other matters right.

Graham wrote: »

Phew. I'll stand down the assassination team.

Safety set back to ON.

Vurnon San Benito

Web development is great - WordPress is brilliant. Easy, customisable, and quick to pump out professional looking websites.

Although, it can be a bit heavy in terms of resources, bit slow compared to other CMS'.

On that note, if anyone is looking for a web developer, do send me a PM :pac:

Seriously though, nab a trade-orientated theme online, create a child theme (3 files or so) and suit it towards your business - job done

Danger781

Thanks lads, I went on a bit of a rant earlier. I'll look into developing a child theme tomorrow and figure out one of the built-in editors. If I have any questions or I get stuck I'll post here. Hopefully I'll be able to grasp it on my own. I think developing a whole theme from scratch might have been a blessing in disguise.

Trojan

Danger781, I think if you had come to this without any web development coding knowledge you'd already be finished. This is a perfect example of the adage "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing"

I'd suggest you install a whole bunch of different free themes off the WordPress repository (Appearance -> Themes -> Add New). Play around with the different themes and settings, find one you like working with. Then go and create a child theme for it, set it as the main theme and start adding your custom code there.

devildriver

Danger781 wrote: »

Am I just stupid? Am I misunderstanding WordPress entirely? :pac:

From what I can see WordPress is more-or-less becoming the de-facto standard nowadays and for the life of me I can't see why..

No you're not stupid. WP is the most platform but that of course doesn't mean it's the best - i.e. the Justin Bieber argument.

Everything you do in Wordpress is essentially a hack.

For me the whole restrictive nature of the theme/template-based structure was so unintuitive. Of course Wordpress is not alone in this as there are plenty of CMS's that operate in a similar way.

So that's why I bailed (many years ago) on the hackfest that is Wordpress and opted for something which for me makes a lot more sense - Expression Engine.

Maybe you should give that a try before you commit to Wordpress. Other options are to check out CraftCMS and ProcessWire.

Graham

WP is the right solution for a number of reasons (theme dev isn't one of them).

It's cheap
It has incredible global community support
If you want to do something with it, chances are somebody has already done it.
There's a gazillion themes.
It's well supported by hosting providers.
There's an abundance of WP talent for hire at all levels.

The only other credible alternative is one of the good site builder tools.

Switching to a niche CMS isn't really the answer to getting a quick and cheap web presence whatever the technical merits may be.

mayo.mick

What do ye think of the Divi theme? Using it on 3 sites and find it great for what I want, plenty of customisable modules.