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I just took 2 coffees worth of caffeine and started a very big project: Turning a wordpress-engined blog with a custom theme into a full-featured website.

Can this be done? Is this legal? Has this been tried before?

My searches on google were in vain as I only came up with tutorials to turn my front page into a static one or how to update my theme! lame...

What I want to do: Take my current website and my new blog. Then take the content from the site (database, scripts, data) and the design, look and feel plus the user administration from the blog and mix them together. Is this possible? Can it be done with today's technology? :P... is it legal? Will it bother wordpress if I use their engine to manage my website, with them not getting anything in return?

I want to take my custom designed theme from my blog, the way the blog manages users(register, login, administrator right to delete users etc). I then want to take the scripts I have for my website: content-fetching from mysql, content posting, rating, comments system, custom search and all kinds of scripts and put all of these into wordpress...

Is there a way to do this without digesting the whole wordpress engine by myself? has this been done before so I could follow a tutorial?

THANKS IN ADVANCE to anyone kind-hearted that will lend me a helping hand

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2 Answers

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Yes!

I've used Wordpress to create many large sites, that are by no means blogs. Sometimes the structure that Wordpress uses, with the custom posts + taxonomies, etc., actually makes things much easier than many PHP frameworks.

There seems to be a big discussion in the PHP community as to whether Wordpress should be used as a framework for general sites. It seems that Matt (the founder of Wordpress) actually wants to keep Wordpress as a blogging engine, however the fact that so many users are beginning to use Wordpress for other means looks like this is inevitably going to change in time. The one thing that Wordpress does lack is an effective caching mechanism, so you're probably going to have to use a plugin for this (WP super cache is a good option). However, the fact that Wordpress has so many functions created for you, makes it very much like a general PHP framework, even if many people argue against this.

From personal experience, Wordpress can be a little heavy to create general-purpose sites that aren't very big. However, it can be a dream if you take it on a case-by-case basis and you use your experience with Wordpress to determine whether or not it will make your job easier.

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First, thanks for your answer. I just started using WP 3 days ago, even if I studied it a little before. The real job starts here. So for the moment, I only need the user administration and the current design to work for my website... what I try to do is take out the design right now but it's a pain in the... back end because of the so many spread around css files... :( ... something useful would be a way to delete the parts that I don't need or a way to take the parts that I need... nothing more, no questions asked... also, I try to keep it simple which is a really hard job around WP as i see – Andrei Chirtes Jul 23 '11 at 22:29
With the help of the myriad of Wordpress themes, I would say that the best part of using Wordpress is actually that it makes the design very easy. There are some things to learn about Wordpress in order to use it effectively, but from a design perspective it can be very simple. Also, it's very inexpensive to find a designer/css programmer who will work with Wordpress. – rocketman27 Jul 23 '11 at 22:33
Yeah, I really can't pay anyone else to take care of my stuff, so that only leaves me... Now for the design, yeah, it's pretty simple but for my needs, I had to tweak a little at the style.css file. Anyway, This leaves me with a great design for my website that I can implement in around 4 hours but no user administration method... is there any way I can extract anything user-related from WP and use it in my site? Like registration, login, admin panel? And without any other things. More, some simple php functions used by WP would be nice, like a user verification or login request?Thanks for rep – Andrei Chirtes Jul 23 '11 at 22:39
Specifically what is it that you want to remove though? If you want the wp-admin section, that includes a lot of the functions that are in Wordpress already, and you can't just take out the wp-content section and keep wp-admin, because they both depend on each other in many ways. – rocketman27 Jul 23 '11 at 22:50
Yeah, so I got the design completely. Just had to remove any trace of WP from a page source and bam! done! now... the wp_admin takes care of the whole system,right? what I want to do is take off anything that resembles a blog, like posts, archives etc, but I want to keep the users part: register, login, comment only on the pages I want but which are not posts, just plain different html pages. Also, no connection with WP, at all! Nothing managed by WP engine except users and if possible, comments.If I cant do this, do you know where I could get the user management system by itself? for free?thx – Andrei Chirtes Jul 24 '11 at 1:09
up vote 1 down vote

What I want to do: Take my current website and my new blog. Then take the content from the site (database, scripts, data) and the design, look and feel plus the user administration from the blog and mix them together. Is this possible? Can it be done with today's technology? :P...

Absolutely. Some implementations may be more complex than others, but at this point, WordPress can be massaged and extended to do just about anything.

is it legal?

WordPress is released under GPL. You can do absolutely anything you want with it, and will be fully within the license. The GPL simply does not restrict end-user use in any way whatsoever.

Will it bother wordpress if I use their engine to manage my website, with them not getting anything in return?

See above. WordPress is a very strong advocate for Free Software Philosophy.

What is it you expect that the WordPress project wants in return?

Is there a way to do this without digesting the whole wordpress engine by myself? has this been done before so I could follow a tutorial?

I would start with the Codex entry for Integrating WordPress into Your Website.

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thanks you for everything! Your answer is very useful! I have already taken the design from it, I just need to think about taking the engine part out of it. Thanks anyway for clearing things out about the license. I thought that maybe if I use their software, I needed to post a "Powered by" link or something... Anyway, thanks again, you were really helpful! Andy. – Andrei Chirtes Jul 24 '11 at 1:11

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