Some parts of the book may apply directly to what you want to do with your WordPress blog. If you already have WordPress installed on your web server, for example, you can skip Chapter 3.
If you have no interest in running more than one website with WordPress, you can skip Chapter Rather, scan the table of contents and the index to find the information you need. Long story short: Take what you need, and leave the rest. Explore all WordPress has to offer. Discover the basic concepts about publishing a website with WordPress. Understand the different versions of WordPress and choose the right one for you. Get ready to use WordPress for your online publishing. How else can you get your content out to a potential audience of millions worldwide and spend exactly nothing?
There may be no such thing as a free lunch in this world, but you can bet your bottom dollar that there are free websites and blogs. WordPress serves them all up in one nifty package. An even greater reason is the incredibly supportive and passionate WordPress community. In this chapter, I introduce you to the WordPress software so that you can begin to discover how effective it is as a tool for creating your website.
Discovering the Benefits of WordPress I work with first-time website owners all the time — folks who are new to the idea of publishing content on the Internet.
You no longer need to worry about knowing the code because the WordPress software does the code part for you. When you log in to your website, you have to do only two simple things to publish your thoughts and ideas: 1. Write your content. Click a button to publish your content. The following sections fill in a few details about these features and point you to places in the book where you can find out more about them.
Getting set up the fast and easy way WordPress is one of the only platforms that can brag about a five-minute installation — and stand behind it! Both versions of WordPress take you approximately the same amount of time to sign up. Mind you, five minutes is an approximate installation time. You can find information on web-hosting services in Chapter 3. The Dashboard is well organized and easy on the eyes. Everything is clear and logical, making it easy for even a first-time user to see where to go to manage settings and options.
The WordPress software surely has enough meat on it to keep the most experienced developer busy and happy. Each time you use WordPress, you can find out something exciting and new. Hundreds of plugins and themes designs are available to let you create a website that functions the way you need it to. If you think of your website as a vacuum cleaner, plugins are the attachments. When you add them to your vacuum cleaner, however, you add to the functionality of your vacuum, possibly improving its performance.
All WordPress websites are pretty much the same at their core, so by using plugins, you can truly individualize your website by providing additional features and tools that benefit you and your readers. When you come upon a WordPress website that has some really different and cool functions, 98 percent of the time, you can include that function on your own website by using a WordPress plugin.
WordPress website owners usually are eager to share the great tools they discover. Most plugins are available at no charge. You can find out more about WordPress plugins and where to get them in Chapter 7. Chapter 15 lists my top ten choices for popular WordPress plugins available for download. In addition to using plugins, you can embellish your WordPress site with templates and themes. WordPress comes with a very nice default theme to get you started.
Figure shows the default Twenty Seventeen theme, created by the team from WordPress, which is displayed by default after you install and set up your site for the first time. You can find more about tweaking WordPress themes in Chapters 9 through The Twenty Seventeen theme refer to Figure includes all the basic elements that you need when starting a new WordPress site.
You can extend your WordPress site in a hundred ways with plugins and themes released by members of the WordPress community, but this default theme is a nice place to start. Using some of the thousands of plugins and themes available, you can truly manage many kinds of content on your website. Using WordPress as a content management system CMS frees you from running only a blog on the platform. Taking part in the community Allow me to introduce you to the fiercely loyal folks who make up the user base, better known as the vast WordPress community.
In March , Matt Mullenweg of WordPress proudly proclaimed that the number of WordPress downloads had reached , — an amazing landmark in the history of the software. But the real excitement occurred in August , when WordPress logged more than 1 million downloads, and in , when the software had more than 3 million downloads.
The number of WordPress downloads has broken the ceiling since more than 35 million downloads by the beginning of , and the number of WordPress users has climbed to tens of millions and is growing daily. WordPress is easily the most popular CMS available on the web today. It currently powers approximately 25 to 30 percent of all the websites you see on the Internet in — roughly one of every four sites you encounter on the World Wide Web.
Finally, across the Internet, you can find multiple websites about WordPress itself, with users sharing their experiences and war stories in the hope of helping the next person who comes along. You can subscribe to various mailing lists, too. These lists offer you the opportunity to become involved in various aspects of the WordPress community as well as in the ongoing development of the software.
