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WordPress: Out of the loop

Monday, October 18, 2010

18th Oct 2010

So it’s been a week since my last post and it’s been rather hectic here at LogoPro.

This week I’ve been getting my head around WordPress: the installation and integration, the loop and all the associated php that’s involved.

I’ve never really worked with php before this endeavour so I suppose that it’s a good thing that I like to be dropped in the deep end!

I wanted to learn how to use wordpress because as you may have guessed, our blog is run by the wordpress engine. This was originally set up for us as a tool for search engine optimization by another company specializing in the field and we wanted to be able to run it ourselves, make changes and ultimately transplant it into our new website that’s currently being built (watch this space!).

So I began by installing wordpress on my local machine with the help of xampp (a nice little free-ware program designed to emulate a web server on your home machine) which went relatively smoothly once I had figured out how to make use of phpMyAdmin.

Moving on to the next step I fired up my web browser and pointed it at the localhost and was promptly greeted by wordpress in all it’s stock untouched glory! At this point I realised that I would have to figure out how to build a theme so I went in search a good beginners tutorial on how to skin wordpress, there are literally hundreds of sites offering detailed descriptions and it soon became apparent that it was going to be hard finding a how-to that started at my level (no PHP experience). In the end however I found one that stood out from the rest in having a slow step by step breakdown of what is needed to create a theme from scratch – If you are interested I have posted the link to the tutorial I used at the bottom of this post.

So I had a bit of a headache and plenty of hours twiddling my thumbs while I tried to remember where I’d left my “?>” but eventually I had a pretty nice looking theme complete with a widget enabled side bar and some cool looking graphics!

On to the back end! – I remember when I was quite a lot younger I started a phpBB forum for a group of my friends, we all played the same video game and wanted to be able to compete in leagues online but that meant that we needed a place to organize matches and keep in touch with the opposition. Looking back on my experience then was a great help when it came to structuring my wordpress site (pages -> categories -> posts -> comments) as the web based control panel was pretty similar to that of the forum I set up. The only issue I had here was that when I took it upon myself to try and set up a system in which I had two sites that were running from the same blog I couldn’t get wordpress to see both theme’s and suddenly I was getting “unable to communicate with database” errors whenever I tried to load up my second page – I turned to a friend of mine who showed me a nifty bit of code that makes wordpress identify a new .php page as a separate entity: <?php /* Template Name: example */ ?> Hallelujah! (Thanks James!)

So I had:

WordPress installed and working
A lovely custom built theme
A Good site structure
Separate pages outside of wordpress that were behaving as wordpress templates

Great! Not bad for a weeks work?

I upgraded our wordpress last week to version 3.0.1 and it couldn’t have gone more smoothly. What a lovely CMS!

I would love to hear of other problems that people encountered while setting up and using wordpress so leave me a comment, I’m still a learner so I really benefit for taking on board other people’s experiences.

Off topic: I have been following the news on the Chilean Miners Disaster with awe and am really happy that everyone made it out alive and well! Go Chile!

Well that’s it for this week’s blog and I hope you enjoyed reading it (even if you have no understanding of php or what wordpress is).

Stay tuned for next Monday’s post!

Alfie

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WordPress How-to: Click here
WordPress Codex: Click here
XAMPP Web Server: Click here

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