I’ve been running a niche job-search web-site for the past several years. I wrote it from scratch in PHP. Essentially it allows members to search for or post job ads. As you can imagine it has search forms, search results and member profiles and all the jazz that goes with that.
It’s come to look horribly dated and, seeing all those nice WordPress templates around, I thought that perhaps there was a way to migrate it to WordPress.
Is this practical? Would I somehow embed my PHP code inside WordPress pages?
EDIT: Thank you to everyone for taking the time to help. All of your comments have been really helpful!
4 Answers
In my opinion as long as your needs are exclusively about looks it’s never a good reason to migrate to entirely different code base. The separation of backend code and frontend site is inherently one of the strengths in web development.
When you you are a lone developer on own project there are roughly three design options:
- Custom tailored commercial design [which you typically won’t have spare mountain of cash for :)].
- Off the shelf commercial/free design, specific to framework used or provided as generic to be sliced.
- DIY design, preferably starting with off the shelf foundation and customizing to your specifics.
You seem to be interested in framework case of option 2, but resource investment you are considering (switching/integrating with WordPress) will be very considerable.
If you operate with money that cost might be better spent on just getting great custom design.
If you operate with time you might focus it on DIY design update. It won’t win design awards, but it will be perfectly usable.
In either case you would have a benefit of individual solution, better fitting your functionality.
