Since moving in to the Protein Studios and finishing off my last big project, work has considerably slowed for the Christmas and New Year period. I imagine most folks are putting off anything big until Jan of 2012. Therefore, I’ve decided to give WordPress a test drive.
I’ve had some experience with DotNetNuke and have reinvented the wheel with my work with Mitsubishi and World Blue (building my own content managers) but I’m always up for a challenge and I had three reasons to give it a go.
Although he hasn’t asked my opinion, my old business partner is currently looking at alternatives for content management. He currently useses a mix of the CMS I built for him in-house and his brother uses FrontPage for a few of his older sites. As his brother is moving on, he needs a way to manage mostly static content so I thought WordPress might be a good option.
Second, I’ve had a couple of chats with the guys at Protein and they have mentioned they always have WordPress work they can pass my way. I’m not counting my chickens yet, but it would be fun to do a few projects with them.
Finally, as I needed to update my website and there are so many built in ‘widgets’ for WordPress, I thought I’d rebuild it using a new technology. Real projects that will actually be used are always more interesting.
Below are my thoughts on the process.
Installing WordPress
Setup was a breeze as I’ve got my account hosted with GoDaddy.
Login to your GoDaddy account. Click on ‘Hosting & Servers’ then select Hosting Management at the bottom. If you have already purchased hosting with GoDaddy you should see the option to launch the control centre.
Once you have launched the control centre, select the Hosting Connection under the ‘Content’ menu.
There you should see a list of content managers such as Joomla, WordPress and others with feedback and ratings for each. Select WordPress.
The next page should allow you the option to install WordPress.
I was given the option of where to install (I chose the root) and allowed to designate the username and password for administration of the site.
The install process then took around 15 minutes. I’m assuming it has some sort of manual process involved hence the delay. Once completed, I received an email saying it was ready to go. Completely painless so far!
Administering WordPress
If your DNS settings are already pointing to the GoDaddy hosting account then you should be able to navigate to your site and VOILA! There is a blogsite there with temporary info and the typical ‘Hello World’ post (with a test reply). Nice.
To administer your site, go to the login screen by typing in your domain and then /wp-login.php. For example http://www.greenbilling.com/wp-login.php. (This is where you use the username and password you designated in the step above.)
Wow, that was pretty easy. I’ll play around with adminstration and get the site setup. If I find any tricks or tips I’ll post them. Good luck with your install.