Learning about Wordpress
Posted on March 20, 2007
Filed Under Uncategorized |
As the title suggests, I’ve been spending a fair bit of time lately learning about Wordpress. More specifically, I’m learning about the variety of themes and plugins that have been developed by the Wordpress community and freely available to use and modify for your own purposes. Of particular interest to me is figuring out how to modify the themes to suit the objectives for the blog I’m working for my employer and then later for blogs of my own. Despite the fact that there are hundreds of layouts available I’m yet to find one that really fits with my intentions. Therefore, I’m gonna have to put my developer hat on and get in and hack about until I get it right.
First off, baby steps. Before I get into the nuts and bolts of editing themes I’m going to try out some easy things first in order to get a feel for the structure of a Wordpress blog.
I’ve been reading blogs for almost a year now and for some reason I haven’t felt compelled to grow one of my own. I guess that’s probably due to fear on some level although I’m not exactly sure what it is I’ve been afraid of - I’m getting off topic but I’ll definitely be revisting this issue in the near future.
Anyway, I was talking about easy things I can do to get familiar with Wordpress and the fact that I’ve been reading other blogs for a while now. The point I’m trying to get to is that I’ve observed these other blogs and noticed aspects and features that I would like to be able to use on my own blogs. So, without further ado, I’m going to install my first plugin…
Step one is to find and download a plug-in that I want to use. Having spent some time today exploring the available options I’ve found one called Sidebar Widgets which appeals to me because at the moment I’m most interested in modifying the sidebar of the blog I’m working on. Sounds logical enough. It’s described as follows;
“It’s called Sidebar Widgets because it allows you to move things (widgets) around, in and out of your sidebar. A widget is something that you might want on your sidebar, such as a category list or the most recent comments or a link to your admin pages. There is even a widget that lets you type whatever you want in the sidebar, such as some HTML or Javascript code.”
Step two is to unzip and upload the appropriate files to my hosting server. For me that means cranking up Filezilla and creating a profile for my FTP account so I don’t have to manually enter the details everytime I want to access my files. According to the included readme.txt I should upload all the necessary PHP scripts to wp-content/plugins/widgets.
I’ve fiddled about previously with Wordpress blogs, modifying headers, footers and sidebars so I have at least a basic understanding of the folder structure. Going through the motions like this ought to make me that little bit more comfortable with the internal workings.
Ok, so I’ve created a folder in the ‘plugins’ directory, named it ‘widgets’ and uploaded the PHP scripts to it. Rad.
Apparently, and I quote the readme again “Installing the plugin files isn’t enough, however. You must have a theme that supports sidebar widgets”. I’m pretty sure the theme I’ve been playing with supports widgets but I figure the easiest way to find out at this point is to just try it out and see if it works or not.
Step three is to activate the plugin. I’m assuming that’s something I do from the admin section… yep! After logging back in and going to the Plugins section I can now see that Sidebar Widgets has been added to my list of plugins. I can also see that I have the option to ‘Activate’ or ‘Edit’ the plugin. Seems easy enough - I click ‘Activate’.
Step four - I have installed and activated the plugin. Now how do I use it?
The installation guide suggests that I should be able to “see a “Sidebar Widgets” item in the Presentation menu”… Yes, sir, yes I can. I click the tab and am presented with a sexy AJAX drag and drop interface. There are two boxes, representing my two sidebars. Below these are smaller boxes representing each widget available to me - e.g. Categories, Links, Recent Comments etc.
Configuring the layout of each sidebar is as easy as dragging and dropping the widget boxes into the appropriate sidebar box in the order that you want it to display. That’s a hell of a lot nicer than editing PHP/HTML!
I notice that some of the widgets have a little button on them that allows you to configure individual settings. I want to rename my Categories widget so I click the little button and change the Title setting. While I’m there I also tick some checkboxes that allow me to “Show Post Count” and “Show Hierarchy”. There’s no button to confirm so I hit enter on my keyboard and am notified that the changes have been made. I have a look at the site and sure enough, the changes have been implemented successfully.
Awesome. I’ve installed my first plugin and had a fiddle with it. It looks like a very useful little timesaver.
Anyway, I’ll let this post fizzle out without any grand conclusion. I only have one reader so everybody else can suck eggs until I get my act together and start blogging regularly.
Joe
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