What would it take to have a “custom” site with WordPress integration in a way that’s thematically consistent? Is that even doable?

[ad_1]

I have *some* experience in PHP, though I am also an outright noob with WordPress. Let’s say I want to make a site that does something, like, an imageboard or a video platform, which means writing my own code with a specific kind of header, footer, sidebar, overall layout code and on top of that, my own database.

Now, I also want to have a blog, and I figured using WordPress to create and manage that blog. Thing is, I want the blog section to have the same look as the site as a whole, which means reusing/copying the header and footer code, and maybe the sidebar code to an extent, though the contents of the sidebar itself would probably end up being different on the “blog” portion compared to the rest of the side. Not sure how to feel about that.

So what’s the best approach to this?

* Having the WordPress installed under /blog/ and developing my own theme?
* WordPress installed in root and somehow having custom pages/code?
* Something else?

For what it’s worth, a while back I tried developing my own theme based on a mockup written in HTML, and it seemed like it took a bit more wrangling than anticipated

[ad_2]