Education therme or plug-in

In WordPress, theme or plugin is not an either/or question. While in practice there can be a lot of overlap, the general concept is the theme manages the appearance of the site and plugins modify the functionality of the basic WordPress blogging platform.

When choosing a theme, you should be mainly concerned with finding one that delivers the look and feel that you would like for the site. Then look for some plugins that provide the functionality that you need. There is some risk that the different components could conflict with each other, but generally speaking most components play well with each other.

When deciding, try to give extra weight to components that are actively supported, maintained and updated. Some plugins are still OK after 2 years without any change, but still, an actively involved development team that supports their products is a big bonus.

Many people are perfectly happy with their theme as initially installed, maybe with some adjustment that the theme allows for through the customizer. Others cannot leave well enough alone and feel the need to add all sorts of custom code to make the theme truly their own. If you might be one of the latter, try to avoid themes built on a common framework. They are somewhat more difficult to safely customize if they are installed as a child theme with the framework installed as the parent.

Child themes are how we safely add custom theme code to an installation. If there is already a child theme in place, safely adding custom theme code becomes much more difficult. Plugins are less of an issue. We can add any number of plugins, custom coded or not. Just don’t get carried away, all of this plugin code needs to be loaded every time someone requests a page from the site.

Thank you for your generous & clear response.

Would you care to name any reliable plug-ins that would meet my criteria?

I would if I could. Being a coder, I have the luxury of not needing to rely on plugins very much, except when the desired functionality is just too large a project. So I don’t have much real plugin experience. Besides the criteria I mentioned earlier, I suggest you try to stay with open source plugins. You are then free to try out any number of various plugins without restriction. Anyone that’s versed in PHP can help you with any issues that may arise. That’s not to say you should never consider commercial plugins. If they are well supported and maintained and do what you need for a reasonable price, there’s no reason not to.

Watch out for themes with demo sites. While you can get your site to look the same, it may take some work, they often don’t look that way “out of the box”. With themes in the WP repository, you can try them out on your site so you know exactly how it looks for you. Again, that’s not to say commercial themes are bad, just sometimes a little misleading.

If you want to have online tests that count towards something tangible, be sure the scoring is done server side. True story: I once took an online test as culmination of a government training that enabled me to be a construction field representative for contracts that reached into millions of US dollars. Serious stuff, right? I passed the test with one wrong answer, but there seemed no way to determine the correct answer. Inquiring minds want to know ?? On a hunch, I discovered the test was scored via JavaScript on the same HTML page as the test. Anyone knowing a little JavaScript could have easily determined the correct answers prior to taking the test!

OK. Anyway, thank you for all your generous help.