Now that I’ve covered Getting Started, and the Admin Panel, we can move on to some other WordPress related things, namely Themes and Plugins. Let’s start with Themes, as that’s going to impact your WordPress application the most.

A “theme” is really just a design for your site. It gives your site that “customized” feel to it, even if there’s a thousand other people using the same theme. Generally, themes are free to use and will only require a “linkback” to the author’s site, as payment. Given, there’s some themes that are “for pay”, but it’s up to you if you want to pay for those.

Installing a theme is generally one of the most simple things to do with WordPress:

• Download your new theme from wherever you’re getting it.
• Unzip the folder (usually requires WinZip)
• Open FTP for your site, and head to the /wp-content/themes/
• Upload your theme folder directly there, leaving the file structure in tact.

That’s it. You’ve installed your new theme. To activate it, just go to the “Presentation” tab, in your Admin panel. You should now see a screenshot (assuming that your theme came with one) of the new theme. To “turn it on”, simply click on it. The page will refresh, and your WordPress application will now be using your new theme. Simple, right?

That’s themes in a generalized view. Check back in a few days, and I’ll be detailing how to modify or create your own theme.

On to plugins! To me, plugins are the most important part of any WordPress installation. Plugins are files or scripts that add functionality to the default workings of WordPress. They enhance what WordPress does right “out of the box” (which is quite a bit), and make it do more things. Plugins range from filtering spam, to creating contact forms, to photo galleries, to a zillion other things. In my opinion, no WordPress install is complete without adding a handful of plugins.

Some plugins I can’t live without: Akismet – Akismet fights spam comments by comparing their content to a centralized database of “known spam” content.
Adsense Deluxe – Adsense Deluxe is for WordPress users who want to generate some income, presumably with Google Adsense. I’ve tested this, and used it successfully with other ad providers, as well.
Netgen Gallery – Allows you to quickly, and easily add photo albums to your WordPress, with fancy AJAX abilities when viewing the photos.
Similar Posts – This plugin is great. It searches your content for other posts containing similar words and phrases, and automatically links them to the post the viewer is reading. It helps get people to other pages on your site.
Simple Pop Up Images – By default WordPress’ handling of images clicked to enlarge, is ugly. This plugin allows you to configure it to show them in a nice popup, without too much extra work on your part.

There’s really a zillion more plugins that you can use on your WordPress, and it’s entirely up to you which ones you want to use, and what benefit they’ll be to you. There’s two “main” places I go to look for plugins:
The WordPress Codex – Their central location of all of them.
Wp-plugins.net – Not official, but just as good.

Installing a plugin is just as easy as installing a theme to your WordPress:

• Download the plugin from its author’s location
• Unzip the plugin folder
• Open FTP
• Upload the folder to /wp-content/plugins

That’s it. Plugin installed. Now, you need to activate it. Head on over to your WordPress admin panel, and click the “Plugins” link. You should see your newly installed plugin there, with a link (on the right) to activate. Just click that link, and that’s it.

Just be sure, once you activate, to go test it on your site, and click around a little bit on other things. Sometimes plugins aren’t compatible with one another, and may not work well together. If this is the case, you’ll need to check with the author (usually they list incompatibilities on their site) for a fix.

One of the great things about the new WordPress (2.3) is that on the Plugins page, it notifies you if there’s a new version detected of the plugin. When there’s a new version, you should always update. There could be potential security flaws in using older scripts. Upgrading is just like installing for the first time. It’s recommended that you deactivate the existing plugin before upgrading, but I never do that. (Do as I say, not as I do.)

That’s it for plugins and themes. Pretty easy stuff that can heavily impact your WordPress installation, and the success thereof. Check back in a few days, my next write-up will be on how to customize a theme or even create your own from scratch. This will truly give your site a “custom” feel to it.

The WordPress Admin panel, or the “brains” of your WordPress install, is a key place, and probably the place you’ll spend the majority of your time on, rather than the site itself. It’s written very smart, and things make sense where they are. It’s generally located at www.mysite.com/blog/wp-admin (assuming you installed your blog into /blog, as we did in our first post, on how to install.

The WordPress Admin panel, or Dashboard, is broken down in a handful of subset groups, which make administering your WordPress much easier.

