WordPress

The title says it all.

This is a test for the twitter api thingy I’m working on.

Next in setting up my blogs, I like to change the URL that WordPress uses to archive the posts.

Click on “Settings”

Click on “Permalinks”

You can see that from here you can change from the Default permalink structure to a customized one. As you click the radio buttons for the Common Settings you will notice the Custom Structure change.

For instance when you click: Day and name

the Custom Structure shows: /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

I set up my Custom WordPress Permalink Structure to /%category%/%postname%/

I use the category and postname (or title of the post) for SEO (search engine optimization).

I just tested to see what would happen if you have two categories assigned to the post. The first category in alphabetical order will come up as the one used in the URL structure.

Setting up WordPress with my host is easy, they have it as a click and install. I’m using mediatemple.net

I’ve clicked “Install Application” and got the install page.

I’ve changed the Website path to recipe.aquanda.com as this is for my recipe blog.

I change the Database configuration for each of my blogs and I keep them in separate databases. For this one I’ve named it wp_recipe.

This is very important, I also change the Database table prefix from wp_ to something else. Like wpnew_. This makes it harder for someone who is trying to exploit WordPress sites to get mine. The exploit will look for wp_ and I always make it something else.

This part is fun, I get to give my blog it’s Blog Title: My Recipe Blog. I added my e-mail address and hit “Install WordPress.”

WordPress says “Success!” and gives me an username of admin and a password. It shows me the “Log In” button and I click it.

I’m now at the WordPress login page. http://yourdomain.com/wp-login.php

Now, the first thing I do when starting a new blog is add a new user that is NOT admin.

Click on “Users”

Under “Add New User” put in your information.

Make sure you change the role to “Administrator.”

Click on “Add User”

The “admin” user is BAD. A hacker could possibly attack your blog because of this. Now that we have ourselves as a new user, we can delete the “admin” user.

Check the box next to “admin”

Click “Delete”

Ouch, and it won’t let me delete the current user. I have to sign off then sign back on as the new user I just created.

Click “Log Out”

Enter your new user information and click “Log In”

Click “Users”

Check the box next to “admin” and click “Delete” then click “Confirm Deletion”

Excellent! My new WordPress blog is ready to go.

Let’s personalize your new blog some.

Click on “Design”

Change your Tagline to your new Tagline.

Step 1: Blog what you enjoy/know/Love

It’s time for a new blog for myself, and this one is really for myself. I’ve been cooking a lot lately and I’ve been wanting to keep track of the recipes I’ve changed. I enjoy doing blogs so I thought I would create a recipe blog for myself.

I’ll be blogging here about my steps for setting up this personal recipe blog.

I’ve done blogs in the past on subjects I thought would make money rather than what I really enjoyed. They didn’t make as much money as I thought and I did not enjoy it as much as my blogs where I was enjoying myself. And I make more money on my enjoyment blogs, not my reach for riches blogs.

Step 2: Use WordPress

The second step to starting a blog is choosing which blogging platform to use. I’ve already got this step covered for myself because I researched and even read several books on blogging a year or so ago. If you have not made up your mind trying to choose a blogging platform can make your head spin. I choose and am still pleased with the WordPress blogging platform. I like the flexibility it gives me to make a unique blog.

Step 3: Use the Theses Theme

The next step for me is having a way to control all that flexibility that WordPress uses. I’ve done coding before and know you can get into the guts of WordPress but I really don’t want to spend my time doing that. I searched, researched, tried and tested lots of WordPress themes. Themes are written so a non-coder can get to the flexibility of WordPress without having to do the coding. It is an interface with WordPress.

After lots of looking I found the Thesis Theme for WordPress. I’ve watched as this theme has matured into a fantastic interface for WordPress. In fact, I have not even used the latest release. I’ll be blogging about my experiences with the newest release here on this blog as I create my recipe blog.

Disclaimer: This blog is run on the Thesis Theme and if you buy it from clicking from here, I get a small amount of money. I would re-buy the theme today, I like it so much.