Joining the WordPress community is easy: Simply start your own website by using one of the two WordPress software options. See Chapter 14 for information about migrating your existing website to WordPress. Choosing a WordPress Platform One of the realities of running a website today is choosing among the veritable feast of software platforms to find the one that performs the way you need. WordPress is unique in that it offers two versions of its software, each designed to meet various needs: »» The hosted version at WordPress.
This book focuses on this version. Neither are you able to sell advertising or monetize your site at all on WordPress. Also, WordPress. But even with its limitations, WordPress. The good news is this: If you ever outgrow your WordPress. You can even take all the content from your WordPress.
Self-hosting with WordPress. Unless you own your own web server, you need to lease one — or lease space on one. You need to make sure, however, that any web host you choose to work with has the required software installed on the web server. These older versions, however, are considered to be end of life, which means discontinued in the software world.
With the WordPress software, you can install several plugins that extend the functionality of the platform, as I describe in Chapter 7. So if you have a knack for PHP and knowledge of MySQL, you can work within the code to create your own themes and plugins that you think would be good for you and your website. Members of the WordPress community have created more than 3, WordPress themes, and you can download them for free and install them on your WordPress site.
See Part 4. The self-hosted WordPress. When you configure the Network options within WordPress to enable a multisite interface, you become administrator of a network of sites. All the options remain the same, but with the Network options configured, you can have additional websites and domains, as well as allow registered users of your website to host their own websites within your network. You can find out more about the WordPress Multisite feature in Chapter This chapter also covers some of the various technologies that help you on your way to running a successful website, such as comments and RSS feeds, as well as information about combatting spam.
Shining the Spotlight on WordPress Publishing content is an evolutionary process, and blogs have evolved beyond personal diaries and journals. Undoubtedly, a blog is a fabulous tool for publishing your personal diary of thoughts and ideas, but blogs also serve as excellent tools for business, editorial journalism, news, and entertainment. Sometimes, you find a stand-alone blog that is the sum total of the website; at other times, you find a full website that contains a blog but has other offerings as well products for sale, CHAPTER 2 WordPress Basics 17 memberships, newsletters, forums, and so on.
Here are some ways that people use blogs and websites powered by WordPress: »» Personal: This type of blogger creates a blog as a personal journal or diary.
Blogs are very effective tools for promotion and marketing, and business blogs usually offer helpful information to readers and consumers, such as tips and product reviews. Business blogs also let readers provide feedback and ideas, which can help a company improve its services.
These news organizations often have editorial bloggers as well. In old media, the journalists and news organizations direct the conversation about news topics. With the popularity of blogs and the millions of bloggers who exploded onto the Internet, old media felt a change in the wind.
Average citizens, using the power of their voices on blogs, changed the direction of the conversation. Citizen journalists often fact-check traditional media news stories and expose inconsistencies, with the intention of keeping the media or local politicians in check. An example of citizen journalism is the Power Line blog at www. Professional bloggers are paid to blog for individual companies or websites. Also, several services match advertisers with bloggers so that the advertisers pay bloggers to make blog posts about their products.
Is it possible to make money as a blogger? Yes, and making money by blogging is common these days. Rowse is considered to be the grandfather of all professional bloggers because for years, he has provided helpful resources and information about how to make money with blogging.
This platform provides everything you need to create your own website and publish your own content dynamically, without having to know how to program those pages yourself. In short, all your content is stored in a MySQL database in your hosting account. PHP which stands for Hypertext Preprocessor — and PHP itself originally stood for personal home page, as named by its creator, Rasmus Lerdorf is a server-side scripting language for creating dynamic web pages.
If all that sounds like Greek to you, just think of MySQL as a big filing cabinet in which all the content on your website is stored. The PHP programming language receives that request, obtains the requested information from the MySQL database, and then presents the requested information to your visitor through his web browser. See Part 4 for further information on WordPress theme management.
Web-hosting providers that offer daily backups as part of their services can save the day by restoring your site to its original form. You can find more information on choosing a hosting provider in Chapter 3. WordPress uses PHP and MySQL technology to sort and organize everything you publish in an order that you, and your readers, can access by date and category.
This archiving process is done automatically with every post or page you publish to your website. When you create a post on your WordPress website, you can file that post in a category that you specify.
