Wordpress Questions
What servers would we be employing word press on?
What ability do we have for access to these servers? ssh ftp?
How do we set up Wordpress locally?
http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress#Using_the_MySQL_Client
http://www.debuntu.org/how-to-create-a-mysql-database-and-set-privileges-to-a-user/
Might we as well switch over to Php5.4/5.5? (We have a server running 5.4.) - ?
Can we make Magento work with Wordpress?
- Yes. There are plugins that have been developed specifically to make Wordpress and Magento work together that are generally reported to function.
Is Magento the only viable e-commerce site available to us?\n
- No. Especially for clients not expecting a huge shop to be the focus of their site, there is a variety of e-commerce plugins available for Wordpress, such as the free WooCommerce.
Are such plugins secure? Is e-commerce through Wordpress secure at all? Are any plugins secure? Is Wordpress secure? - ? (? likely, with so many using it and the community involved)
Can we have Wordpress function as a common app? (Changing the parent website will affect all its children.) - Probably not. The best we've been able to find is more of a template functionality. We will have to go over each website to make sure it's not broken whenever we update Wordpress, which will take some maintenance/time. (though these updates won't be installed until we are ready for them, and the update itself for Wordpress and plugins is very easy, especially if we program a dashboard for it) An upside is that this will help ensure the security of our clients' websites without us having to research recent threats and how to protect against them. We can make a Demo wordpress and update it, then apply those to the websites under it (mass-editing is possible).
Can any of these plugins be to our advantage? - Yes. There are over 33,000 plugins and a large community behind it. Some of them are of pretty good quality and may even be able to replace some of our old common Apps (slideshow, events calendar, photo gallery, Wordpress itself would replace the Toolbox). We can use them as-is and depend on the developer, or tweak them as we need (would have to make our own updates to them), or make our own entirely (and possibly sell them). Note that we'd be writing new software anyway if we began to 'fix' our common apps.
Programmatically, we will be taking a step backwards, because we'll be relying on an event-driven foundation, not the newly more popular MVC approach.
