Wordpress Is Driving Me Up The Wall!!

[paultp]

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I've been messing around trying to get a new site up and decided to use wordpress as it allows me to manage the site easily and also do some other things I want to.

The last site I did was all html/css/php with a mysql database for products etc. and I would quite like to do somethiing similar with wordpress.

Can I have a separate part of the site outside wordpress which is made up of PHP pages and make them look like the wordpress theme by including the wordpress header, footer and sidebar.php in each?

I can shove my own menu into wordpress by hacking the header file but are the premum (or better still any free) themes flexible enough to add "outside" pages to the menu included in the theme?

Finding a theme and getting the site to look how I want it to is driving me nuts!! I could have had the site up and running by now but it wouldn't have some of the flexibility I want to add to it later on without wordpress.

I would buy a theme if I was confident it would do what I want, thing is though; as it is my first proper wordpress site I'm not sure if I know what I want yet.

Grateful for any help.

Cheers
Paul

[Keith]

wordpress will do all the things you mention with a bit of theme hacking

if you decide to buy a theme make sure the designer knows your full requirements

[Lunchbox]

Since you have a bit of php knowledge, try looking at making a custom page template.

Just take a copy of your page.php file, chop out all the loop bit and add in whatever custom stuff you want to add. Then add a bit of code at the top of the page to tell wp it's a page template file as shown here. Then when you create pages in wordpress you have the option of using a normal page or specifying which template you want to use (should be in the right hand bar where you pick post categories. If it doesn't show up, try disabling and re-enabling the theme).

Hope that helps. Good luck.

[paultp]

Since you have a bit of php knowledge, try looking at making a custom page template.

Just take a copy of your page.php file, chop out all the loop bit and add in whatever custom stuff you want to add. Then add a bit of code at the top of the page to tell wp it's a page template file as shown here. Then when you create pages in wordpress you have the option of using a normal page or specifying which template you want to use (should be in the right hand bar where you pick post categories. If it doesn't show up, try disabling and re-enabling the theme).

Hope that helps. Good luck.

That looks like the job!

So if I wanted some php pages that heave in certain types of products from my database (I've actually added tables to the WP database) I could create a template page for each page, include the php to grab products on the template page, then create a WP page using that template?

I want to have some database driven pages that display all products of a certain type each with a basic product listing. i.e. a blue widget page, a green widget page, etc each showing all available blue (or green etc) widgets. Some of these listings would each link to a wordpress post with the specific product giving more details and maybe price comparison.

Are template pages the way to achieve this?

[Lunchbox]

There are 2 possible ways i'd do it. Either using template pages or using a wordpress post for each product, then using categories. You can then use some simple php /wp bits n bobs to style these posts and their category pages differently to your blog pages.

Something else to consider is Datafeedr or something similar as that does all the hard work for you and is populated by datafeeds. Not used anything like this yet but I'll be giving it a go in the not too distant future.

[paultp]

Thanks for the help. I'm going to try the template pages tomorrow I think.

My experience with datafeeds so far is that they are too flaky (in terms of content) to use as they are and need a bit of tweaking and cleaning to get what I want, so I'm going to stick with a database to hold products, banners and merchant info, populated from ceaned data files. Although I am going to use a script to produce some posts of individual products for use in price comparison but these posts will still need a bit of individual editing to get them right.

I'm also really still at the experimental stage, finding out how to do what I want to do and learning what is possible.

[paultp]

wordpress will do all the things you mention with a bit of theme hacking

if you decide to buy a theme make sure the designer knows your full requirements

After another frustrating morning, I think you're right - theme hacking it is!

I'm going for a seperate static site with header, footer and sidbar(s) from whatever wordpress theme I eventually go for. Then I can write articles and product details etc in the wordpress bit and link the two.

Cheers
Paul

[jaller79]

I have found that choosing the simplest wordpress design then changing the header and editing page.php the best example.

Otherwise most themes downloaded have come back to bite me in the ass later when I found there encypted or to difficult to tweak. - or after gone live the meta tags all wrong.

In the end have chosen Artisteer a program to customise themes this lets you choose as you wish -kept things simple as posible 2 column sites with simple footer.


Got sick of messing about with other peoples themes rather than getting a site live.


I can empathise with you


John