Hi. I’m fairly new to Wordpress, and I think I’m a bit out of depth. With the amount of features within WP, the Pro theme, Pro’s stacks, and Pro’s optional addons, I’ve overwhelmed myself searching without really know what I’m looking for. There’s so much documentation with occasionally contradictory advice, and features with similar names (eg. post type, post format, and post template). I was hoping I could describe what I want to accomplish, and be told if it’s possible in WP, and what the idea is called so I can research further. Like, I’m not asking for the whole site to be coded for me, I’m just hoping people can tell me what elements of WP/Pro/Stacks/Addons I could look up. I’ve bracketed what I’ve figured out.
I’m designing a small group portfolio for some artists and myself, selling packs of art assets. I’ve installed a child theme of Pro to play around with, currently using the Icon stack (though if other stacks can handle it better I can switch).
I understand how to set up an account in WP for each artist. I’d like the artists to make a new post in the WP dashboard, set their featured image, enter product text in the post, choose category/tags, and upload a number of sample images. The post should display the featured image in-line with the text, and the sample images should appear below in a grid-style gallery. (This layout would be similar to https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse/set/1513/miks-mixed-cavern-maps)(From what I’ve researched, I would have to edit single.php by hand, as making a post template like this in cornerstone isn’t possible? The gallery I think can be done with the [gallery] shortcode, which I assume I can do by adding <?php echo do_shortcode("[shortcode]"); ?> somewhere in that php, though I don’t know how to format that gallery)
I’d like there to be an archive/category/authors/search results template page (I believe this is editing archive.php by hand, though I may need to also change search.php seperately? Can I force that hierarchy, or am I misunderstanding what Search returns?). I’d like this page to display the relevant posts in a grid of featured images, with the artist’s name and metadata, but without any exerpts or other images. (Example of https://marketplace.roll20.net/browse. This grid I believe can be done with the Essential Grid plugin tied with Pro, but if it can be done natively, I think that’d be better, as I don’t need EG’s fancy options). I’d also like to have a search functionality on this page similar to the Roll20 page.
The front page index.php (I believe I can create the content for this in Pro/Cornerstone), after a static blurb, I’d like to have a grid of the latest (arbitrary number) posts formatted like the archive page, though limited to (arbitrary number) rows. (Again, I know EG can do this, but not if it’s possible natively). I would also like the functionality (in the WP Dashboard?) for the authors to choose one of their posts as their “featured product,” and have a row on the front page that displays these. (The only solution I’ve found is by having them set one of their posts with a “featured” category, but that requires them to go to their previous post and remove it from that category manually).
Again, I’m sorry for such a long and involved question, as this is definitely out of scope for the intentions of this support forum, but I am hoping that the experts here can skim this and tell me something like, “this part can be done with A and B, search those in our knowledge base. That part can be done with wordpress’s C, D needs to be done through editing E.php and inserting this shortcode after F.” Thank you for your help!