Heya gurus, need advice on a concept.  Please.

I'm wanting to mod out a wordpress install and, before I crawl under the hood with my screwdriver, side cutters, and jumper wires, I wanted to run the concept by you.

I want to have a site that is fronted by a full wp install.  All the bells and whistles included.  Behind the blog will live a complete dynamic shopping site.

The theme that I envision will be a three col affair, with the standard wp side stuff in one col and my directory (or contents, or menu, or wtfe) in the other.

I have investigated the use of the wp pages function, but forsee a huge list of parent-child links.  Also not so sure about integration of dynamic presentation within the wp frame.  So my current plan is to use the page function as a directory level page for each category (such as shopping, gaming, downloads, etc.).

The directory page(s), with no child pages, will serve as the index of the category with static links to the various categories.

Now, I'm getting close to lala land.  The categories (shopping>>shoes) will be database driven and completely outside the influence of the wp install.  Seperate db's and the necessary sql are no problem. 

I'm guessing here that I will need directories (folders) that will contain a modified template and style sheet matching the blog to mirror the look and feel.  I can replace the wp includes with the appropriate shopping includes for title, meta stuff, etc.  I'd need to delete the portions of the orig templage to remove the blog only functions (comments, rss, trackbacks, etc.) and write in my sql queries.

And, well thats it in a nuttyshell.  I feel confident (maybe over confident) that I can hack the code to make this work

Am I about to bite myself on the ass, or does this sound reasonable?

Yours truly,
boliver shagnasty

Yikes you're way past me in the WP code... I only got there a little while ago and still hate it. But I'll look again at what you're trying to do next time I have the hood open and see if that seems to make sense...

/p

Domo.  Arrigato gozaimasu.

Dink - im pretty good with wp theme files etc and can help you troubleshoot if you like....

Probably done  or 2 themes a week for about a year 

Thanks m8e.  You'll be the first I ping when my ship runs aground.