Help on Direction of Building Cooking Site

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I’m building a recipe/food-science article website and could **use some advice on the tech stack.**

Note, I’ve worked in IT for 6+ years (tech is mostly advanced sql) & also build iOS apps as a hobby. I don’t have a lot of experience as a web developer, with WordPress, or with PHP, however given my background think I can pickup the stack quickly. I have a little bit of knowledge of JS and HTML/CSS.

I’m looking for help on the starting direction.

**Website Concept**

The site has 2 overall sides to it.

Side 1 – Articles & Glossary:

Will have articles on cooking and some glossaries showing off cooking techniques.

Side 2 – Recipes:

Think the homepage looking like Netflix, however it won’t be customized to the user. There will be recipes and collections of recipes.

The recipes pages won’t look like those typical blogs you see. It’ll look closer to how NY Times Cooking looks. When you click on a recipe, you’ll see a header, image, the ingredients, and the instructions.

I’d like to build out the ingredients on the recipe page such that I can reorganize the ingredients into shopping buckets (meat, produce, dairy, etc.) vs. instruction buckets (Step 1 – these 3 ingredients, Step 2 – these 5 ingredients, etc.). I’d also like to also be able to tag ingredients with things like Salty and Sour and have that show next to the ingredient name.

On the instructions side, I’d like to build a mode that on the tap of a button it removes everything from the screen except for the instruction & ingredients for that instruction to keep you focused.

I have other thoughts but trying to keep this post short.

**Questions**

1. Is this something that can be built using WordPress?
2. Would you recommend WordPress for this project vs. building a custom web application?
3. Would you recommend starting with a recipe theme and then building a child theme out of it?
4. How would one go about building that focus mode? Does that require building some specific PHP logic to run on the tap of a button?
5. How do you tweak the CMS part of a recipe, given I have custom requirements? (Ex. Soy sauce on this recipe has the Salty tag)
6. Does a page builder like elementor lock you into what you can build? If I built the recipe page using a page builder like elementor, how difficult is it to then build the cooking mode?

For what I’m trying to build, I know exactly how I would do it if building a native iOS app. I just don’t know the web experience to know where to start looking for this project.

Thanks in advance!

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