When you first login to your Dashboard, you’ll see the default Admin theme:

From left to right, your options read: Dashboard, Writer, Manager, Comments, Blogroll, Presentation, Plugins, Users, Options

Each of these groups is clickable, and brings you to the subset of options for that group, if they’re available.
Dashboard – This is the homepage of your Admin panel. It allows you to see recent WordPress news (from WordPress), recent comments, recent posts, Askimet Spam protection (assuming you’ve installed it, and you should!), and sites who’ve linked to yours.
Write – This will give you subset options for Write Post, or Write Page. Write post will post to your blog portion of WordPress, while Write Page will post to the “pages” section of your WordPress. Pages and Posts are different in many ways, but we’ll get more into that later on.
Manage – The manage section allows you to modify existing posts (whether in draft, published, or pending review form), modify existing pages (draft, published or pending), manage uploaded images, manage your categories, manage your files, import blog posts from another blogging service (LiveJournal, Greymatter, etc), or export your WordPress database.
Comments – This subset will give you three options; comments, awaiting moderation, and Akismet Spam (assuming you’ve installed Akismet, which again, you should!). Comments are all approved, and posted comments on all of your posts. Awaiting moderation are comments that are waiting to be approved (depending on how you set up WordPress, you can set certain things to be flagged for manual review), and Akismet Spam is stuff that is automatically detected as spam. You generally just go in here, verify everything is spam, and click “Delete All”.
Blogroll – A Blogroll is simply a list of links to other blogs. You can moderate links here, view who you’ve linked to, and import links from another location.
Presentation – This is where you select your active theme, and modify any theme you’ve got, without doing so through FTP. This is helpful, if you make a lot of small changes. Note: in order to use the Theme Editor, your files need to be writeable by the server. If you have any questions on how to do that, drop a note in the comments, and I’ll explain.
Plugins – I’ll be doing an extensive post on plugins, and themes coming up shortly. However, the Plugins menu is where you can see which plugins you have activated, and activate new ones. Plugins are basically extensions that make WordPress more useful, or customized.
Users – If you allow registrations on your WordPress, or have other authors, this is where you can go to manage them, give them permissions to do things (or not do things). You can also change passwords, e-mail addresses, and website URLs through this page. It’s also used for manually creating users of your WordPress, as well.
Options – Probably the most important part of your WordPress. The Options subset gives you a zillion options, literally. I’ll explain them, left to right, as they appear on screen: General Options; this allows you to change your blog’s name, your e-mail address, time stamp, new user default role, and membership options. Writing; allows you to modify a variety of options related to writing posts on your site, including the size of the posting box, default category, and others. Reading; configuration for how many posts to show on the site/RSS feed, and what to show on your front page. Discussion; allows you to configure who can leave comments, how often, if someone has to be registered to leave a comment or not, and when to flag a comment as potential spam (to moderate it). Privacy; do you want the WordPress to be indexed by search engines? Permalinks; this can be complicated if you don’t know what they are. A Permalink is basically a link to a specific page. You can opt for different options, based on what WordPress can do. Note in order to change from the default, you’ll need an .htaccess file, and it has to be writeable by the server. Miscellaneous; this simply lets you change where your files/images get uploaded to.

And that’s it, the WordPress Admin panel in a nutshell. Any specific questions? Leave them in the comments, and I’ll do my best to help out. Check back soon for my post on Plugins and Themes, how to use them, and what they’ll do for you!

As the web becomes more and more saturated with people who want websites or blogs, it’s becoming easier as a web-dev guy to help people who aren’t HTML savvy get a website. While WordPress is designed as a blogging tool, it’s so much more than that.

As a designer, I can build the site on WordPress, implement a custom “theme” (design layout) for whomever I’m building it for, and spend an hour or so teaching them how to use it. Even if they’ve got no intention on using it as a blog, it’s still a great, and easy, way for people to update content on their site, without even having to know what an FTP client is.

To get started, simply head over to WordPress’ Site and grab the latest version of the software.

