My soon to be self hosted WordPress blog is coming along very well. I’m taking my time with this, so that I understand fully what is involved and how to manage my blog site going forward. As I stated in Spouting 13, I will be using this blog to detail my progress of my self hosting WordPress install and set up. Afterwards, I will transfer everything over to my self-hosted blog and continue blogging from there.

I decided to use a subdomain of my site to do all of my testing, as I learned that it would be very easy to transfer my completed test blog to my main domain when the time is right. As such, I’ve completed the phase 2 of my sight: installing and playing around with plugins. I haven’t installed every plugin that I will need, but the two that I did install contributed to the learning process for me to know how to actually do the installation. The two plugins that I chose to start with is the All in One SEO Pack and Tweetmeme. Both of these plugins installed quite nicely. WordPress offers a great internal installer. And the beauty of all of this is that you do not need to install directly from WordPress if you choose not to. If you’re interested in doing it manually, you simply need to upload your plugins to the plugins folder on your server via FTP. Not that I’m afraid to do it manually, after all, I’m quite proud of having installed WordPress manually. As noted in my first phase, Spouting 13: WordPress Update, the installation was a piece of cake. I really only had to change 8 lines in one file called: wp-config.php and then upload that file with the rest of the WordPress application files to my root server via an FTP client. Now that I understand the manual process, I don’t have a problem with letting WordPress automate it for me. Another nice feature is that WordPress will decompress the .zip file the plugins come in as part of the auto installation process. I simply can not believe how easy this has been. I also installed a different theme. It’s not the one that I will be using, but I also wanted to understand how theme installations were handled. The fact that WordPress is setup to allow the user to search for and install plugins within its own dashboard is wonderful. This prevents the user from having to go to another site. Yet, if the plugin you want to use isn’t available within the dashboard’s plugins page, then you can still simply upload the .zip file and have WordPress take care of the rest!

As of now, Tweetmeme,was the easiest of the two plugins to understand. Although I have the All in One SEO Pack installed, I’m not sure if it’s really working or how to determine if it is or isn’t. I did a test post, but I didn’t see anything beyond the general stuff that appears with a post. This means that I will simply play around with the plugin a bit more, visit the forums and see what I can discern. For those of you reading this and considering the same, some resources that I found to help me out with this part of my installation were:

My Google seach string for the “must have” plugins for a WordPress blog

WordPress Plugins Page

How To Make My Blog’s 18 Most Downloaded Plugins Ever

Thesis Theme Plugins Customization

Quick Online Tips’ Must Have WordPress Plugins

Business 2 Press’ 30 Must Have WordPress Plugins

Most of the information is repeated in the above links, but I put them in the order that I found them to be most useful. With regards to the Thesis theme, I’m not sure if I will be going this route. It’s a highly customizable theme for WordPress with a very clean structure. If you like to control everything and have the time to invest, then this is the theme for you! My personal opinion, and I could be wrong, but it’s really for those that are more high end users. I’m keeping my eye out on it, maybe one day, but I really like more visually laid out themes, like Elegant Themes, and while I’m still on the fence about which direction I’ll take my blog, I am leaning more towards Elegant Themes. That being said, I will be saving my theme of choice to the very end. As far as plugins are concerned, I would enjoy reading anyone’s suggestions on any other plugins that I should consider using, whether they are on the lists noted by the url’s above or not. I make no promises, but to check them out!

——-@ds

Roughly two months back, I registered a domain, Running Without Condition, for the very first time on my own. It wasn’t difficult, but this was my first step in setting up my own full-fledge website with a hosting company at some point in the future. The prompting of this was due to the fact that I love WordPress so much, that I want to be able to control it more on my own. When you’re using WordPress.com, it’s a great springboard for getting adjusted with the interface and the program for free. However, you begin to see that in its ease of use the .com version of WordPress is very linear (and for good reason), but if you want to get more out of WordPress, use it as a CMS (something that I want to do and learn from the experience of interaction and mucking around), or increase its functionality with the use of plugins; then you need to go the WordPress.org route.

Both routes are free, however, the WordPress.org version is completely controlled by the user and requires the user to have his/her own domain and server space. With all of that being said, I’ve been reading a lot since I registered my domain on how to install WordPress on my server and what I can potentially do with it when I am ready. Part of understanding that use is understanding how to increase its flexibility with the use of plugins. Plugins, in my view, are like constructing your own personal robot. You start with a base (that’s the wordpress.org installation) and then you start to think how you want to build your robot so that it can do what you want and how you want it to do it. This is where Plugins enter. They provide the functionality that you seek to increase WordPress (your robot) beyond its basic installation. 

I just came across another post about the use of WordPress plugins on Kikolani’s website. Her post, entitled, “WordPress Thesis Theme Customization Part Two: Plugins” speaks directly to the heart of using plugins with WordPress. Kikolani even provides some very useful plugins to start off with and short descriptions of what they do. If you have any interest in using WordPress and customizing it to your needs, then you should definitely take a moment to read her WordPress customization post. 

——-@ds