Entries Tagged 'Wordpress' ↓

First of all, you will need to make sure you have an unzip utility on your computer. I have a free download I use. A lot of people have recommended 7-zip to me, so if I needed one, that is the one I would install. Plugins and themes contain many files and come in a .zip format, so you will have to unzip them to install. If you have winzip and know how to use it, great. If not, try 7-zip.

I have two plugins I want you to install. Create a new folder in your Web Folders directory named Blogs, and in that create a folder named Plugins and another named Themes.

First you are going to download Bad Behavior, which is designed to block comment spam from spambots. The download you need will be found in the second paragraph, under the title Stable. The text is bad-behavior.2.0.38.zip. The link doesn’t work here because I want you to download it from their site. When you click to download in Firefox, you will be asked if you wish to save. Click yes. Then, right click the Bad Behavior download in the download popup list (not showing? Click Tools => Downloads to make the popup appear) and select Open containing folder from the menu. When it opens, the file will be highlighted. Right-click it and choose the option that says “extract to”. From the menu, select the Plugins directory in your new Blogs directory and accept.

Now, in Filezilla, find that Plugins Directory. Note that there is a bad behavior folder within a bad behavior folder. Click the outermost folder and you will be able to see its contents down below. It should look something like this:

Now click the Plugins directory.

Click the bad-behavior folder to select it.

Now look at the two frames in the right-hand side of your Filezilla window. When examples.help4flirts.com is selected in the top window, you can see your blog directories and files below.

Click the ‘+’ sign to the left of the domain name and the folders will display above.

Now click on wp-content in the top frame.

Click the ‘+’ sign next to it.

Click the plugins directory.

Now you can right-click the folder in the lower left-hand frame, select upload, and the entire bad behavior folder will upload into your plugins directory.

Next, I want you to download All-in-one SEOpack, which will help make your blog much more search engine friendly. The process is the same. Download, unzip, then upload into your plugins directory.

Let’s go set up these plugins. Select Plugins in your left-hand sidebar. You will now see Bad Behavior listed as one of your plugins. Click the activate link to the left of that plugin. There is also a Bad Behavior link in the Settings file, which you can visit if you are curious. You can wait on that, as it probably doesn’t need to be changed.

All in one SEO pack is going to be a little trickier to set up. Click the activate link next to the plugin on the plugins page. A red stripe will appear at the top of the plugins page telling you that you need to go to the admin page to enable and configure your plugin. Click the link in that message to go there.

Scroll down to plugin status. Select enabled.
Home title: pick the title you want to display in the blue strip across the top of the browser window. I have chosen “Homepage of WordPress demo blog.”
Home description: I have used “This blog is being used as a demo to go with the domain registration, hosting, wordpress setup, and file upload series of tutorials on my blog at http://help4flirts.com”.
Home keywords: Pick words that you want people to find your site for. I have selected “WordPress, installation demo, tutorials, hosting, domain registration, file uploads”.

That’s probably all you need at the moment. Scroll down to the bottom and update options.

I was going to show you how to install a new theme, if you don’t like the ones that came with your blog and find one out there you do like. But you already know how to do it. Download the theme and unzip it into a Themes directory you will create in the same Blog directory where your Plugin directory is. Then upload it into your Themes directory in your wp-content directory. It will automatically appear in the list of themes you have available to you on your Themes page you can get to by clicking the Themes link in the left-hand sidebar here.

A note about themes: some of them are tricky to set up. Some of them are tricky to use. Be prepared to give up and try something else if the first one doesn’t work for you.

Maybe tomorrow I can finish up the blog by having you write a new post. Then all we need to do is show you how to upload files.

The last thing we did in the last post was to download all the files on your server to your computer. What we have done is backed up your files, so in this folder what you have is an exact duplicate of what is online. This makes it really easy to upload, download, and restore files.

In order to install WordPress using Dreamhost’s one-click installer, you will need to delete the files on your server. In the lower right-hand frame, click the top file, hold down the shift key, and click the bottom file. All four files should be selected.

Right click and select Delete. Acknowledge the little popup, because you do want to delete these files.

Now log into your Dreamhost panel. In the tan box in the upper left-hand side of the page, click “One-click installs”.

Select the middle option, “Install new website software – Advanced mode”. When the list opens, you will see WordPress already selected at the top. Scroll down to “install to” and select your domain. Leave the input on the right blank to install the blog to your homepage. Then click the “install it for me now!” button. It should be installed within 10 minutes.

If you are hosting elsewhere, you will have to look up their WordPress installation procedures. If they do not have an easy installation procedure, you picked the wrong host.

When WordPress is installed on your domain, Filezilla will show this where no files were moments ago.

Type in your domain, and you will come to a welcome screen. Type in your site title, username, password, and email address. Pick a password that isn’t a word. Make absolutely sure you get your email address correct, or your blog won’t be able to send you notices about important stuff. Leave the “Allow my site to appear in search engines like Google and Technorati” box ticked. Then click “install wordpress”.

