During tax season this year, I treated myself to a WordPress class at the local community college . The class was supposed to use Dreamweaver as a text editor. Very exciting stuff when you want to make a few changes to your site! The class description was wrong – very frustrating… You’ve probably heard of Lynda.com; they have tutorials in every imaginable programming language and how to use tons of software. I decided to add Lynda to my Safari Books On-line educational program and start from the beginning (or almost!).
The first step in learning how to be creative with WordPress is setting up a local server on your computer. This seems pretty straight forward and I really didn’t have any trouble setting one up on my husbands laptop. The books and videos tend to either teach you the complicated method of installing Apache, MySQL and PHP individually or they tell you about MAMP, WAMP or XAMPP. In the class I took, the professor preferred XAMPP. If you want to set up your own local server, here is a link to a great step – by – step guide to installing and setting up your server.
As I mentioned, this worked great on my husband’s laptop but I wasn’t so fortunate with my desktop… Some pitfalls that about did me in:
- be sure that you have no previous installations of MySQL on your computer. MySQL is a very important part of WordPress and I had taken a MySQL class in the fall to get a better understanding of the way WordPress works. I installed MySQL on my computer and my homework went smoothly. When I tried to install XAMPP, I got repeated messages about my databases (which are what MySQL is all about). I don’t remember how many times I uninstalled and re-installed XAMPP and every MySQL file I could find but I can tell you that after 2 intense days of this, my brain was pretty fried! What I learned on the 3rd day was that my computer had hidden files and that MySQL had a folder in there! Once the hidden folder was deleted, XAMPP installed beautifully but the weekend was over.
- install WordPress directly from WordPress.org. I choose to have GoDaddy install WordPress for me as part of their hosting package which means that I didn’t have to get ‘dirty’ in the set up. It also means that my site lives totally out there in cyber space! This is a very new concept for me – I’m used to working in Dreamweaver where I know the layout of my file structure. I have yet to discover how to get my files to my desktop computer but that seems to be caused by another problem…having a purchased theme.
- I purchased a theme. It has a lot of different template styles, some flexibility in the styling but it has a lot of those hidden files. My objective was to set up an art site quickly believing that I could take my time to learn how to tweak the code to get the font I wanted and my logo clickable, just a few small things. The CSS files were nowhere to be seen and the code that I could find was all PHP, no friendly HTML, just Get that and Echo this, it was like reading a foreign language! My suggestion is to purchase a theme only when they have exactly what you want; that you are happy with it exactly the way it is. If it’s not perfect, don’t waste the money because your ability to edit it is very limited.
What I’m doing now that I am older and wiser:
- I am treating WordPress as a foreign language; I am starting with learning the parts of speech (PHP and MySQL).
- I jumped into HeadFirst’s book on PHP and MySQL. Since I am not interested in writing code from scratch, I then moved into books that gave an overview of PHP like “I Hate PHP” and videos like PHP with MySQL Essential Training.
- As my language skills have improved, I’m going back to revisit ‘Dreamweaver, The Missing Manual’ and watching the video, ‘Dreamweaver and WordPress:Core Concepts’
- I am learning how to create child themes. This sounded much harder than tweaking my purchased theme but I think it’s overall, the best way to go. Start with a free theme from the WordPress site that has the elements that you want and then create new files to make adjustments to the theme; save the adjusted theme under a different name and viola! Of course there is a lot more depth to it than that…Some good videos on Lynda.com are ‘Start with a Theme: Photography Portfolios in WordPress’, ‘WordPress 3: Building Child Themes’ and ‘WordPress 3: Creating and Editing Custom Themes’.
I am looking forward to applying my new skills; I’m starting with a pencil and paper, laying out a visual just like I would with Dreamweaver.