When you are searching for Wordpress Theme Options, be sure to consider the Thesis theme. It might not be for everyone, if you like to tweak the Wordpress files than this theme option is not for you.

However, if you want a theme that has a control panel to handle the most common issues and one place to make your style changes than the Thesis theme might be what you are looking for.

With the Thesis Wordpress Theme Option, you get a wonderful, easy to use control panel to set up things like how to handle the header area. Do you want your own graphic? Do you want this theme option to allow you to show the title and tag lines of your blog?

The control panel also allows you to set up your blog’s feed to work the best with Wordpress. You can use the control panel to set what pages you want for your Navigation or Category pages. You can really easily set up Google Analytics or any other statistics software. The control is so easy that it makes it hard to use a Wordpress Theme option that does NOT have this awesome of control panel.

To change the styling of your blog you change a single file within the Thesis Theme if you choose this as your Wordpress theme option. You can see my .custom page for the Blue Blog by clicking on this: Yancey’s Custom Style Sheet for the Blue Blog. The Blue blog of course uses the Thesis Wordpress Theme Option.

It’s great that you got your new blog going. I like the way you have used the Thesis theme for WordPress. You can see now why I really like to recommend it.

This is important, this is the first step I always take when working with a new blog and plugins.

Install Plugin Central for WordPress

Without Plugin Central you have to download then upload the plugin. With Plugin Central all you do is put in the name of the plugin and hit “Install Plugins” which is soooo much easier.

Step 1: Download Plugin Central to your hard drive.

Go to Wordpress plugin Directory page for Plugin Central and click on “Download.”

Step 2: Upload the Plugin Central folder to the plugins folder

Your WordPress blog files have a folder specifically for you to put new plugins in. It is in the folder “wp-content.” Here is the path with my host:
topcolorblogs.com/html/wp-content/plugins

There are already two plugins in the folder, Akismet which is in a folder and hello.php which is a single file. Most plugins will be in their own folder.

The Plugin Central folder needs to go in the plugins folder.

There are many ways to do this. One way is to use your FTP program to open your WordPress site folder on your hosted server and then to navigate to the plugin folder.

I’m using Dreamweaver and have a copy of my site on my hard drive. I copied the Plugin Central folder to my hard drive folder then used Dreamweaver to upload to the hosting server.

Activate the Plugin from WordPress Dashboard

Go to your admin area for your blog or as WordPress calls it your “Dashboard.” If you do not have a quick link to it you can just type “wp-admin” after your blog url to get there.

Click on “Plugins” which is in the upper right corner.
Click on “Activate” next to Plugin Central.

Notice that now Plugin Central is next to Plugins and Plugin Editor on the navigational bar.

Click on “Plugin Central”

Now you can just enter the name of the next plugin you want to add.

Rockie, I want you to put in “Google XML Sitemaps.” You need this next with your Rockie’s Ghost Riders! super blog. (another Thesis theme blog)

I know there are other plugins like Plugin Central for controlling your plugins for WordPress. If you are using another plugin, please leave a comment below and let me know which one you like.

Those new to plugins might also want to read the WordPress page on Managing Plugins.

If you go the Vladimir Prelovac’s page, he wrote Plugin Central, you see that he has listed “All in One SEO Pack.” If you are using the Thesis theme for WordPress, you DO NOT NEED THIS. The Thesis theme was written from the ground up with SEO in mind. In fact, author of Thesis is well known in the SEO industry. Rockie, do not add the “All in One SEO Pack.”

Hey Rockie,

You were right in asking me, I’ve been using cformsII a lot lately so I know I can help you. I wrote step by step instructions for how I put together my Contact Page but I can tell you some more tidbids here.

The biggest thing in cformsII is to keep hitting “Update Settings” if you don’t that next action could erase the last things you did. Last night I was working on the Form Settings for an Artist Interview questionnaire and I had made a lot of changes to Fields then I deleted a field that I did not need. Bad move, I should have clicked “Update Settings” first to save all my work, then hit the delete.

As for Styling, most people want to change the basic form style. This is where it can get confusing until you have played with the cformsII plugin for WordPress for a little while.

