I’m learning WordPress and migrating a site I built using plain HTML, CSS, jQuery, and PHP over to it. I’ve found that, using shortcodes, I can pull values from the database and display them on the frontend.
I’m using the free version of Elementor.
What I want to know is: can I fetch data directly from PHP and build the layout with iteration using Elementor, on top of that data? Obviously, I don’t know how many records I’ll be retrieving (it could be 5, 7, or 1,000 from the database). In other words, I’d like to pull a styled container and somehow inject each data item into it (each one inside a styled container), without having to worry about how many items are coming.
From what I’ve seen on ChatGPT, Google, etc., the typical suggestions are:
use the paid version of Elementor with something called Custom Fields (ACF), which I don’t want to pay for,
manually build everything with PHP using loops and string concatenation, which I’d like to avoid,
or fetch everything to the front and handle it with JavaScript.
Since my site will need to pull different sets of data on different pages (meaning I’ll need to iterate over that data and build layouts dynamically), if the answer is that Elementor can’t really handle this, then it seems like I would’ve been better off just skipping WordPress and doing it the traditional way.
So I’m wondering: what’s the actual advantage of using WordPress for these kinds of sites? Is it only useful when the content is fixed—static text and images?