You will be asked to log in immediately. Hopefully you kept your password and username handy.

After logging in, the page you will land on is the dashboard.

We have a number of things to do. First, you will see a button with a number in it next to the word “Updates” at the top. It is very important to do your updates promptly. Click that to go to the updates page.

If you have plugins that need to be updated, click the box next them and update. Then click the Select All next to the themes that need to be updated and update them. They probably all updated correctly. If a theme did not update properly, make a note of it and don’t use that one. On Dreamhost you have plenty of themes to choose from to get started.

Now, at the bottom of the left sidebar, click the down arrow to open Settings. Click General.

You want to change the tagline to something that goes with your blog. “Just another WordPress Blog” is not it. Pick your timezone. For everything else on that page, the default will be alright for now. You can go back and change anything later.

Now let’s go down to Permalinks. Pick the Day-and-Name option. This format is friendlier for search engines and people than the default. Click Save Changes.

Now click Users. There you are. Click Edit. Choose the blue admin color scheme to see how you like it. Fill in any personal info or contact info you want to. Then click Save Changes. You will see that the color scheme to your admin area has changed. If you prefer the pale gray, you can just change it back.

Now click Plugins. There are some plugins already installed which you can activate if you wish. I recommend activating WordPress Hashcash first. Just click Activate and you are done on that.

You also need to activate Akismet, but before you do that you will need to sign up for an account at WordPress.com to get an API code. Go do that, then when you click the activate button, you will have to enter the API code to activate Akismet.

There are a couple of others I want you to install, but that will have to be another lesson, after you are more comfortable with a few things and have made a post or two.

Now click the name of your blog in the upper left-hand corner of the dashboard, which will take you to your website.

You see your title at the top on the left of your header image and your tagline on the right.

Below you see Home and About. Click About. What you see is standard WordPress sample text for a blog. You will have to change that. You could do it now, as there is probably an Edit button. But let’s finish our tour of your site first. Either click the Home link or hit the Back button on your browser to go back to your homepage.

Go down and you will see a post dated today. This will need to be edited or deleted. Beneath it you will see there is one comment, by Mr. WordPress. This also will need to be edited or deleted.

If you look in the right-hand sidebar, you will see some links. Any links you do not want can be deleted, and you can add your own in your admin area.

Let’s edit the page, the post, and the comment.

Go back to your admin area, and click the Posts link in the left-hand sidebar. There should be only one post. Mouse over the title and click the edit link. Change the title to something more appropriate, like, “So glad to be here”. Then delete the text and type something welcoming readers to your new blog. Update the post with the button on the upper right-hand side.

Click Comments. Mouse over to see the menu of choices. I am going to edit it, so I will click Edit. Follow to see what I am doing.

You can edit any part of a comment. You will often find vague comments that are spam masquerading as comments, things like “This is good, I bookmarked it.” Stuff that is not clearly written in response to a post should be deleted. Sometimes a good comment has a spammy return link. You can delete the URL so you aren’t sending traffic to some site. And you can edit the text of the comment to fix spelling and grammar errors, etc. You can look to see what I did.

Now let’s edit the About page.

Click Pages in the left sidebar, then click to edit your page. Update when you are done. You could also click the Add Page button on the Pages page. Let’s do that. After you click the button, you will come to blank entry page. Type Photos as the title, then below you can temporarily put “I will very soon put some photos here for you to look at.” Or say something about payment mail buttons.

Now let’s check out your links. Click Links. Your links page may have a long list of links that doesn’t show up in your sidebar. You can delete them all by checking the boxes and selecting Bulk actions => Delete. If you want to add links then, first click Link Categories. Blogroll is the only one there by default. To add a category, Click the Add new, then on the Add Link Category page, name your link category. I’m adding a category called Websites. The slug will be your category name, all lower case with hyphens between it. So the slug for Websites is websites. The slug for My Web Empire would be my-web-empire. If it’s complicated, you could put a description, but most themes do not display this.

Let’s add a link now. Click Links in the left sidebar, then the Add New button. On the Add New Links page, I’m going to add my website. The title will be ‘Help4flirts’, the web address will be ‘http://help4flirts.com’, and the description I am putting in will be ‘Web tutorials’. I’m going to select my new category, ‘Websites’. I will scroll down and click ‘_blank’ so the link will open in a new window or tab, then click ‘Add Link’. Add a link to your new category. Add links to your blogroll for all your friends, and add categories to keep your links sorted out.

Click your blog title in the top left-hand corner of the page and visit it again.

I just noticed that my post is in the category ‘Uncategorized’. I’m going to fix that by adding a category for it. In the Posts menu, click Categories. My new category will be Site News. The slug will be site-news, and I will add a description.

