I am new(ish) to WordPress but have a lot of years in development. Most recently I’ve been building projects on the FERN stack. I’m generally comfortable that if a client wants something to look or work a certain way, I can figure it out.
A new large-scale project is calling for a lot of non-technical people to be able to add and modify certain content types after I’ve delivered, so a CMS is needed.
I don’t know how to approach WordPress though. I may be making a mountain out of a mole hill, but it feels like it comes with a ton of boundaries, some of which might be invisible to me at the moment.
I’ve built multi page, fairly basic sites with Elementor in the past. I see a lot of talk about how Gutenberg is the future. Getting locked into using a visual editor and then being bound by the rules of its interface would be bad. Headless, to combine my experience with CMS features, seems to be more trouble than it’s worth in most cases.
It may be early to come here asking questions since the scope and requirements aren’t fleshed out and clarified yet. I just want to make sure that WP is capable of incorporating a lot of custom sections and code and that I can style the frontend as precisely as if I were doing everything by hand.
Would you use a visual editor?
Would you use a template?
Can you point me in the direction of your best learning resources?
Can you tell me that everything is going to be alright?
Sounds like you are looking for either a custom coded theme (using “classic” style with the Advanced Custom Field plugin), or headless.
Hey, As far as i know you can by pass an the editor and write in the code yourself. You should have 3 options The Guttenberg editor, Live mode and Classic mode. I suggest uding the editor and if you need something custom you can always look at the code in the classic view. Is that what you mean?
Also, the best resource for me is to search for the themes forum. Every theme has a forum where people are chatting with the web develper via support…. Id serach for your answer in one of these forums.. My theme is Imprezza and i go here.
If you build your own theme by using php and wpcodex you will be able to do anything. It’s a completely different approach from react/Vue/typescript tho , you ‘ll need to learn wp’s best practices and logic. You’ll use a sql db instead of firebase for example, and you’ll need to write your own queries (with the help of codex of course)