To WordPress or not to WordPress, or similar.

To my mind you've answered your own question! All of that functionality could be accomplished relatively easily with WordPress (and possibly WooCommerce for the shop element).

There's no doubt you'd certainly learn a lot more if you built all of it from scratch, but I'm guessing it would also take significantly longer and a lot of that time would be spent reinventing the wheel as you devise your own solutions for questions that already have answers. That might be good as a learning exercise, but building your project around an established CMS like WordPress is probably better in more practical terms.

If time's not a factor and you're feeling ambitious though...

@Matt, have you gone through the PHP courses already? Do you feel you already have the knowledge and you simply want to save some time at this point?

@Mike - This is my point. What's the point in building from scratch anymore when all the components for a fully functional website are available? I've read a few things about why not to but none of them seem particularly valid. More people who are simply not fans.

@Brendan - I've built a couple of wordpress sites in the past for my own use but without ever fully understanding or learning PHP so I know wordpress quite well and what it can do. The fact it allows someone to build a site with no knowledge of php or html or anything really is cool but, I did occasionally find limitations, chiefly down to that lack of knowledge of php etc.

I've done a couple of days on the php stuff here and have now started writing two sites in php, it's so much better then doing it in just html and css.

I am of the opinion that it is about saving time now. Why spend hours and hours setting up everything to run a site when I can just grab a few plug ins, tweak the styling and I'm done.

I am by no means finished learning even the basics. I'm only just working out how to have a database with a UI to post articles to a page and to have recent articles auto posted to the home page. My jQuery sucks and there's a tonne of HTML and CSS that I don't know about. I spent over a day messing about trying to work out how to have 6 pictures in 2 columns of 3 rotated 15 degrees facing each other and it not look stupid. Had to tweak perspective origin to suit each row of the three rows but I digress.

I guess I'm just wandering, why spend all that time building a site from scratch when it can be done with plugins on wordpress and look and work the same.

Yeah I agree. It is certainly a trade off it seems between getting something setup quickly and not rewriting stuff that is already there and probably better and well tested. I think it's great to use a CMS for a lot of cases, I'm not sure I'd go with wordpress as a cms though. It's great for blogs. But for building and showing some pages I find it cumbersome.

Matthew Campbell I think if you're game for taking on a project like this from scratch you should go for it! As you absorb more knowledge about making things on the web, you really have to put them into practice to master them.

Now, from a practical standpoint you really should build this site with WordPress as Brendan O'Brien justifies pretty well.

However, since it's a personal project and you're learning a good foundation from the Treehouse projects I think you should step up the challenge and go for it!

My 2cents as a teacher ;)

Whatya think Randy Hoyt ?

Thanks Zac Gordon for your input. Always great to hear from the teachers.

I've actually started working for a client on a site that after experiencing Drupal, I have moved over to WordPress. Already, I am kinda wishing that I could just build it from scratch. This may be mad but. simple things like adding a div above the navBar is not working and because it isn't my code, I am having to work out what does what which is time consuming.

Also, WordPress appears to be written so that everything can be edited online live with get this here and get that there functions all over the place.

Yes I can change colours, sizes, positions etc but actually adding to the theme is tricky. I pitched for this job because I know it is within my limited skill set. All that's needed is css changes and to make sure it all works, set up the hosting etc. All easy I can 100% do. I'm going to have a look at the WordPress islands tomorrow and see what I can pick up from there.

I feel I'm at the point now where I'd really benefit from an internship somewhere. Based in cloudy, wet, cold England...I'm thinking somewhere nice like Orlando would do. lol. ;)