Now I am going to go edit that post again. Click Posts, then Edit. In the right-hand sidebar you see Categories. Uncategorized is checked. I am going to uncheck that and check Site News. Change or add a category to your post, then click Update.

Now it’s time to do something with the appearance. Under Appearance, click Widgets. Your widget page will have lots of modules you can put in your widget areas, which depend on which theme you are using. The default theme for Dreamhost does not have Links in the primary widget area, so I’m going to add it. You can add any number of widgets and move them from widget area to widget area and back, just to see what happens.

Okay, now click Themes. Dreamhost provides you with eight pages of themes, but there are also an unlimited number out there, many for free. Scroll through, click preview to see what they will look like. If you activate a theme, you can easily change it back.

We’ve done enough damage today. One more thing. Go back to your Dreamhost panel one-click page. Pick the bottom option, Upgrade or remove previously installed software – Advanced mode. Scroll down to the bottom and click the Automatically upgrade all one-clicks forever option.

Whoa. More work to do tomorrow.

Here’s the deal with WordPress plugins: there are a lot of plugins, and they are not all equally good. Some of them don’t do what you need. More plugins are not better. Sometimes having multiple plugins means that none of them work, or there may be unpredictable results.

When deciding to get a plugin, search on what you need to see what is available. Look at several to see which one seems to fit your needs the best before deciding to download. Read how to use it on the plugin site. After you install and activate it, look for a settings or configuration panel to see if you need to configure it. Then check to see if it is doing what you needed it to do. If you don’t like the plugin, you can deactivate it and try a different one.

Seo, keywords, description, etc.

The most effective SEO comes from having different keywords and description for each post, as well as a unique description and keywords for your homepage. If you have the exact same description and keywords for every page, you won’t get any more mojo from google than if you had none at all.

By the way, your pages will still get indexed if you don’t have these, but it is probably more efficient to have them.

robots.txt file

A robots.txt file tells bots what to index and what not to index. Without a robots.txt file, the bots will generally just index everything. You can exclude certain bots if you know you don’t want them on your site. You can also exclude certain pages from being indexed and links from being followed. If you really have no preferences, the following code will permit all bots and spiders to index your site:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

That’s it.

I was a little worried, shall we say, since I had read of difficulty of fixing broken templates and bizarre lost functionality. I was also concerned, remembering how long it took to get used to the new dashboard style when WordPress upgraded to 2.5, and how little there was to show for it.

This is different. They have redone the admin area to add all kinds of cool jquery javascript functionality. All the menus you need are in the sidebars now. Dropdowns appear with a click. No more multiple menus across the top of the page or waiting for pages to reload so you can get to the menu you need. No more scrolling down below the post to look for the menu you need or forgetting to put tags or categories because, out of sight, out of mind.

It’s just very intuitive. Even the menus that are below the post are all dropdowns.

And they even got rid of that nasty default color scheme.

Just check your posts when you update. I have found that about half of mine had their permalinks reset to the default format, not anything I wanted.

Some screenshots:

First of all, WordPress will not recognize a local file. So you will have to edit the html embed code to put the absolute path to your .swf file, wherever you have put it on your site (or elsewhere). Two different places in the code you will see a reference to “myfilename.swf”. You will have to edit it to make the full url, such as “http://mywebhost.com/swfs/myfilename.swf”.

WordPress has a sucky visual editor. They were supposed to fix it in the 2.5 release, but it’s even worse now than ever. It used to be I could just disable the visual editor, but now it mangles code in the disabled mode, too. And one of the things it totally mangles is the html code you use to embed your flash.

So first, you need to disable the editor. Go to users and select your profile. The top option on the page is the “Visual Editor/Use the visual editor when writing” checkbox. Uncheck it.

Now WordPress is still going to mangle our code, because unlike in regular html, WordPress thinks that line breaks and spaces mean something important. And it thinks they mean something different each time it sees them. If your embed code is full of line breaks and spaces, as SWISHmax 2-exported code is, WordPress is going to look at each line, decide what it really wants to turn it into, and then go ahead and do it. By the time it gets done you will just have some gibberish on the page that doesn’t resemble your embed code.

So what can you do? Open up Notepad. Make sure that Word Wrap is turned off (Format => Word Wrap). Open your html file that SWISHmax 2 put the embed code in. The part you need starts with <object> and ends with </object>. Start with that first <object> tag, hit the “End” key on your keyboard, then press the delete key until you have deleted all the spaces between that and the next. Leave a space between words and phrases within a bracket; leave no spaces between one tag and the next. What you should end up with is your entire embed code on one line. Now just copy and paste it into your blog.

Looking to learn a lot more?

Got some time on your hands and want to learn it inside and out, even though you may be a beginner to coding? Have I found some tutorials for you!

Build your own WordPress theme. These tutorials explain to you what you’re doing as you build your theme line by line. Learn some xhtml, css, and php in the process, as you complete the day-by-day tutorials.