Recommend an open source, template driven website builder UI that produces a working WordPress site [closed]

I’m a programmer at a domain registrar and web hosting company. In the past year or so we have branched into custom web design for individuals and small businesses. Currently all our solutions are WordPress-based.

We find that we have a small but vocal group of clients that are not ready for custom web design, and are not prepared to learn WordPress to build themselves a site either. Currently these clients are using our legacy templated website builder solution based on a classic ASP framework that we purchased and customized. While the platform is a complete dead-end, it does have several good features, including sub-page support, galleries, contact forms, product catalogs, and Paypal integration. It is also easier for a non-technical user than WordPress — better at holding their hand with wizard interfaces and big buttons, etc.

Some within the company are suggesting what essentially amounts to an updated version of the same solution, based on Plesk’s SiteBuilder platform. I believe this will simply lead to another dead-end a few years from now. What I would really love to adopt instead is an open source, template driven website builder UI that produces a working WordPress site. (Note that it can be commercial and paid, as long as we have access to the source to customize/maintain it.) My thinking is that the future of the WordPress platform is bright and stable, and any clients that build small templated sites on it will be able to easily upgrade them as their needs grow in the future. In addition, should they later require custom development, we will be in a position to leverage our WordPress know-how, including any plugins and themes that we have customized, to get their job done faster and cheaper.

I’m surprised that after five minutes of Googling, I haven’t found something that matches my description. Maybe I’m using the wrong search terms. I would have thought that such a huge and mature platform as WordPress would already have spawned something like this. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Another way to put it is that we want to offer a service competitive with GoDaddy’s WebSite Tonight, but that produces a working WordPress site. We want a completely non-technical user with no knowledge of HTML to be able to build their site without human assistance. In other words, a nice colourful wizard with big buttons and 3 steps:

1. Pick a theme.
2. Setup page names and paste in your content.
3. Optionally install some common free plugins: contact forms, photo/media album, Google Analytics, product catalog, PayPal integration, etc.

It’s OK if the wizard can’t edit the site once it’s generated. At that point it will be better for the user to learn how to edit within WordPress proper. But the “kickoff” has to be through the super-simple friendly UI. If nothing like this exists, I would love to help build it, but I doubt our management team could allocate the time 🙂 Maybe as a side project.

What you’re wanting essentially is to not have to intervene, to let the customer do it all without needing human intervention by the company other than when things go wrong, am I correct?

Of note, WordPress.com already operates in an environment where the end user can do it all themselves.

I estimate the time needed to build this as 2-3 days. I’m afraid there isn’t anything that will do it all for you straight out of the box. The others have very nice solutions that let you modify an existing wordpress sites design extensively without needing to do any code or stylesheet work, but as you’ve mentioned that’s not what you want.

So you need:

• A multisite, or a root install, that sets up a new WordPress site/install from your own custom distribution ( rather than the vanilla wordpress install ).
• A plugin in the wp-content/mu-plugins folder, that launches your wizard by redirecting on login the first time a user logs in, and then never showing once the wizard is completed
• Alternatively instead of the above you could use a customised installer, see http://www.kurtpolinar.com/wordpress/create-a-custom-wordpress-installer/ and http://wpbits.wordpress.com/2007/08/10/automating-wordpress-customizations-the-installphp-way/
• A page showing themes and a next button here is how to change the theme in code
• A second page listing the plugins you wish to offer, here is how to activate and deactivate plugins in code
• A final page leading to the add/edit pages menu item so that they can add them. Alternatively it can redirect to the admin page of a bulk page creator plugin instead

All the themes and plugins would come preinstalled with your multisite network/wordpress install package, all you need to do is that last step of building the Wizard GUI

I would advise that you’re problem of clients not being ready for custom design is not a technical problem, nor is it a problem with their knowledge, but a marketing/sales problem, and one that could be very profitable if it’s solved.