WordPress lets you create as many categories as you want for filing your content and posts by topic. WordPress is all about preferences and options for organizing your content. On the other hand, using WordPress categories is your choice. Feedback, referred to as comments, is akin to having a guestbook on your site. People can leave notes for you that are published to your site, and you can respond and engage your readers in conversation about the topic at hand.
See Figure and Figure for examples. In addition, if someone leaves a comment with questionable content, you can edit the comment or delete it. Chapter 5 has the information you need about setting up your preferences for comments on your site. This belief is common in the publishing community because experiencing visitor feedback via comments is part of what made Internet publishing so popular.
Then readers can download that content for their consumption. Table lists some of the most popular feed readers on the market today. It has an RSS-to-email service that enables you to send your recently published content to your readers via an email subscription service. You have no software to download or install to use this service, but optional applications are available for your use. To stay updated with the latest and greatest content you publish to your site, your readers and website visitors can subscribe to your RSS feed.
Most browser systems today alert visitors to the RSS feed on your site by displaying the universally recognized orange RSS feed icon, shown in the margin. WordPress has built-in RSS feeds in several formats. Tracking back The best way to understand trackbacks is to think of them as comments, except for one thing: Trackbacks are comments left on your site by other sites, not people.
A trackback happens when you make a post on your site, and within the content of that post, you provide a link to a post made by another author on a different site. When you publish that post, your site sends a sort of electronic memo to the site you linked to. That site receives the memo and posts an acknowledgment of receipt in the form of a comment to the post that you linked to on the site. The information contained within the trackback includes a link back to the post on your site that contains the link to the other site — along with the date and time, as well as a short excerpt from your post.
Trackbacks are displayed within the comments section of the individual posts. This process works as long as both sites support trackback protocol.
Almost all major content management systems CMSes support the trackback protocol. Sending a trackback to another site is a nice way of telling the author of that site that you like the information she presented in her post.
Most authors appreciate the receipt of trackbacks to their posts from other publishers. An option in WordPress allows you to turn trackbacks off if you want to; you can find more information in Chapter 5. Dealing with comment and trackback spam The absolute bane of publishing content on the Internet is comment and trackback spam.
For content publishers, the concept is similar and just as frustrating. Spammers fill content with open comments with their links but not with any relevant conversation or interaction in the comments. The reason is simple: Websites receive higher rankings in the major search engines if they have multiple links coming in from other sites.
Enter software, such as WordPress, with comment and trackback technologies, and these sites become prime breeding ground for millions of spammers. No one likes spam. Occasionally, however, spammers sneak through. All WordPress systems have one major, excellent thing in common: Akismet, which kills spam dead. Chapter 7 tells you more about Akismet, which is brought to you by Automattic, the maker of WordPress.
This means that WordPress enables you to create and publish all kinds of content on your site, including pages, blog posts, e-commerce pages for selling products, videos, audio files, and events. Exploring the differences between a website and a blog A website and a blog are two different things. A blog is a chronological display of content, most often posts or articles written by the blog author.
Those posts or articles are published, usually categorized in topics, and archived by date. Blog posts can have comments activated, which means that readers of a blog post can leave their feedback and the blog post author can respond, thereby creating an ongoing dialogue between author and reader.
A website is a collection of published pages and sections that offer the visitor a variety of experiences or information. Part of the website can be a blog that enhances the overall visitor experience, but it usually includes other sections and features such as the following: »» Photo galleries: This area of your website houses albums and galleries of uploaded photos, allowing your visitors to browse and comment on the photos you display.
CHAPTER 2 WordPress Basics 25 »» Social community: This section of your website allows visitors to become members, create profiles, become friends with other members, create groups, and aggregate community activity.
Blog pages change each time you publish a new post. Viewing examples of blogs and websites I include a couple of figures in this section to further illustrate the difference between a blog and a website.
Moving On to the Business of Publishing Before getting started with publishing, you need to take a long look at your big plans for your website. A word of advice: Organize your plan of attack before you start. Have a good idea of what types of information you want to publish, how you want to present and organize that information, and what types of services and interaction you want to provide your audience.
Do you have answers? Having an idea of what you expect to write about in your blog makes planning your attack a little easier.