Once you’ve got the latest version, you’ll need to unzip it, and get it onto your webhost. Obviously, this part takes a bit of know-how. If you’ve already got an FTP client, great. If not, I recommend SmartFTP it’s a great, and free application. Assuming your webhost provides MySQL and can run PHP, you shouldn’t need much else. (If you’re not sure, check the knowledgebase of your host, or just ask them. This stuff’s pretty standard these days.) You should also know the FTP information for the host, also can be provided by them.

Once you open up your FTP client, all you need to do is simple. 1) Make the decision if you want your WordPress installation in a subdirectory or not. All that means is, do you want your WordPress to be located at www.mysite.com/blog, or simply at www.mysite.com? I usually opt for installing it at the highest level (known as the root level).

For the sake of example, we’ll say that we’re installing into a subdirectory called “blog”. What we’ll first need to do is create a folder in our FTP, called blog. Generally, webhosts don’t allow you to create something through FTP, so you’ll need to create the folder on your desktop, and drag it into the FTP window. Once uploaded, double click on it, to open it.

Now, head back over to your desktop, and open up the “wordpress” folder that you got when you unzipped the latest version of WordPress. You should see a whole bunch of files in there, that mostly start with wp-, as well as three folders (wp-admin, wp-content, wp-includes). Grab this whole bunch of files, and drag them over to FTP into your “blog” folder. If you grab them all at once, they’ll all get uploaded to the right file structure, and the install will work cleanly.

Once that’s done, head on over to your webhost to create a MySQL database. This is generally done through a control panel of some sort, which varies from host to host. If you’re unsure how to do it, ask your webhost or check their knowledgebase. They should also be able to provide your “mysql host”, which you’ll need when you install WordPress into the database. Most times this is just “localhost”, but sometimes it’s different.

Once the database is set up, and you have your database information, simply head on over to your website. www.mysite.com/blog/wp-admin

You’ll get a message telling you that you need to install the WordPress application into the database. The install’s very easy, however, you’ll need to be sure that you do one last thing first. Head back over to your FTP program, and locate “wp-config-sample.php”, right click on it, and select rename. Change the name to “wp-config.php”. Once that’s all set, right click again on the file, and look for an option for “permissions”, or “CHMOD” (varies depending on your FTP client). Once the menu opens, change the number from 644, to 777. This will allows the WordPress application access to edit this file, with the information you give the webpage, and save it for you. This is the easiest way to set up WordPress.

Once done, head back to the web install interface, and click the “First Step” link. The next page will ask you for a Weblog Title, and an e-mail address. It’s very important that you provide a real e-mail address, so that your username and password can be e-mailed to you once the WordPress install is done. Click “Continue to Second Step” once you fill in those two details. That’s it! WordPress will install some phony data to get you started, so you can see how things work.

Be sure to write down the username and password you get on the next page, in case the e-mail doesn’t make it through your spam filter. Otherwise you won’t be able to login to your admin panel. Also, be sure to bookmark the Admin page, which is usually located at www.mysite.com/blog/wp-admin (which will vary, depending on where you installed WordPress to)

That’s it, WordPress is now installed on your site. If you visit www.mysite.com/blog, you’ll see the phony data, with the default template. Easy enough, right?

The next step in running WordPress is learning your way around the Admin Panel. Check back in a few weeks, for a detailed post on how to use the Admin panel to write posts, pages, moderate comments, and more.

Ever since I started using a dual monitor set up at home (two 19″ Samsung LCD monitors), I can’t live without two monitors. When I started my new job here, they gave me a fairly beat up old laptop. Which is fine, I can cope with 15″ to look at. The bad news was the max resolution is 1024×768, which I stopped using a number of years ago.

So I brought in my own 17″ LCD to use in conjunction with Windows XP’s fancy “extend my desktop” feature. Combined with Realtime Software’s Ultramon, makes for an excellent workspace (even at different resolutions.)

However, I found something that comes in handy as well. If you’re off to a meeting, and can only bring your laptop (and not the second monitor), don’t use the “disable secondary monitor” option in Ultramon. What I’ve started doing, is leaving it enabled while I’m off with the laptop. Why? Easily, to cause less clutter.

Windows XP still thinks you’ve got a second monitor attached, as does Ultramon. With some handy keyboard shortcuts (I’ve got mine set up as Control + > and Control + < to move windows to the other monitor), you can still dump programs you’re not using to the other “monitor”, even though it’s not connected. This allows you to easily move things you don’t need in front of you, to clear up your one (less than optimal resolution) monitor. Handy little trick, if you’re stuck with just a laptop.

