Wordpress Blog with eCommerce

M

MikyMouse

Senior Member
Joined
Jan 11, 2011
Messages
803
Reaction score
3
Location
Johannesburg
Hi all,

Let me start off by stating that I'm a complete newbie to web development, blogging etc.

A bunch of friends and I are wanting to start an online blog / forum with the aim of adding an online shop section at a later stage. Now before we begin we want to setup something that will be easily scalable, and that can handle these features from the get go - thus saving us time and effort in future.

Off the bat I'm considering the wordpress.org platform for the site and then hosting with either Afrihost or WebAfrica. Does WP support a forum and eCommerce? How are payments handled?

I see that there is another platform called Joomla and Drupal - any recommendations / suggestions on these platforms? or should I be sticking with WP?

Another great plus would be mobile and desktop apps that allow us to manage our site and do posts from there.


Thanks in advance!
 
Oh and I see that the various ISPs offer a number of different packages which are easy enough to understand, however the only thing that I'm missing is the MySQL databases - how many do I actually need? and Why would I want 10, 100 or unlimited vs only 1?
 
in a nutshell

Wordpress.com - hosted by wordpress themselves. Fairly hasslefree but you wont be able to load your own plugins, themees, etc.

Wordpress.org - you download the wordpress package, and install it on your hosting package
- hosting package should run php, and have 1 mysql database

for the ecommerce bit, look at using WooCommerce, pretty decent and i'v used it on several sites with good success

payments cna be handled by paypal and payfast.co.za (there are others too)
 
naeem said:
in a nutshell

Wordpress.com - hosted by wordpress themselves. Fairly hasslefree but you wont be able to load your own plugins, themees, etc.

Wordpress.org - you download the wordpress package, and install it on your hosting package
- hosting package should run php, and have 1 mysql database

for the ecommerce bit, look at using WooCommerce, pretty decent and i'v used it on several sites with good success

payments cna be handled by paypal and payfast.co.za (there are others too)
Click to expand...

Hi naeem - Thanks for the help.

I did a little research on Wordpress and definately thin I'll be going the .org route for customisation.

great to see that the payments side of things are easy enough to be done.
 
Hosting with a CPanel takes the think-work out of setting up a wordpress site. I'd recommend hosting with Elitehost as they're friendly and will help you within minutes. Web Africa & Afrihost is too big/lobsided to really rely on for advice or even help setting things up or explaining to you what goes where.

As for e-commerce portion, there's loads of options, I prefer woocommerce
 
Thanks halfmoonforever! I'll definitely check them out.

With regarding developing the site, does anyone know of a good free site to host? We're wanting to develop for free (if possible) until we are ready to launch and then will go the full hosted route.

Alternatively we're considering developing on a local machine - is it easy enough to transfer this to a host once ready?
 
Use Xampp - allows you to have a little webserver on your windows box. Setup your website as you like, once you're done, install the Duplicator wordpress plugin to make transferring easier.

you could copy over the files, import database and change 2 small things but duplicator kinda takes care of this
 
MikyMouse said:
Thanks halfmoonforever! I'll definitely check them out.

With regarding developing the site, does anyone know of a good free site to host? We're wanting to develop for free (if possible) until we are ready to launch and then will go the full hosted route.

Alternatively we're considering developing on a local machine - is it easy enough to transfer this to a host once ready?
Click to expand...

Use WAMP

It's similar to what naeem said, just better (;
 
I would recommend neither wamp or xampp purely for compatibility reasons. I've developed sites before in those 2 environments and as soon as it goes native on linux, something went wrong because windows allowed something linux didn't or vice verse

Its very easy getting a quick virtualbox setup, and using something like vagrant is even easier
 
MikyMouse said:
Thanks halfmoonforever! I'll definitely check them out.

With regarding developing the site, does anyone know of a good free site to host? We're wanting to develop for free (if possible) until we are ready to launch and then will go the full hosted route.

Alternatively we're considering developing on a local machine - is it easy enough to transfer this to a host once ready?
Click to expand...

You are overthinking and over complicating things, just get a R5 a month shared host like webspacebar and then work on it there. Even better hosting for your needs will be cheap so just to the host you want to use. You are putting yourself in unnecessary drama judging by your type of questions.
 
halfmoonforever said:
I would recommend neither wamp or xampp purely for compatibility reasons. I've developed sites before in those 2 environments and as soon as it goes native on linux, something went wrong because windows allowed something linux didn't or vice verse

Its very easy getting a quick virtualbox setup, and using something like vagrant is even easier
Click to expand...

BS.

The only thing that will be an issue is if you don't name your files correctly and then pulling in a file with small caps instead of all caps since Linux is case sensitive and Windows ain't
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top
Sign up to the MyBroadband newsletter
X