Can WP do what I need?

  • Hello WordPressers,

    Looking for advice. I volunteered to build a website for a non-profit youth sports club. I am planning for certain pages to have blog aspects to them with other dynamically generated content but the rest will be static. I have never used WordPress before and am a bit of a control freak when it comes to coding. Certain pages will have user submitted forms for schedules, player stats, game scores, etc. At the end of the season, team pages will be archived to a previous season page and the new season’s team pages will be generated. A key feature I want the site to have is the ability for anyone who can use a word processor to be able to post, which is what attracted me to WordPress. That way if I leave for whatever reason, the club’s board will still be able to maintain/update the site with ease.

    I am under a time crunch and need to decide what direction to go. I have not had time to play around with WordPress but am curious, with the research I have done, if WordPress will allow me to achieve my goals? I am pretty good with PHP and SQL and can get what I want out of CSS and JS but have only been developing as a hobby for a few years (an inventory system and web based training site for my company) and am afraid that having to learn the WordPress system and developing plugins and themes will be too time consuming and may not even yield the results I want. Will I be able to do the dynamic content beyond blogging with wordpress with <= moderate time? At all? On the flip side, initial writing of the blog style and static pages using WordPress seems like it would be pretty cookie cutter and may save time.

    Any advice, opinions, or guidance is much appreciated.

    Thanks for your time,
    Matt

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  • Short answer, yes.

    Theoretically, anything you can think of can be done with WordPress…

    The issue you might run in to is WordPress doesn’t really natively do “user generated” content very well… You can set up multiple authors with restricted access, but as far as letting anyone add content, it’s a little bit tricky. There are plugins that add that functionality, with various levels of success. EG If you want Coach A to be able to submit last nights stats, you can create forms (using a plugin like Gravity Forms) that can harvest that info, and either a) hold it for moderation, or b) automatically post it somewhere.

    Without knowing exactly what you want to achieve, I can’t make recommendations, but I can say I have developed complex course registration and user management solutions with WordPress as well as a number of dynamically generated user content based sites… Complexity will vart.

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