You may want to write about your personal life. Maybe you plan to share only some of your photography and provide very little commentary to go along with it. Having an idea of your subject matter helps you determine how you want to deliver that information. My design blog, for example, is where I write about web design projects, client case studies, and news related to design and blogging.
I keep the two blogs separate, in much the same way that most people like to keep a distinct line of separation between their personal and professional lives, no matter what industry they work in. When you have your topic and plan of delivery in mind, you can move forward and adjust your blog settings to work with your plan. Set up your website base camp by registering a domain and getting set up with a web-hosting provider. Install WordPress on your own hosted server and begin configuring the settings and options to personalize your site the way you want it.
Establish your own publishing routine by discovering and using the tools that WordPress provides. Doing so involves more than simply downloading and installing the WordPress software. You also need to establish your domain your website address and your web-hosting service the place that houses your website.
Although you initially download your WordPress software onto your hard drive, your web host is where you install it. You need to consider many factors in this undertaking, as well as cope with a learning curve, because setting up your website through a hosting service involves using some technologies that you may not feel comfortable with at first.
But where do you start? The first steps toward installing and setting up a WordPress website are deciding on a domain name and then purchasing the registration of that name through a domain registrar. Some examples of domain names are WordPress. I emphasize the word unique because no two domain names can be the same. Understanding domain name extensions When registering a domain name, be aware of the extension that you want.
A word to the wise here: Just because you registered your domain as a. So if you register MyDogHasFleas. You can register a domain name for one year or up to ten years. Some people keep a close watch on expiring domain names, and as soon as the buying window opens, they snap up the names and start using them for their own websites in the hope of taking full advantage of the popularity that the previous owners worked so hard to attain for those domains.
My personal website, for example, has the domain name lisasabin-wilson. When you pay the domain registration fee today, you need to pay another registration fee when the renewal date comes up again in a year, or two, or five — however many years you chose to register your domain name for. Most registrars give you the option of signing up for a service called Auto Renew to automatically renew your domain name and bill the charges to the credit card you set up for that account.
Decide on a domain name. Doing a little planning and forethought here is necessary. Many people think of a domain name as a brand — a way of identifying their websites or blogs.
Think of potential names for your site; then you can proceed with your plan. In your web browser, enter the URL of the domain registrar of your choice. Purchase the domain name. After you complete the checkout process, you receive an email confirming your purchase, so use a valid email address during the registration process.
The next step is obtaining a hosting account, which I cover in the next section. Often, you can find hosting services for a lower cost than most domain registrars offer. It just takes a little research. Web hosting is the second piece of the puzzle that you need before you begin working with the WordPress software. Some web hosts consider WordPress to be a third-party application. To find out whether your chosen host supports WordPress, always ask first. Several web-hosting providers have WordPress-related services available for additional fees.
These services can include technical support, plugin installation and configuration, and theme design services. Web-hosting providers generally provide at least these services with your account: »» Hard drive space »» Bandwidth transfer »» Domain email with web mail access »» Secure File Transfer Protocol SFTP access »» Comprehensive website statistics »» MySQL database s »» PHP Because you intend to run WordPress on your web server, you need to look for a host that provides the minimum requirements needed to run the software on your hosting account, which are »» PHP version 5.
If not, find the contact information for the hosting company and fire off an email, or use the live chat on their website if they have it, requesting information on exactly what it supports. Getting help with hosting WordPress The popularity of WordPress has given birth to services on the web that emphasize the use of the software.
These services include WordPress designers, WordPress consultants, and — yes — web hosts that specialize in using WordPress. Many of these hosts offer a full array of WordPress features, such as automatic WordPress installation included with your account, a library of WordPress themes, and a staff of support technicians who are very experienced in using WordPress. Research this topic and read the terms of service, because that free domain name may come with conditions.
Typically, traffic is measured in gigabytes. Think of your web host as a garage that you pay to park your car in. The garage gives you the place to store your car disk space. It even gives you the driveway so that you, and others, can get to and from your car bandwidth. Managing disk space Disk space is nothing more complicated than the hard drive on your computer. Each hard drive has the capacity, or space, for a certain number of files.
