Is WordPress for me?

well, in short, wordpress could easily be for you, if you’re prepared to do a little copy/pasting.

using php includes is quite possible, but largely unnecessary for what you want to achieve.

the idea is to (mostly) copy/paste your site layout into a wordpress theme… then dynamically injected wordpress content will be inserted into your design in all the right places.

The deal then, is to take your old content and turn it into wordpress posts or wordpress pages depending on their chronological or static nature respectively.

It’ll be easiest in the long run if you convert your whole site to wordpress. Categories allow you to *easily* differentiate between various types of content.

You can make posts in one category appear as featured news items, while posts in other categories appear as headlines only, or as though they were written on ‘talk like a pirate’ day… there’s no limitation on the difference in display options you have for posts in different categories.

This is all a function of your theme. WordPress provides a framework which allows you to stuff information in a database. Your theme which relies largely on you and your existing design, is responsible for pulling that information out of the DB and stuffing into the right areas of your design.

For someone who has enough php experience to use includes, the learning curve won’t be too steep. You’ll certainly have to spend a little time understanding wordpress template files (in the theme) and looking up some functions in the codex for the correct syntax, but for the most part it’s all within 3 clicks of a google search.

It’s really quite a nice feeling to pull your content out from the design. It just means that posting new stuff involves many less steps than it would otherwise.

Do it, do it, do it 🙂

for the record, I mean that about absolutely any kind of CMS… if you play with wordpress for a while and decide it’s not for you, don’t go back to static pages. Find a CMS which you *are* happy with.

Having said that, wordpress offers quite a lot of flexibility because it’s templating system is just a bunch of php files. Not having a custom templating language means that you can do anything php can do.