Hi Everyone, I recently created a website www.flashculture.com . It all works fine, but because its all Flash based it's hard to get it to do some basic things, such as comments etc. So I was thinking of converting it to WP. 1) Would I be able to keep the same look as I have already got? i.e on the front page, just have a list of titles, rather then with most blogs a title and description? 2) would I be able to keep tabs? 3) Would I be able to keep the other parts of the site, wesbites/games/motion graphics as flash? 4) Would I be able to hook up the current mysql database to the wordpress site (so I don't have to re input everything again?) 5) Are there any themes already out there that anyone knows about that look a lot like my website design already? and if not how would I create a theme that does? 6) plug ins will be very important to me, so will I be able to put in adsense? 7) Can you allow people to upload their own stories with wordpress? (like with digg.com) 8) Can people have their own page? and therefore have a log in/out stage with wordpress? sorry for all the questions, but I have to make a important decision and need as much info as possible! Thanks. FlashCulture.com
I'm pretty sure the answers to most of your questions is yes. It can be done. I think I have seen plugins for most of those features. This sound like a pretty big task if you're not really familiar with Wordpress. . Number 4 could be a little tricky. You may have to import the current mysql database into Excel and try to arrange the columns into something wordpress friendly. I would download xampp so you can run wordpress on your local machine at home to play with it. Once you put a little grunt work into learning Wordpress you will wonder why anyone would do a web site any other way.
is it possible for me to have a holding page on my current domain name, while I'm also setting up the wordpress version behind it? or is that not possible? as for running the local server, that seems a lot of work, how would I set that up, and get WP working locally??
One easy alternative which I can suggest is, keep the site as it is and install a blog in sub domain.like flashculture.com/blog and for 7) and 8) You can allow ppl to create account in your blog. Wordpress has that feature. Also you can limit there access ( suscriber, author admin etc.)