Getting Started with WordPress Blogs
Getting Started with WordPress Blogs (2007 edition)
Stephanie Leary
The Texas A&M University Writing Center
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WordPress is versatile...
... but limited...
- Standard version: just one (1!) blog
- Multi-blog versions: many plugins and themes will not work
- Cross-platform, but...
- notifications use sendmail unless SMTP plugin is installed
- clean URLs require Apache's mod_rewrite or a custom PHP 404 error page for IIS
- MySQL only
- Workflow is minimal.
... and a little quirky.
Out of the box:
- Pages and custom fields are not searched.
- Scheduled publishing feature means future-dated entries will not appear.
- Stats are nonexistent.
- Uploads are restricted to audio, video, and image file types. (No Office docs!)
(All of the above can be fixed with plugins.)
- Akismet, the included (and best) spam guard plugin, requires an API key from wordpress.com.
- Themes are ...different.
It is, however, powerful.
- The addition of plugins and themes can turn it into a small-scale CMS.
- Feeds (both Atom and RSS) are generated for just about everything.
- Looking at an archive page -- category, monthly, by author...?
- Append feed/ to the URL for RSS.
- Append feed/atom/ to the URL for Atom.
- Looking at an archive page -- category, monthly, by author...?
- Installation is EASY.
Common problems
- Installation
- .htaccess file missing or corrupt
- bad permissions (file, directory, or database)
- quirky PHP settings
- incompatible line break types (e.g. Mac line breaks on Windows server)
- Upgrading
- wp-includes files not fully updated
- incompatible themes or plugins
Moving your installation
- Old and busted:
- Create SQL dump (structure and data!) from the old database
- Import SQL file into new database
- Copy themes and plugin files to new server
- Create new wp-config.php
- New hotness...? Survey says this is buggy:
- Manage → Export on old site
- Manage → Import on new installation