Any comments on my WordPress plan?

CMS & WordPress
1

I’ve been debating Drupal vs WordPress for some time, and I think I just came up with a good plan. I currently have Google blogs associated with all of my websites. I’m now thinking of upgrading one of my sites to Drupal, then combining all my blogs into a single website running on WordPress. After I get the hang of things, I can then upgrade my remaining sites to Drupal or WordPress, whichever works best for me.

I have several questions about WordPress, probably more questions than I should put in one post. But I thought if I just gave you an outline of what I want to do, maybe someone could point out any specific things that WON’T WORK, or that will require some extra coding or whatever.

OK, here’s what I would like to do…

  1. Create a series of blogs (or a blog divided into sections), like this…

www.mysite.com/biology
www.mysite.com/geography
www.mysite.com/politics

Another possibility would be to use subdomains, like this:

biology.mysite.com
geography.mysite.com

Would that require a separate WordPress installation for each subdomain, though?

  1. Subdivide the blogs further, like this:

www.mysite.com/biology/animals
www.mysite.com/biology/plants

and maybe further still…

www.mysite.com/biology/animals/mammals
www.mysite.com/biology/animals/birds

  1. Make posts with URL’s that do NOT include dates, like this:

www.mysite.com/biology/aardvark

NOT www.mysite.com//2014/11/biology/aardvark

(However, it would be cool if WordPress would still keep track of the dates each post was made.)

  1. The site I want to convert to WordPress has a folder filled with PHP, CSS and JavaScript files that other sites link to. It also has a database that other sites are connected to. Can I set up WordPress on this site without wiping out these folders? In other words, can folders not associated with WordPress live side by side with a WordPress installation?

Is there anything I mentioned that can NOT be done or that’s going to create special problems?

Thanks!

2

It seems like you might be complicating this unnecessarily?
maybe you should pick drupal or wp. seems like both are pretty complex. might not be worth it to you to spend time learning a system to then just ditch it. Espcially if you don’t have a lot of experience to begin with.
why subdomains? you would not necessarily need multiple installation. you can run various sites off the same install, but if you are brand new to it have diff installs in diff folders might make it easier on you.

in wp you can choose the permalink per post/page that you want. you have the choice of date/year/custom/numeric, etc…

as for

can folders not associated with WordPress live side by side with a WordPress installation
yes but in a separate folder.
In folder a you have your old files. You could add a new folder w/in folder a, and install wp there.

D

3

Thanks, that helps.

It’s just hard choosing between different CMS’s when you don’t have any experience with them. How are you supposed to choose?

I definitely don’t want to try Drupal until Drupal 8 is released, and I don’t know when that’s going to happen. One possibility is to just go ahead and use WordPress for all my sites. If I later see the need for some special feature(s) Drupal has, I can upgrade again.

4

Well, they are both free i believe. Which is a great price for trying stuff out. You can still download & install wp on your local server & start playing w/it & of course if you really want to run multiple site from one install you can check on multisite http://codex.wordpress.org/Glossary#Multisite
but like i said. you might be over complicating it. & in my experience you can do quite a bit w/wp.
I’d love to try out drupal too in the future but too busy right now.
best wishes
D