Some questions about WordPress?

I recently installed wordpress on my personal website to manage my posts and it’s been a great experience. I don’t think you will be able to work it into a preexisting website design, but you can easily edit the CSS of any wordpress theme you find; if you are web design-savvy you will probably be able to make your own theme fairly easily.

I am fairly sure there are wordpress plugins that integrate with various forum applications to cross-link post comments with a topic that the plugin will create in a forum.

One example plug-in that I just found but have not personally used: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordbb/

I use Wordpress basically like a content management system for my website.

You can edit the Wordpress CSS pretty easily, but I believe (last I checked, which was a while ago), the public website actually charges you for this. But if you install Wordpress onto your own domain’s website you can edit the CSS for free. I’m definitely not an expert, but I found the CSS sort of tricky to work with. Like, you have to select a theme and then sort of reverse-engineer it to really adjust the CSS. (There is a good chance you’ll find this easier than I did, though).

As @mzehnich said, there are plugins (one of the big advantages of Wordpress—some of them are almost like “apps” you can install on your website). If you do use WP I highly recommend playing with some of them! It’s surprising what kind of cool shit people can do with websites nowadays…

Yeah I think Wordpress will be the answer to my prayers lol. I just installed it and I am going to get my hands dirty and see what happens haha. I just hate wasting time and coming up with FAIL. However I am pretty confident that I will be able to handle it…might just take some time. I found this site which looks like it could be pretty useful for me and maybe for others.

You might want to look into http://bbpress.org/. It is forum software written to integrate into wordpress nicely (it is mostly written by the same people). Like when you set it up it will share all the user account info with wordpress.

I’ve used WordPress numerous times, the shortest being a couple of days, longest being about 6 months. It drives me up a wall. In my mind it is not as flexible and easy to make it do what I want it to.

I will give a thumbs up for bbpress. Great lightweight forum software. I’ve been using it for 6 months now and really like it.

(I consider myself an OK web designer/developer, just so you have a stick to measure my answer against)

With some HTML and CSS knowledge you can design whatever you need. When I first started with WordPress we were converting an old blog and wanted our writers to go ahead and start using it But we weren’t ready to redesign the site yet. I was able to exactly mimic the look of the old site using WordPress. Our readers never knew that we had completely changed blogging software until we were ready to upload the new look.

With some PHP knowledge WordPress can be very flexible. I am no PHP guru, but after buying a simple PHP for beginners book and searching the PHP manual site when necessary I’ve been able to get it to do just about anything I need it to do.

Yes, if you’re only willing or able to deal with out of the box solutions you’re going to be limited. But whether you start from scratch or just modify another theme, WordPress is pretty adept at handling whatever you need it to be.

On one of my client’s sites they have a vanilla installation running the forum. I haven’t yet figured out how to get wordpress to send any information over for vanilla to use. But I do have the two running without a hitch. Users sign up with Vanilla instead of with Wordpress. If I needed users on Wordpress as well I’m not sure how I would make that work.

Anyway, besides my questions about forums.. Wordpress is fairly unlimited. I’ve gotten it to do everything I ever wanted. Knowing a bit of PHP, MySQL, JS and the like is useful of course.