SturmB

Yeah, along with the time that I’ve had to think about it, your arguments sound increasingly like I need to just abandon the idea of using WordPress for our sites. So I’ll stick with Laravel for now. Thank you both for giving me the information that I needed to help me to make my decision.

Thank you for replying, @joyously and @bcworkz. That is some good, much-needed info.

Okay, so I’m processing this information and beginning to see the ups and downs of using WordPress for the AA site. On the one hand, creating a Custom Post Type or Custom Page Template sounds like what I’d want to do. On the other hand, its data handling leaves a lot to be desired, from what I gather.

Custom field data is typically stored in post meta by key names, which works well enough for many things, but can be a terrible organization if you will be frequently querying for specific data.

Please define “frequently querying for specific data” for me since I’m not sure if our site would fall under that category. I suppose I could take a screenshot of my database’s visual diagram in PhpStorm, if that would help.

I’m not opposed to creating my own Plug-in, but since I’ve no experience in doing so, it almost seems like re-inventing what I’ve already created with Laravel on the ACS site. I’m strongly considering going that route, since most of it is already created; it would just need to be styled properly. (Don’t ask me how to make those ugly, horizontal pricing and specification tables responsive; they probably just won’t be.)

A custom fields plugin would make building a UI for managing the data easy, but how it stores data may not be optimal for your sort of data. […] With a custom table, you can use any schema you deem best, but then you need to build your own UI to manage data.

As for an interface to make adding new products and prices each year, I’m sure that ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) or another custom fields plugin might be able to serve my needs, but again, I could just use Laravel Voyager to do something similar. I mean, it wouldn’t be pretty, but neither would custom fields, I imagine.

Okay, so if I can’t get any help here, can I at least get a pointer to where I should be asking this question?