Read this to avoid a problem. I found that I could NOT simply reload a page I was previewing either published or not and have the changes I made in cformsII show up. This was while I was changing the Style of the form. I had to go to the Dashboard and “Save” my page/post again to make the changes. Even thought there were no changes to the page on the dashboard, the form needed the save to show the latest changes. So if reload does not show your change, go to the DashBoard and “Save” the page.

I had to do this dance to see the different form styles that cformsII plugin for WordPress had.

Caveat: This could have happened because I just installed the WP Super Cache plugin for WordPress.

Here is another bit a quirkiness that I experienced.

The Styling page is for the last form you were working on. You can NOT change forms from this page. If you have two or more forms, make sure you have chosen the correct one before clicking on the “Style” button.

If you go back to Form Settings, it will default back to the 1st form so if you are still working on another form you will need to select it first.

Best tip for cformsII plugin for WordPress: Pay very careful attention to the settings and do not assume.

Thesis Theme for WordPress Steps

Rockie, I know you are using the Thesis theme for WordPress. Here are the steps I take setting up the page. I will just put the cformsII tag in the body.

(Thesis Theme Users) Scroll down and choose “Page Template” and pick “Page Without Sidebars”.

Unless you want your sidebars. For me the form is the most important thing so I like the page without the sidebars. I would rather the user fill out the form than click a link.

Bonus: if you change any css you need to make a backup of it. When you update the plugin for WordPress, cformsII, it could overwrite anything you change there. Having a backup will ensure you keep your cformsII CSS safe.

If you really have to change the css I, and the author of cformsII recommend you use Firebug.

So to summarize,

1. if you need step by step instructions read this post
2. Hit “Update Settings” after you make changes.
3. If your changes are NOT showing up, click “Save” on the page from the WordPress Dashboard.
4. Always watch the settings to make sure it did what you wanted

My forms are here and so far, I have not changed any css:
(Well I did change the font size on one form but when I upgraded I had not saved my css so it was changed back)

Contact page with Fancy White form style

Contact page with the basic cforms.css form style

Directory Submission (with lots of check boxes) with the Wide Form form style

Artist Interview (with 30+ fields) with the Wide Open No Border form style

The biggest thing in cformsII is to keep hitting “Update Settings” if you don’t that next action could erase the last action.

You can use cformsII plugin for WordPress for the comments field for your blog. The latest update had a focus on that including compatibility with the plugin Comment Love. I don’t get too many comments yet so I have not researched this. If you know about using cformsII plugin for WordPress as the comments field, please use my old fashion comments field to tell me about it.

Email to me that prompted this post:

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 10:56 PM, Rockie L. Gaddie wrote:

Hey Wordpress guru!

How can I add a form for people to subscribe to a newsletter?

Thanks
Rg

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Yancey says:
Get the Thesis Theme for WordPress and Enjoy Outsourcing the Update Headaches

I’ve been ordered by the Queen to add another plugin.

After reading on the WordPress Blog that The official site of the British Prime Minister’s Office is using the WP Super Cache I decided it was time to act.

For you the reader, the plugin makes the site load quickly. For the blog owner it reduces the load on your server.

It was an easy installation. After installing the WP Super Cache Plugin I went to the WP Super Cache Manager.

Under “WP Super Cache Status” I clicked “ON”

UPDATE: I’ve changed to “HALF ON” so the page will reset with the default hourly rather than after 100 requests. Based on info here from Rick Beckman.

Under “Super Cache Compression” I clicked “Enabled”

I could see experimenting with the “Expiry Time” if you had over 2500 page views a day. I’m under that unless you go tell ALL your friends to drop by.

“Cache contents” shows you how many pages you have currently cached and also those expired. After turning WP Super Cache on I browsed my site then came back and saw my cached pages go up. This is one way you know it is working. This is where you can Delete Expired and Delete Cache.

REMEMBER this if you install this plugin and then want to make changes to your home page, you may have to Delete Cache with every test of new changes to your blog.

I’ve taken the advice of the British Prime Minister’s Office and loaded WP Super Cache. Thanks for pointing this out WordPress Blog.