Roy
(@gangleri)
Basically WP is blogging software, but over the years it has become more and more CMS-like. What it is that you want to do? You can use “pages” for static content, “post” in “categories” do order them by subject, but there are plenty of more possibilities when we start to look at “plugins” (enhancements so to say).
Thanks, Roy. I want to have a home page, with some general text/images on the subject. Then have various links to different kinds of documents/resources (including extracts from publications of mine), links to other sites on the subject; that kind of thing. I don’t want to post blogs at present but will probably add that dimension later. Oh, and I’m a complete beginner at any of this kind of thing!
Roy
(@gangleri)
I want to have a home page, with some general text/images on the subject.
That would be a “page” set as index (settings->reading)
Then have various links to different kinds of documents/resources (including extracts from publications of mine), links to other sites on the subject; that kind of thing.
That could be posts assigned to categories with direct links to those categories just using the “links” function. The same function can be used for external links.
I don’t want to post blogs at present but will probably add that dimension later.
That could be a category too. New since WP 3.0 are custom post types which could be something for you too, but this hasn’t been worked out completely and I’m still struggling with them myself too.
Oh, and I’m a complete beginner at any of this kind of thing!
We all were once, not? I’d just install WP and play around a little with it and see if you can do what you want without too much of coding. The standard WP is quite flexible, especially since there are countless plugins that avoid users having to code themselves. Just fool around, ask questions in the forums as needed and when you get the hang of it, there’s plenty you can do with WP to improve things.
Will have a go and see what happens. Thanks for the suggestions.
One other thing I wanted to check. Should I just be working in wordpress for all this – using it as a website rather than just a blog – or should I be using the DreamHost facilities themselves (its own tools and whatever, and all the more complex processes that seems to entail, such as sorting out FTP to upload, etc, etc)? Again, this might be a daft question to anyone who knows what they’re doing, I suspect.
Also, in using wordpress, the web address begins ‘blog’, then the domain name I registered. Can I change that, just in wordpress, to lose the ‘blog’ part at the start and just have the domain name itself. Given that I’m not including a blog at present, it doesn’t seem useful for it to have a name that begins that way. Again, I’m not sure if I can do that in wordpress or whether the original domain name will only be the address if I do it directly through DreamHost. Feels like everything in wordpress is really oriented around blogging rather than really being designed for just a website.
geoffking,
I was in exactly your situation about 30 days back.
Today I have a full featured CMS website – content management, the ones with login/registration. Ive been working full time on the website, while being on vacation though.
You can do ANYTHING with wordpress, thats the belief I clung to, and hunting for plugins and themes etc, finally makes it all real.
Start with hunting for a nice theme. Install it – it will give you lots of peace.
Then look for plugins you need.
After youve finished hunting for plugins – if youre lucky/unlucky, you might need snippets and making edits to php files.
Thats all – you can build anything.
Start with the featured websites on wordpress website.
Roy
(@gangleri)
I suppose you made that “blog” subdomain yourself. You can install anywhere, in the root, in a subdomain of your choosing, in a subfolder of your choosing.
You can install WP again in another subdomain, folder or in the root (be sure there’s nothing else in the root when you want to install WP there). When you’re already well on the way, you can look at these texts:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress
http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory
And indeed, I’d start in WP, like Seyed says, you can so many things with WP. First see if you can make WP to your needs before you start looking at several systems to maintain your website.
Oh, and looking around what others did can help too.
Roy: Bit confused about the domain business. I created a domain in DreamHost. Then installed WP via DreamHost. At that point, maybe, I gave it the subdomain name starting with ‘blog’ as a default (I didn’t actively name it that myself). I’ve tried to modify that installation, changing the domain name to the original, but get error message saying that already exists (presumably as the original domain before I installed WP). I started trying reinstalling WP through DH, with the intention of changing the domain to get rid of the ‘blog’ part but get error message again saying the original domain name is already being used in their system. That gives me the option of deleting the web hosting (to get rid of the competing use of the name, I assume), but I think that might screw everything up… So I’m not sure if I can get back to the original domain I wanted for the WP part of the thing.
Was very interested and impressed to see what others have done and found that thread really useful, if a bit overwhelming!
Roy
(@gangleri)
Did DH give you FTP access? You might want to consider installing manually. There’s a lot of info in the ‘codex’.
http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page
The ‘use’ of the root might be nothing more than an index.html saying “this domain is registered at DreamHost”. You do not have a website running already, right?
Roy: DH gave me a bunch of instructions about using FTP to launch a site, that kind of thing. But I don’t much fancy getting into all of that if I can avoid it. No don’t already have anything running other than the domain I set up with DH.
Roy
(@gangleri)
WordPress is well known for its ease of installation. Under most circumstances installing WordPress is a very simple process and takes less than five minutes to complete.
Apparently, the automatisch DH installation does not do what you want, so what are the options? Besides, I (and many with me) highly recommend manual installation. You at least know what happens.
Don’t really want to start all over again, though. I’ve made some progress so far, although a bit stuttering.
Thanks again for that, Roy. I seem to have managed it myself, though – much to my surprise! I went back to DH and did an ‘advanced’ rather than ‘easy’ install of WP through them. Ended up with the domain I’d wanted, with a ‘www’ prefix, which is how I wanted it. I’ve now replicated in that one the progress I’d made in the other. Does that mean I should entirely delete the earlier version, with the ‘blog’ prefix – can I do that safely?
Thanks also to Seyed110011 for the earlier reply. Have found a theme that I’ve customized with my own image, which is all much more like it. And will explore the world of plugins!
Appreciate all the help.
Roy
(@gangleri)
If there’s nothing in the old installation’s database that you need, you can just delete it (of maybe DH has an uninstall option?). Otherwise you can export and import or simply connect the new installation to the old database by editing the wp-config file.
