How to make a theme fully customizable for client

Question

I was wondering if there was some way to make a theme from scratch for a client and have it be fully customizable, or at least as customizable as possible.

What if they wanted to update multiple forms of content, and not just the main content area. Like for example if they wanted to update a div on the left which was the main content, and then a div on the right that was all "News".

I'm trying to do this for someone who has ZERO coding knowledge.

Does it take plugins? If so which ones?

I know this is a noob question but I'm having a really hard time finding a straight answer.

Can anyone help me with this?

Answer 1

I use the Advanced Custom Fields plugin for (almost) all site content. --> advancedcustomfields.com

This allows you to make the post/page entry more precise via text boxes, text areas, and other controls rather than having them use the daunting WYSIWYG editor for html/formatting.

Using the ACF plugin you will have to create the post/page templates and pull the data from the user-friendly data entry pages either by echoing each field on a specific div or you can also make them more dynamic like with loops and check-if-empty conditions.

Here - http://pastebin.com/710U8T7R - an example of my page template showing how to dynamically produce a div table, omitting fields if the user did not fill them up and other error-checking processes.

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I have this idea of manipulating the theme's layout via user-friendly ACF input as well, just that I haven't tried it yet.

Answer 2

I believe that you can accomplish this using Widgets:

http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Widgets

You can have a widget on the left and a widget on the right that are independent of the main page content. You can also create page templates:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages#Page_Templates

That will allow you greater flexibility in terms of layout on a page by page basis.

Answer 3

I strongly recommend taking a look at http://wordpress.org/ and googling it a bit, the download of Wordpress on that site also contains very basic themes, widgets can be added and plugins can be used depending on what your looking to do or use this website for, and whether there is one available, bearing in mind, if you do not host this yourself or with a 3rd party, then you are rather limited in what you can do, you might as well pay for a theme as you cannot edit this, so I recommend looking at this site and how to setup a web server (WAMP - depending on your OS).

You could use a FREE theme if they do what you need, or visit http://themeforest.net/category/wordpress and buy from 100's of themes that are more in-depth graphics and coding wise..

.. all really depends on the end result, and this will help you find out where you need to start.. what would you like the website to do? be able to take payments? is it a blog? a personal portfolio.. good thing about wordpress is you can take payments from your blog, have a blog within your ecommerce site.. let me know what the website will be used for and I will make some suggestions.

I have to say I think the Wordpress dashboard is impressive, you can log in, create a post, a page, add user accounts so that they can login and post also, without having any knowledge of coding.. or even touching/seeing it for that matter, so if you say blog every 5 minutes and have a 20 year old archive, then the scale of it really is good considering you dont know what HTML means :)! - that wasn't aimed at you! Hope this helps.