Michael Fields

Your Questions:
1. Yes, WordPress is a great solution for your site 🙂

2. In my experience with customizing WordPress, I have to admit that I would be absolutely lost without knowledge of php and mysql… I’ve been using WordPress since version 1.5 and it took me quite sometime to wrap my brain around it… I would suggest that you find a very knowledgeable WordPress developer/consultant in your local area to aid you in development.

3. I would use a theme which I would modify to suite the visual needs of the project. Please be aware that WordPress themes are much more than just templates. Themes supply all of the logic which determines which content to display on the front-end of the site. Modifying a theme can be a pain in the #@!@# though… especially when authors use the css global reset thingy (*{margin:0;padding:0;}) and then have to write millions of lines of code to add margin and padding back to everything…. hmmm, I’m ranting now… sorry about that.

Best of Luck,
-Mike

@stereopoly,
I would suggest that you base you image.php file on the default theme’s image.php… there are special template tags that are not used in page.php. Some of which are:

wp_get_attachment_url()
previous_image_link()
next_image_link()

Also, see this plugin if you do not like how WordPress uses images for it’s previous and next navigation:

http://mfields.org/wordpress-plugins/text-based-image-links/

Pretty easy fix, just add a bit of logic:

<div class="entry">
	<?php
	$screen = get_post_meta($post->ID,'screen', true);
	$screen = ( !empty( $screen ) ) ? $screen : 'path/to/default-image.jpg';
	print '<img src="' . $screen . '" width="160" height="100" alt="" />';
	the_content_limit(600, "");
	?>
	<div class="clear"></div>
</div>

Please let me know if you have trouble with this code – it works in theory, but was not tested.

anywhere should work

Not as far as I know. If needed ths content, I would use a custom query like this:

$spotlight = $wpdb->get_results( "SELECT post_content FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE ID IN( 31,41 )" );
if ( $spotlight ) {
	foreach( $spotlight as $spot ) {
		print apply_filters( 'the_content', $spot->post_content );
	}
}

Note, you will want to keep the query as simple as possible to try to ensure that there are no problems when you upgrade. he query above will pose little problems do to the act that it references on the “post_content” column of the “post” table -> both of which have been a part of WordPress for a long time.

Best of luck,
-Mike

Maybe try one of these functions instead of is_page('home'):
http://codex.ww.wp.xz.cn/Function_Reference/is_home
http://codex.ww.wp.xz.cn/Function_Reference/is_front_page

try something like this:

<?php if ( is_page('home')) : ?>
	<li>
		<h3></h3>
		<iframe>
	</li>
<?php elseif ( is_page('2')) : ?>
	<li>
    	<div class="cloud">
	</li>
<?php else : ?>
	<li>
    	<h3></h3>
		<iframe>
	</li>
<?php endif; ?>