An 80GB gigabyte hard drive can hold 80GB worth of data — no more. Your hosting account provides you a limited amount of disk space, and the same concept applies. If you want more disk space, you need to upgrade your space limitations.
Most web hosts have a mechanism in place for you to upgrade your allotment. A good starting point for disk space is 10GB to 20GB of storage space. If you need additional space, contact your hosting provider for an upgrade. The larger your website, the more space you need. Also, the more visitors and traffic your website has, the more bandwidth you require see the next section.
Choosing the size of your bandwidth pipe Bandwidth refers to the amount of data that is carried from point A to point B within a specific period usually, a second or two.
I live out in the country — pretty much the middle of nowhere. I get my water from a private well that lies buried in the backyard somewhere. Between my house and the well are pipes that bring the water into my house.
The pipes provide a free flow of water to our home so that everyone can enjoy long, hot showers while I labor over dishes and laundry, all at the same time. Lucky me! The very same concept applies to the bandwidth available with your hosting account. Every web-hosting provider offers a variety of bandwidth limits on the accounts it offers.
Your bandwidth pipe size is determined by how much bandwidth your web host allows for your account; the larger the number, the bigger the pipe. A 50MB bandwidth limit makes for a smaller pipe than does a MB limit. Web hosts are pretty generous with the amount of bandwidth they provide in their packages. Like disk space, bandwidth is measured in gigabytes GB. Bandwidth provision of 10GB to 50GB is generally a respectable amount to run a website with a blog. Planning will save you a few headaches down the road.
CPU which stands for central processing unit is the part of a computer or web server, in this case that handles all the data processing requests sent to your web servers whenever anyone visits your site. What do I mean by throttle? I mean that the host shuts down your site — turns it off. The host does this to kill any connections to your web server that are causing the spike in CPU use. Your host eventually turns your site back on, but the inconvenience happens regularly with many clients across various hosting environments.
When you look into different web hosting providers, ask about their policies on CPU use and what they do to manage a spike in processing. SFTP is a convenient utility that gives you access to the files located on your web server, which makes managing your WordPress website a bit easier. Almost all hosting providers these days provide SFTP as the standard protocol for transferring files.
You find the settings within the hosting account management interface, where you can set up the SFTP account for your website. In this chapter, I use cPanel as the example. If your hosting provider gives you a different interface to work with, the concepts are the same, but you need to ask your hosting provider for the specific details you need to adapt these directions to your environment.
Mostly, SFTP for your hosting account is set up automatically. Follow these steps to get to this page and set up your SFTP account: 1. Log in to cPanel for your hosting account. Enter your hosting account username and password in the login fields and then click OK. Browse to the User Manager page.
View the existing SFTP account. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the default SFTP account uses the same username and password combination as your hosting account or the login information you used to log in to your cPanel in Step 1. Fill in the provided fields. The fields of the User Manager page ask for your name, desired username, domain, and email address. Type your desired password in the Password field. You can choose to type in your own password or click the Password Generator button to have the server generate a secure password for you.
Retype the password in the Password Again field to validate it. Check the Strength indicator. The server tells you whether your password is Very Weak, Weak, Good, Strong, or Very Strong not shown in Figure , but you find it farther down on the same screen.
This action changes the icon label to Enabled and enables FTP for the user you are creating. Indicate the space limitations in the Quota field.
In the future, if you add a new user, you can limit the amount of space, in megabytes [MB], by selecting the radio button to the left of the text field and typing the numeric amount in the text box, such as 50MB.
The user, in this case, is the same username you entered in Step 1. Leaving this field as is gives the new SFTP user access only to a folder with his or her username. Click the Create button. You see a new screen with a message that the account was created successfully.
Additionally, you see the settings for this new user account. The settings for the user account are the details you need to connect to your web server via SFTP. Whatever you decide to call it, an SFTP client is software that you use to connect to your web server to view, open, edit, and transfer files to and from your web server. Many SFTP clients are available for download. By default, the left side of the window displays a directory of files and folders on the local computer.
Connecting to a web server is an easy process. Open the SFTP client software on your local computer. Locate the program on your computer, and click or double-click the program icon to launch the program.
The Site Manager utility appears, as shown in Figure Click the New Site button. Type a name for your site that helps you identify the site.
