I’ve been getting some comments lately. Some of them are obviously spam and others may be legit but have some kind of strange URL attached to them. Since I grow tired of trying to decide one way or another on these I have decided to split the difference: I’m responding to a specific comment while simultaneously not approving the actual comment. The reason is because he links to a web site that while it may not be technically illegal I would view at the very least as unethical. Should this commenter see this post feel free to comment again just don’t link to that site.
First of all I would not consider myself a “WordPress Webmaster” in any sense of the term. I always assumed installing WP would be extremely difficult and require lots of knowledge of PHP and/or SQL coding. Finally, with this most recent attempted spurred on by Blogger’s announcement that FTP support would be ending I did more reading and figured it out.
The part of the install that may be most difficult for some is figuring out an acceptable URL for your provider’s MySQL server. My web host happens to post this rather plainly in the control panel interface for the web space. I also manually created a SQL user, although I found out this isn’t really necessary. Basically you need only a couple pieces of information and a web host with the relatively basic requirements of PHP and MySQL. After that you simply copy all the files from the WP zip file available from the WP site to your FTP space and bring up I believe install.php. Something like that. This page prompts you for your SQL address and user name/passwords. It then creates a database and tables and does whatever it has to in order to set it up.
As I mentioned in a prior post you can install the XAMPP package on your local machine and play with WP relatively consequence-free to your heart’s content.
Once install there are a number of plugins and themes easily browsed from the WP dashboard and enabled/disabled at a moments notice with no difficulty what-so-ever.
One thing to keep in mind however is keeping WP up-to-date: it’s rather simple. A notification will come up upon logging in to your dashboard and let you know an upgrade is available. It’s just the matter of click the package is downloaded, extracted and installed for you as you watch. It’s literally one click.
There are a number of further steps to be taken to enhance security as well as powerful plugins and features that can be utilized among them something I should have installed to begin with: a spam detector/filter plugin.
To the original commenter I hope this is sufficient for my information. It’s actually quite straight forward. If you’d prefer something more encompassing there are the official codecs at the WP.org site as well as some wonderful books available on Amazon (I already bought the WordPress 2.7 cookbook, which is good so far). I hope you found this helpful (although upon re-reading your comment I imagine you did not).
Here’s the comment that inspired the above post sans the email address and the URL:
Hi, how are you doing? I genuinely like your blog ! I was wondering if you might help me (I am certain your other subscribers may also be interested). I want to get into creating a blog also and I currently have a blog with Word Press, but it is quite difficult for me to build and I would like to attempt to find several good training guides or courses (preferably free) that can assist me in making use of wordpress correctly. As a word press web master yourself, do you perhaps maybe know where i can learn online tutorials to be able to do this myself?? Thank you
Wordpress is the best blogging platform ever. It is much better than Typepad and blogspot.”~”