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Section I
Before You Start
Lesson 2
Planning Your Site for WordPress
Special Site Functionality
ОглавлениеIt's now time for another list. You won't need it right away, but it's good to have it as you work your way through this book and through WordPress. It will begin as a list of every function you want your site to perform. As you learn more, you can cross some items off the list until it becomes a list of the things your site needs that WordPress doesn't do. Eventually it will become a list of plugins, the add-on programs that provide WordPress with additional functionality.
For the moment, you just need to write down all the things you think your site needs to do. Following are some examples:
● Run a slider on the homepage.
● Allow visitors to sign up to your mailing list.
● Accept online payments.
● Automatically post to Facebook, Twitter, or other social media.
● Allow visitors to easily pin your pictures to Pinterest.
● Create a pricing table of your services.
● Display an events calendar.
● Track how many visitors download certain files.
● Play video on the site (from YouTube or other sharing sites).
● Display galleries of photos.
● Track the number of visitors and other statistics.
● Create forms.
● Have rotating testimonials on the homepage or in the sidebar.
Try to be as comprehensive and as specific as you can with your list. Some of the items in the example here were items from the page map, and that will often be the case. The page map was about where you want things; this is a list about what you need WordPress to do, so you can figure how it's going to get done. Don't worry if it's a long list or whether you're actually going to have all this functionality on your site (at least right away). This is a wish list to help guide you.
Some of these functions, you'll discover, are built in to WordPress, whereas others will require a plugin. And the more you know exactly what you need from each of these functions, the better you're going to judge which plugin is right for a particular function. In any case, having the list can make you a better WordPress user; learning any software is about knowing what you need it to do, not knowing everything it does.
WARNING You're going to discover that WordPress themes may offer to do some of the functions on your list. In some cases that will be a good thing, whereas in others I'm going to warn you not to accept the offer. That's because the function the theme wants to perform is a function you'd want even if you switched themes. In that case the function should be performed by a plugin. This happens a lot these days as themes become more sophisticated; often that sophistication becomes misplaced in an attempt to be all things to all people. I'll be sure to warn you about this throughout the book.