I’d like to use wordpress

[onon]

But I’m just starting to wrap my head around how to customize it. Joomla would appear to be much more robust out of the gate, where each menu item can be a completely different template, meaning I can easily mix and match my pages/sections. How is that accomplished in WP? I did just purchase Chris’s book, but the answer did not stare me in the face.

[Judith]

Try the tutorials on http://www.lynda.com the essentials and then theme building: also with Chris ;) They are both quite good, you learn step by step (still quite fast and you’ll get loads of valuable tips.

[onon]

Am I able to mix and match templates within one site, or does WP only work with one template? Is it possible to put together multiple sites under one menu, for example? That way I could have different index.php pages for the same site.

[krogsgard]

You could enable WordPress Multisite and set it up to operate in subfolders, such as http://site1/site2 so that it appears to be the same. In reality, the admin side of things are different, with a common network admin.

http://wpcandy.com/teaches/how-to-enable-multisite can show you how to do that.

In general, you can use as many templates as you want. Check out the codex for theme development and also for the template hierarchy to learn more.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development

But to save yourself some time, you could use a sort of “base” theme and develop a child theme to save some time. DigWP offers some I believe. Personally, I use ThemeHybrid more than anything else for development.

[onon]

Thanks Krogsgard. It’s also covered in the Digging into WordPress book, but I just read about it, I’m still figuring out how to approach this, but it sounds like the way to go, at least, according to WPcandy. I usually strip everything out of my theme except a what I absolutely need, which is not much, and then I like to build it back up back in once I know what I want. At that level, a theme is just a menu system, and most themes are pretty similar in that way.

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