I need some advice from knowledgeable WordPress users.
I want to build a site that presents users with access to classic stories from fiction's 'Golden Age'. I'm thinking of something that allows users to search by writers or by story title and then allows them to select a story and either read directly as a PDF or download an E-pub to read offline.
Essentially, from the front page you would search by title or writer, then be sent to a page with information about the writer and a list of their available stories to select. Your selection gives you the option of reading online or downloading the story.
So, is WordPress a good choice for this and if so, can you recommend a theme and template and appropriate plugins to do this? Technically I'm pretty skilled and could build this by hand, but I think the time has come for me to actually focus on the web sites content and let the technical end take care of itself. Kind of a new beginning for me.
Thanks in advance…
Any platform would be suitable for this. It’s just a matter of what’s best/easiest for you.
WordPress is absolutely suitable for this — you’re indexing and filtering PDF’s — download or read is baked into browsers and always up to the user.
The thing is, any CMS will do this.
Aside from the usual SEO and Form plugins you may not need any plugins at all. Core WP is pretty robust if you take the time to learn how it works and what you are doing isn’t hard.
Yes it is and specially if your site is related to blogging.
I good question to ask is “Am I going to want the blog/post types features later.” WordPress does, of course, blogging, and content type segmentation really well, and the plugin system is a bonus to that. If you want to stand that up with zero effort some time in the future, it’s good to start with WordPress.
If you really know your way around building a content model and CRUDding stuff out of the DB, you might not really need it.
Doable with WP, but you’ll be better of using Next, Astro etc and avoid any overhead from features you may not need at all…
“WordPress is a fantastic platform for what you’re envisioning, especially if you want to focus on content. With the right setup, you can easily create a searchable database of classic stories, allowing users to find titles by author or story and offer both online reading (PDF embedding) and E-pub downloads. I’ve built similar content-focused sites and would be happy to help you get started with the right theme, like Astra or Booklovers, and plugins like SearchWP for enhanced search, and Download Monitor for managing file downloads. Since you’re technically skilled, you’d appreciate how flexible and scalable WordPress can be. Let me know if you’d like assistance building this – I’d love to bring your vision to life!”
WordPress should do the job for you – there are a huge range of approaches to this – pop your request in Ch`tGPT and to be honest it will give you a pretty good scope. I use it even for my own customer projects where they ask me to do something that has custom areas of work as it givers me at least a good guidance.