Wordpress Installation:
You know what makes good blog reading? Reading a blog about installing a blog. That's right. Continuing my theme of tutorials for newbies by a newbie, here's review of Wordpress Installation: It was doable, but still frustrating. Empasis on the doable, and worth the initial effort if you'll be dong small daily webiste updates.
I have some html skills from high school. And I have had programmer friends write me snippets of php code that I know how to maintain. And so while I'm not as "computer newbie" as your grandmother, I'd say I'm right at about the technical level of other people who start their first blog.
Overview of Installation:
- 1. Download the zipped wordpress files from the wordpress site. (And unzip it on your computer.)
- 2. Upload your files (via FTP) to your (remote) webpage server.
- 3. Trigger the files to install on your (remote) webpage server by browsing via Firefox and clicking (like you're checking out from an e-commerce site.)
- 4. Customize your weblog so it doesn't look ugly.
My biggest hurdles were steps 2 and 4. More details below.
1. Download the zipped wordpress files. This is easy. Most people have downloaded a .exe file, and wordpress is exactly the same. Unzipping is just like every other thing you've unzipped. If you've never done this before, maybe you should try installing other (simppler) programs from the web.
2. Upload your files (via FTP). This took hours for me. I've run my own webpage for a couple of years. But I've never used FTP before. Normally I just use the “upload wizard” from cPanel to bring files in one by one. Unfortunately, wordpress has a zillion tiny 2kb files that would take days to upload one by one. (Note to wordpress developers: you should make a streamlined installation that is just one big 5MB file for people who can't FTP.)
Filezilla didn't like me. Neither did the other FTP programs I tried. I kept getting:
Status: Connection established, waiting for welcome message... Response: 220 ---- Welcome to Pure-FTPd [privsep] [TLS] ------ Response: 220-You are user number 1 of 50 allowed. Response: 220-Local time is now 18:18. Server port: 21. Response: 220-This is a private system - No anonymous login Response: 220-IPv6 connections are also welcome on this server. Response: 220 You will be disconnected after 15 minutes of inactivity. Command: USER janep Response: 331 User janep OK. Password required Command: PASS ******** Response: 530 Login authentication failed Error: Critical error Error: Could not connect to server
Google searching for thhe “530 Login authentication failed” led to a lot of red herrings. (The cPanel “autoconfigure option” that edited windows registries? I never figured out why that was.) My eventual “brute force solution” was to log in as the administrator. Instead of trying to login as janep, I used the administrator's name and password. That got me in. It only took a couple hours of frustrated hair pulling to figure that out. But once I was in, the rest of the ftp process was easy.
3. Trigger the wordpress installation process. If it was on my home computer, I would just double-click the desktop icon. Since it's on a remote computer, I needed to use Firefox to go to:
http://example.com/blog/wp-admin/install.phpAnd trigger it via the web. (Instead of “example.com”, I went to http://www.teksciproductions.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php.) Instead of replacing “example.com” with “teksciproductions.com”, you would replace it with “coolname.com”
This is also really easy. After browsing to your webiste trigger address, you fill out some forms (just like a shopping cart.)
4. Customize your blog so it doesn't look ugly. This was by far the hardest part. The "twentyten theme" is just ugly. Maybe it is intentional so all blogs will look different. (I know I would never want my friends to see that design associated with me.) I think that people who install wordpress successfully but never actually blog are discouraged by how ugly the default theme is. Changing the default theme to something neutral would make a huge difference.
Customizing a theme was not easy either. First you have to guess around a maze of a filesystem to find the index.php that you need to edit. (It is in /blog/themes/twentyten/index.php) When you find it, there is too much (obscure to a nonprogrammer) php code forcing unnecessary widgets on your weblog page. And all these “invisible” tags that you don't know what they do, so you delete them and hope it doesn't crash your page, and when it does, you put it back.
The default twentyten theme was too cluttered, so I installed the “classic” theme from 5 years ago. Much less widgets and invisible tags (and also not nearly as ugly...but still ugly.) But at least it was small/simple enough to start customizing.
My big breakthrough was to NOT use pointers to “external files.” In the default, your index page has a “get_header.php” pointer, place for your body, the “get_footer.php” pointer. So to customize, you have to edit 3 separate php files. This is fine for a programmer type. For me though, it was frustrating. So I replaced “get_header.php” withh the 20 lines of code from the actual “header.php” file.
So instead of 3 files (index.php, header.php, footer.php) with 20 lines of code each, I only had 1 file (index.php) of 60 lines of code.
Now I could figure out how to customize it, just like the .php file on my webpage.
Conclusion: Wordpress Install
So that's how installation went for me. I stumbled on uploading/FTP and the customization. The uploading difficutlties were not wordpress's fault, I learned how to FTP better. I'd recommend the wordpress people simplify to one 5MB file instead of a zillion 2kb files, and have a super simple default them that is just one index.php file with minimal php code (like pointers to header.php and footer.php.)
Other people might have other issues. If you're good at FTP, you could get wordpress on your stie in 5 mins. And if can find a "Default Theme" that you don't need to customize with the PHP code, you could be happily blogging in 5 mins.
So make no mistake though, wordpress is amazing software that vastly simplifies daily updates to a website. It's run by volunteers, and they are doing an amazing job!
