Ask HN: Questions about Wordpress | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Questions about Wordpress

2 pointsninetax8 comments

My friends have asked me to help them build a website for our small school alumni (about 500 people) and I was wondering the best way to go about doing this. They need to have an index of people, a way to make donations, a hosted newsletter, and a couple more simple things.

I'm a developer but obviously I don't want (or have the time) to build it from scratch, so I thought I would use Wordpress and some plugins. But I have a couple questions regarding this:

  - Can you do enough frontend design to make a Wordpress site not look like a Wordpress site at all?
  - What's the flexibility of adding new features if I the frontend is redesigned?
  - Is it a better idea to hire out and let someone else pick all the plugins and put it together?
  - Can you give me a recommendation on would could build such a thing for me, or would it be cheaper to do myself?
  - What would these things cost?

Thanks!

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>Can you do enough frontend design to make a Wordpress site not look like a Wordpress site at all?

Yes. One of wordpress' strengths is its theme system. You can find a number of existing themes which are ready to make 'child themes' out of (I suggest looking at Responsive or even 2012.)

Bear in mind there's nothing you can do to keep someone from viewing the source and seeing it's a wordpress site.

>What's the flexibility of adding new features if I the frontend is redesigned?

You have a functions.php to build whatever hooks you need into the API for that particular theme, and plugins are basically global applications which can do anything. The API can be a bit arcane but there's a very good chance whatever problem you have has already been covered in an existing theme or plugin. I would be willing to bet that for what you describe, 100% could be handled with existing plugins, and 90% of the rest by creating a child theme and tweaking. This is honestly what Wordpress was meant for.

>Is it a better idea to hire out and let someone else pick all the plugins and put it together?

I would say it depends on the amount of work you want done, in regards to customization of the theme and custom plugins.

>Can you give me a recommendation on would could build such a thing for me, or would it be cheaper to do myself?

You could do it yourself for free, but looking up documentation and solutions is on you. How comfortable are you with horrible looking mixin PHP? Do yourself a favor though, whatever you do: look up "hardening wordpress", apply what you learn and turn off theme editing through the UI.

Thanks!

Yeah not sure why I said cheaper. What I am actually short on is time. The budget for the project is pretty reasonable, but I really would like to find someone reliable that I can work and communicate with towards getting it done on time.

I am also just trying to find out how maintainable the site would be if I did hire someone to create it. I would want to be able to have functionality added, but from what you're saying about plugins it sounds like that's not much a problem.

Horrible looking mixin PHP is not my idea of a fun time, but I will have a look at "hardening wordpress".

Do you have any recommendations on where go look for a reliable developer for this kind of thing? Or even know someone perhaps?

Thanks again!

Well, it's not difficult to administrate at all.

If you have a local dev server (I test wordpress installs on Xampp[1]) you can have wordpress running on it in literally minutes from download. After that, you can upload it anywhere - although the default is still by PHP, Heroku and Pagodabox will host Wordpress and you can deploy by Git if you like.

[1]http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

You can go on to elance or odesk and throw a dart and hit a wordpress developer, though anyone will tell you to caveat emptor when it comes to those sites. I could do it provided you don't need it done too quick (I have school and a couple of other projects.) Finding someone willing to work on wordpress for a paycheck is really not going to be difficult at all.

Would a Facebook group not work?

You use Wordpress because you like the off the shelf parts.

You can make WordPress look like anything. It is PHP, so if you want you can have a page that is mostly a web App and just use WordPress for the content blocks on the page, but that wouldn't be the most efficient way to do things.

If you have to ask if it would be easier, then it would probably be easier.

Paying for custom design varies wildly. You could spend $50 on a kid in college who may or may not make something awesome. You could spend $50k on a major design studio.

As an SEO I saw both happen.

Thanks! Would you recommend getting the whole thing setup by someone else, or having one person do plugin setup and then another do design?

How flexible would it be to change with a custom design? Like if I add a new plugin, won't the theme from that plugin have to be rewritten to match the new one?

Know anyone good that would be interested in this kind of thing? Or have you had good experience with a particular freelance finding site?

Depends. It can be done by one first. Typically plugins don't modify theme/design, so nothing will need to be done when you add new plugins.

If you need help, let me know.

I would use a $10 a month host like Dreamhost or BlueHost or HostGator, (everyone hates one of those) get it working, then worry about scale.

Plugins vary wildly in how much theme they bring with them.

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