In the example, the SFTP server is wpfd. Typically, SFTP uses port 22, and this setting generally never changes. My host, on the other hand, uses port for SFTP. In case your host is like mine and uses a port other than 22, double-check your port number and enter it in the Port field, as shown in Figure Select the server type.
Select the logon type. Choose Normal from the Logon Type drop-down menu. Enter your username in the Username field. This entry is the username given to you in the SFTP settings. Type your password in the Password field. This entry is the password given to you in the SFTP settings.
Click the Connect button. This step connects your computer to your web server. The directory of folders and files from your local computer displays on the left side of the FileZilla SFTP client window, and the directory of folders and files on your web server displays on the right side, as shown in Figure Now you can take advantage of all the tools and features SFTP has to offer you!
Within the SFTP client software, you can browse the directories and folders on your local computer on the left side and browse the directories and folders on your web server on the right side. SFTP clients make it easy to transfer files from your computer to your hosting account by using a drag-and-drop method. Two methods of transferring files are »» Uploading: Generally, transferring files from your local computer to your web server.
To upload a file from your computer to your web server, click the file you want to transfer from your local computer, and drag and drop it on the right side the web server side.
To download a file from your web server to your local computer, click the file you want to transfer from your web server, and drag and drop it on the left side the local computer side. Downloading files from your web server is an efficient, easy, and smart way of backing up files to your local computer. You can use the methods described in the preceding section to download a file, open it, edit it, 46 PART 2 Setting Up WordPress save it, and then upload it to your web server.
Another way is to use the edit feature built into most SFTP client software by following these steps: 1. Connect the SFTP client to your web server. Locate the file you want to edit. Open the file, using the internal SFTP editor. In some rare cases, your SFTP client software may have its own internal text editor. Edit the file to your liking. Save the changes you made to the file. Upload the file to your web server. After you save the file, FileZilla alerts you that the file has changed and asks whether you want to upload the file to the server.
Click the Yes button. The newly edited file replaces the old one. Use the SFTP edit feature to edit, save, and upload files as needed. For this reason, I strongly recommend downloading a copy of the original file to your local computer before making changes.
That way, if you happen to make a typo in the saved file and your website goes haywire, you have a copy of the original file to upload to restore the file to its original state.
Programmers and developers are people who generally are more technologically advanced than your average user. Instead, they use a version-control system called Git. Changing file permissions Every file and folder on your web server has a set of assigned attributes, called permissions, that tells the web server three things about the folder or file.
Each set of permissions has a numeric code assigned to it, identifying what type of permissions are assigned to that file or folder. Typically, folders and files within your web server are assigned permissions of or Usually, you see PHP files, or files that end with the. In case you do need to dig further, you can find a great reference on file permissions at www.
Open the file attributes for the file. Right-click the file on your web server, and choose File Permissions from the shortcut menu.
The Change File Attributes dialog box appears, as shown in Figure Type the correct file permissions number in the Numeric Value field. This number is assigned to the permissions you want to give the file. Most often, the plugin or theme developer tells you which permissions number to assign to the file or folder — typically, or The permissions in Figure are assigned the value of Click OK to save the file.
Some hosting providers have their own WordPress installers that can make installing WordPress easier by providing things like a step-by-step wizard or an easy interface. Check with your hosting provider to see whether it provides a WordPress installer for you to use. You may not be using WP Engine, so your host may have a slightly different utility, but the basic concept is the same. To access the account dashboard of WP Engine, follow these steps: 1.
Log in to the WP Engine user dashboard. Enter the email address you used to sign up, enter your password, and then click Log In. The page refreshes and displays the dashboard for your account. Click the Add Install link. The Add Install page displays in your browser window, as shown in Figure Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3.
Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. WordPress for dummies Item Preview. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! This guide covers all the features and improvements in the most up-to-date version of WordPress. Whether you are switching to WordPress from another blogging platform or just starting your first blog, you'll find lots of advice in this friendly guide.
Skip to content. WordPress all-in-one for dummies : Sabin-Wilson, Lisa Updated to capture all the changes expected to come with the latest release of WordPress, the brand-new edition of this bestselling guide gives you an all-access pass to using this powerful publishing platform to get your very own blog or website up and running—in no time.
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