PHP Application with Wordpress Theme

Woocommerce...that is all.

Seriously though, it is the best way to go. It takes a shit load of effort and work to get to grips with it but if you're wanting complete control over absolutely everything and to be totally unrestricted in how you build your store, it's the best I've found and I've torn apart all the big named platforms out there.

Wordpress is PHP. All WordPress does is handle all those annoying time consuming bits of code that we learn in the PHP course. The logging in to the database(wp-config file), the secure login to the site (wp-login file), the backend that you add and save stuff to the database (wp-admin collection of files).

You'll need to learn the WordPress language. Complete Zac's videos, they're awesome and then just treat it as the CMS part of your PHP site.

I build a lot of stuff in WordPress and there's as many pages without loops as with loops. You don't have to write a loop on every page. You can think of it as writing your site and then using WordPress as the vehicle to get data to the pages. However, don't think about writing a static site and then trying to shoehorn WordPress into it.WordPress needs to be at the core of your site and a lot of planning needs to go into how you're going to move the data around your site and how it's going to be managed.

Perhaps a better alternative would be to go and grab an ecommerce theme, there's some epic premium themes out there. You can also get away with just turning on WooCommerce and then it just requires some tweaks to get it looking how you want.

Hope that helps!