Welcome to the Treehouse Community

Want to collaborate on code errors? Have bugs you need feedback on? Looking for an extra set of eyes on your latest project? Get support with fellow developers, designers, and programmers of all backgrounds and skill levels here with the Treehouse Community! While you're at it, check out some resources Treehouse students have shared here.

Looking to learn something new?

Treehouse offers a seven day free trial for new students. Get access to thousands of hours of content and join thousands of Treehouse students and alumni in the community today.

Start your free trial

WordPress Getting Started with WordPress Getting Started with WordPress When is WordPress Not the Best Solution?

Will I be able to create this website with wordpress?

Hello. I want to create a website that's interactive, but that can be edited frequently, like an interactive blog. I want it to be able to do things like this website https://seeimpossible.usa.canon.com/#!/stories/diagnose/see_advanced_eyecare but I want to be able to post. My idea is to create like a "labyrinth" where each visitor has to pass some "routes" to get to the post, but, I want each post to have different effects, like to be a different page. Should I be able to do this with Wordpress? If not, what would you recommend? I don't want it to have a sidebar or a menu. If I do use Wordpress, would I need to create my own theme? Thank you very much!

3 Answers

Zac Gordon
STAFF
Zac Gordon
Treehouse Guest Teacher

I would say you could pull this off with WordPress, but it would take a lot of custom work. Basically you would already have to know how to build all the custom functionality with PHP and then tie into WordPress to leverage it as a framework. This would definitely take some heavy knowledge of WordPress Development to do, although I would say it would be possible.

Thank you very much Zac! Would you say it would be easier if I do it without Wordpress? Just using PHP?

Zac Gordon
Zac Gordon
Treehouse Guest Teacher

I'm almost wondering if you could just do this using two custom fields:

  • Option label
  • Related post

Then on the front end you could have two buttons displaying the two options for the particular page and then have them link to the two different pages. Would that work?

That's a great idea, I think that will work. Thank you very much! If you were to create an interactive blog, with very complex animations, which programs would you use? And which programming languages? Again, thank you Zac! Your class is amazing!

If you're ok with having animations be in a discrete area of your pages, you could look at Revolution Slider as a way to create some short animated slides. You can create clickable elements in the slider that the user would need to click on to access a different page, post, whatever. You can make it pretty big, and play with the timing for the different elements. You could create as many as you want and drop them into different parts of your site as you wish. So at the end of a post or page, you could add one that the user needs to click somewhere within to access the next thing. http://codecanyon.net/item/slider-revolution-responsive-wordpress-plugin/2751380

It's nothing on the scale of the site you shared, and would take time to create the elements you want, but it's certainly much faster than learning everything necessary to do the heavy lifting for an integration like what Zac mentioned.

Thank you, thank you! That's a great idea! Would you that in site like the one I showed Wordpress would be of help? If not, what would you use?

If I understand your question you're wondering if this is something to use in WordPress - yes, it's a WordPress plugin. Or did you mean something else?

Oh, okay, thank you. I was wondering that, if I learn a lot of programming, would it be helpful to do this interactive blog with wordpress or just with HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc.? Or, because I need the web page to be able to have posts, I'll need a CMS?

You could use both in an integrated system. Doing the fancy animation pages in one language, and then adding navigation links to and from a WordPress blog installation. If it were my project, I'd probably stick to WordPress, perhaps adding a custom template or two and drop the code you mentioned into my WP setup.

Wayne Priestley
Wayne Priestley
19,579 Points

Hey Karla,

I can tell you that you won't be able to have a website like that with Wordpress. Something like that is going to take a lot of knowledge with javascript, css and probably more I would imagine.
Sorry I can't be of more help.

Don't worry, thank you for answering!