Making good 1st choices? Q's re Premium Webcart, themes, dreamweaver, quickbooks

  • Resolved reel2303

    (@reel2303)


    11 years, 7 months ago

    Hi all,

    I created a (now defunct) WordPress site about 1.5 years ago – at the time, I stumbled around but due to the intuitive nature of WordPress, I got it to work!

    Now, my partner and I have a new idea and are about to create a brand new site. We want to be more strategic in our creation and have been reading up on WordPress for Dummies and even some HTML. Even so, we are still very much newbie/novices (but wanting to learn)!

    The site we would like to build needs to include blogs (with photos), paid and free membership levels, forums, digital download/retail, possibly physical retail. We are fine with paying for plugins, themes, etc. – but don’t want to break the bank with custom.

    We have been researching shopping carts and would really like to use Premium Webcart (and it should handle the membership level piece for us).

    Some questions we are hoping you can help us with so that we make good choices from the onset when setting things up:

    1. If we use Premium Webcart, how do we know what themes work best with it? Do you have any recommendations for themes (or theme sources) that would be compatible with PWC?
    2. We read there is a plugin to make premium Webcart work with WP. We did not find it in our plugin search though? Thoughts?
    3. If we need to customize our theme or site, does Dreamweaver work? Does it make it easy to customize with minimal code knowledge? We have access to a copy.
    4. Is there integration with Quick Books for accounting and tax purposes? (We already know QB). If not, what do people use? What are alternatives? We are hoping to have 100’s of monthly auto-pay subscribers – would be nice to automate for tax purposes.
    5. What plugin do you recommend as best for adding forums (haven’t researched this aspect yet)?

    If you can answer one question or all, we appreciate your thoughts.
    Thanks much!
    Lisa

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
  • WPMU DEV – Your All-in-One WordPress Platform

    (@wpmudev)

    11 years, 7 months ago

    Hello Lisa!

    I’m not familiar with Webcart, but would like to chime in.

    Make sure that if/when you pay for something it’s supported. Don’t go into anything without some kind of service or support on the table as well. It’s so easy for folks to put out plugins and not support them, you want to make sure you use folks who believe in what they are doing and will follow through.

    Most themes will work with any plugins, you may encounter some javascript errors or a few conflicts, but that is bound to happen with SO many opions out there. The best thing for you to look for are themes that are built on WordPress commands and framework. Proprietary themes can be beautiful, and many code to work with WP, but some do not. Those few that do not will be where issues arise.

    As for your theme customization, you should look into creating a Child theme if you don’t purchase a theme with Parent Framework. http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes

    As for forums, you will need to decide which kind of capabilities you need. You can go as big as Budypress.org or as small as a single site plugin. There are many options out there, ask lots of questions to the actual plugin companies before you commit.

    We do offer a few WP tools as well, please feel free to let us know if you need anything down the road. premium.wpmudev.org

    Best of Luck!

    Kimberly

    Thread Starter reel2303

    (@reel2303)

    11 years, 7 months ago

    Hi Kimberly,

    Thank you for your response. I will be very careful about the support offered, especially for a novice like me.

    Thank you for the referral about Buddypress – I have heard about that, will look more carefully into it to see if I need something so big.

    On theme compatability, if Premium Webcart is a shopping cart (that maybe has plug-in to make it compatible with WP), would it still be true that most themes are compatible with most shopping carts? Or are certain themes better suited for different shopping carts? I saw some posts suggesting certain themes worked best with Woo Commerce and with Jigoshop (both of which I have decided not to use) which made me start wondering.

    As for child themes, again, I have read the whole HTML for Dummies (yet have no real experience) and I glanced through the codex you cited. While I might be able to figure out css, etc (after much pain, I’m sure), would it be easier to just create it with Dreamweaver (which I believe is WYSIWYG)? Or does Dreamweave not work to create a child theme?

    I will also ask the shopping cart people what they think. I have read about this particular shopping cart on many forums as being high quality and reasonable in price and compatible with WP. Of course, there may be other options as well – I have looked into a ton of shopping carts at this time but I’m sure I have not exhausted all. I was trying to stay away from just a WP plugin – as I wanted to have sophisticated features like membership levels, digital downloads, drip feeds, etc.

    Thanks again – appreciate your feedback.

    Lisa

    PS Do you think I posted this in the wrong section? I wasn’t sure where to post my questions about theme compatability,

    michael.mariart

    (@michaelmariart)

    11 years, 7 months ago

    Dreamweaver can help you create a theme, but it won’t do a whole lot for you. To do anything worthwhile you need to learn not only HTML and CSS (so you can control the look of the site), but a good introduction to PHP is also extremely useful. Don’t try to use visual editors… they just won’t work. Try to lean how to do this by hand. it’s harder and will take a while longer, but it’s worth it in the long run.

    Dreamweaver will let you create the files, but themes are brken up into many files for a single page, not just one file per page, so using the ‘Design’ mode won’t show it the right way. This gets even worse when you see that because WordPress inserts the links to it’s CSS files dynamically, you can’t see the styles in Dreamweaver, so it will always look wrong, no matter what you do.

    WPMU DEV – Your All-in-One WordPress Platform

    (@wpmudev)

    11 years, 6 months ago

    Many ecommerce companies create themes that work with their software. It’s their way of creating a package for you. Most shopping carts work well with WP in any theme, and these are nice as they don’t tie you to a specific company.

    Most theme designer’s will be willing to work with you anyway if there are a couple of issues that pop up.

    WPMU DEV – Your All-in-One WordPress Platform

    (@wpmudev)

    11 years, 6 months ago

    You’ll find some themes (pagelines i think has one) that you can buy framework that drag and drop, and work just with WP. So you get flexibility and customization without needing a whole lot of css knowledge.

    Thread Starter reel2303

    (@reel2303)

    11 years, 6 months ago

    Thank you all for your feedback on this. I think we will purchase Pagelines. Michael, I will avoid Dreamweaver for now – thanks for the info. I feel I have so much to learn as it is – I do want to learn some code but that will have to be down the line a bit. . .

    Thanks again!

    StillSearching

    (@stillsearching)

    11 years, 5 months ago

    Hi Reel2303,
    I am looking to do the exact same thing however I have not read any coding books. I noticed that you said you will go with page lines. How is that working out? I just found out I wont be able to use just use any theme because most of them are made for a specific shopping cart. I am using shopify and I want to be able to use Premium web cart.

    Let me know how Page lines is working out for you.

    WPMU DEV – Your All-in-One WordPress Platform

    (@wpmudev)

    11 years, 5 months ago

    @ StillSearching

    Have you looked into MarketPress?

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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