

Ask HN: Questions about Wordpress  - ninetax

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.<p>I&#x27;m a developer but obviously I don&#x27;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:<p><pre><code>  - Can you do enough frontend design to make a Wordpress site not look like a Wordpress site at all?
  - What&#x27;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?
</code></pre>
Thanks!
======
krapp
>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.

~~~
ninetax
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!

~~~
krapp
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](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.

------
devonbarrett
Would a Facebook group not work?

------
drakaal
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.

~~~
ninetax
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?

~~~
centdev
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.

