Hello
I’d appreciate your view/opinion about the Pinegrow’s WP add-on - I only need to make some in-house themes’ ‘tweaks’, not for a complete wordpress website development!
Thanks
Hi ganr,
The first question to ask is are you familiar with Wordpress and how it functions. Not from a user stand point but from a development point of view. Although Wordpress is touted as being “easy” and “user friendly” the reality is, it’s not once something breaks. I highly recommend that you pick up Digging into Wordpress and/or TAO of Wordpress (you can get them as a bundle) to get an understanding of what is happening behind the scenes so you can properly maintain your WP sites once they start to grow legs.
PinegrowWP is a great tool to create a baseline WP site that you can then build upon to make your custom WP site as you see fit. The problem with “templates” is that they are someone else’s idea of how a site should operate and be setup. Usually they also limit you with licensing on how they can be used and modified. It also requires you to review their innner workings and figure out how they were setup and operate to maintain them.
By building a site from scratch with PinegrowWP and other tools you can then take control of the sites and how they are setup, operate and documented. You also take full control of their license and use without restrictions.
PinegrowWP will not magically create WP sites without your understanding of how to use it properly along with other tools to enhance them. To give you an idea, here is what I use.
Tools
PinegrowWP
CodeKit
Atom
Elementor Pro
VisualComposer
LayoutSlider
Afinity Designer/Photo
Hype 3
Mamp Pro (to setup a developement server)
Bootstrap Studio
Themes
OecanWP w/plugins
Ultimatum Developer lifetime
Pinegrow Starter Template
TeslaThemes Developer Access lifetime
Choka Blocks for Pinegrow
Misc Plugins for WP, Backup, Woo (if needed), etc
Hope this helps.
Cheers,
Vince
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Thanks Vince - as previously mentioned, my intention is to just modify a few templates and add a widget or two to improve functionality and appearance - I have no intention to get my hands dirty with PHP etc. so thought that Pinegrow WP can alleviate the pain…
PinegrowWP is not designed to modify existing WP websites. It is designed to turn HTML code into a WP template, one way. Once they are converted to WP, you will need to use WP plugins and editors to modify the PHP, CSS and MYSQL for the existing WP site. It’s pretty difficult if not impossible to import a WP website backwards to edit as Bootstrap code especially if it has been modified as WP with plugins. It’s sort of like decompiling code. It’s no where near the original source code.
If you are modifying “existing” WP sites, you will need to keep it WP and use an editor and or other WP plugins or the CMS itself to maintain them.
Take a look at these and determine what their licensing options are and their restrictions in ability to modify a site.
Also Elementor Pro, Microthemer and CSS Hero for tweaking look and feel
PS: they run developer sales for unlimited site use on most of these products where you can save substantial $$$ off the license.
Be well,
Vince
Not only Bootstrap code but ANY html code. (using a framework or not).
Sort of meant that but was specific by mentioning Bootstrap as a catch all. Corrected! Thanks Ernoud.