I’ve been hard at work the last few nights working on various projects:

•  Did some more design changes to the Lace Reader website last night. Added new menu items, a “send a quote card” section, a reviews section, and a section for press & media to get downloadable materials.
• Did more work on the pagination script for the “all about Salem” website that Christine and I are working on.
• Trying to creatively come up with some ideas to improve the usability of MovieSnobs to increase return users, and loyalty.   Right now, I don’t think just having the movie reviews is cutting it.
• Renewed the domain name topfivealbums.com last night.   Am going to try to rethink the purpose of it, and redesign it accordingly.   While it’s fun to have what it is now, no one seems to be interested in it, and haven’t submitted anything in a while.   I’m surprised it doesn’t get more traffic, if you Google the phrase “top five albums”, we’re the first result.   You’d think people might look for that sort of stuff.

That’s about all I’ve got going on, for right now.   That’s my update.

Over the weekend/holiday, I did quite a bit of design work, and learned a few new things, as well.

I started off on Friday night, by finishing the install of the CMS software, for one of my design clients. I’m not sure exactly what his intent is for the site, but the CMS software I installed is a social networking application (similar to MySpace, Facebook, etc). Once he gets back in town we’ll discuss what he’s looking to do with the site, and how much resources he’s looking to throw at it, to make it what he wants.

My office was closed yesterday, due to July 4th, so I spent the majority of the day, working with Christine working on one of our new projects. We’re building a site about Salem Massachusetts (where we live). Sort of an informational site for tourists. Where to go, where to eat, what tours to take, how much money to anticipate spending, etc. We figured with all the tourism that happens around our house from May through November, it would be helpful to have a site where people can get information about the area. It hasn’t launched yet, but we spent a lot of time yesterday working on it. I spent my day re-writing the code for the listings page, and managed to work in some clauses into my queries that will allow sortable tables (something I previously didn’t know how to do), so I’m psyched about that. I’ll post a link to the site, once it’s complete, and will add it to my Design Portfolio (up top there).

That’s all I’ve got for now. That, and be sure you watch Burn Notice tonight at 10PM. The pilot was just okay, but I think the show’s going to get a lot better in time.

I’m really digging my new job. It’s nice to be at a company where things related to support, and customer service make sense, and they don’t necessarily feel like an afterthought, like I’m used to. Not only do all of the tech support tools make sense how they work, but the people that work in our support centers (internationally) know how to use them, too.

So far, I’ve just done a lot of learning, and sat in on a lot of meetings. My boss, Gary, has done a great job of showing me the ropes. As well as everyone else in the building. Everyone’s so friendly, and genuinely happy to be there. Again, something I’m completely not used to.

This is definitely a good thing, and a good place to be. We’re not sure when yet, but sometime in the next few months, Gary and I will be taking some international trips to our call centers, so I can get to meet everyone. When I say internationally, I mean Canada, India, and the Philippines. I’m excited about all the travel, but worried what I’m going to eat over there. After all, I am the world’s pickiest eater.

So, over the coming next week, I’ll be meeting with all sorts of directors and VPs of various departments, to get a feel for what they do, how they work, what types of projects they’re working on. It should be exciting.

For this week, I shared Gary’s office, since there’s no where to put me yet. Starting next week, there’s an empty desk on the other side of the floor (almost), that I’ll be sitting at, until we move. The company who subleased the other side of the floor from us, has moved out. So, we’re waiting for someone to come in (July 10th) and wire up our phone system, and internet so we can move over there. Once that happens, I won’t be the stray child off in another state.

That’s my update for this week. This weekend’s plans are: See Live Free of Die Hard in an hour and a half, when DNS propagation is done for a client’s domain name, I’ll be installing some CMS software for him, and testing it out, tonight Christine and I are heading into Boston to see a friend of ours in a play. I believe tomorrow is relaxing day, or as we like to call it “Horatio-ing”, which is basically us sitting around watching CSI: Miami on DVD, over and over again. Horation Caine is the man. Don’t deny.