A Wordpress based approach to building a new website?

[Tom Kershaw]

Thanks to Clay and Ike, I'm a Wordpress user as well. I revamped my site earlier this year (thanks, Ike!), but it's still not complete. I've had other priorities come up in the mean time...

Kerik,

Did you use the 'Thesis' package as promoted by Clay Harmon?

Tom

 

[daltonrooney]

Howdy,
I am the author of the Portfolio theme linked to earlier in this thread. As you can see, a WordPress site does not have to look like a blog!

I also released the slideshow functionality that powers that theme as a free plugin, which you can find elsewhere on the site. I've seen some great uses of this code, such as here: Dead Link Removed. Tracy used a theme called Headway, along with my plugin, to make a pretty amazing portfolio.

I have set up a few dozen photographers on WP now, and so far everyone has loved it. Best of luck!

Dalton

 

[Tim Gray]

Kudos to you for making your plugin free. Very nice.

 

[clay]

Basically, my work flow in using Lightroom is to simply import a scan into the program. Lightroom allows you to organize your photos - put them in collections and so forth. Once you are ready to create a web gallery, you just select the photos you want to export to a gallery and then click on the Web Gallery Tab. You are presented with a whole array of possible gallery styles to export - from simple html galleries to oooh-wow Flash galleries. I wanted my site to run on phones and ipads and so forth, so I elected to just use the simple HTML gallery. I exported the gallery and spent an hour one afternoon hacking on the styles.css file for the gallery to get it to mesh well with my site in terms of fonts, colors and so forth. I made a copy of this modified CSS file that I now just drop in place of the one that Lightroom creates for all my galleries.

Once the gallery has been exported, I just upload the whole gallery to my site in a dedicated gallery folder that I will then link to from my wordpress page. This post describes how I then use a standard Wordpress iframe plugin to embed the gallery into the page.

My whole theory was that I wanted to create a site that made adding content a costless exercise. I am pretty much there, in my opinion. All I have to do is upload photos or scans to Lightroom and then export the gallery. Paste my custom CSS file into the gallery, and then upload it. Make a new page and point a menu link to it. It takes less than 30 minutes including the ftp transfer time.

BTW, if you don't want to buy a copy of Lightroom just do to do this, Adobe Bridge that is included with Photoshop has the exact same web gallery export features. The procedure would be identical.

Dalton, your theme and plugin are pretty nice. I like the clean, uncluttered functional look of the theme. I may try your plugin as an alternative to my CSS-hacked Lightroom HTML gallery. Thanks for making it available to all of us.

 

[clay]

One last thing for anyone contemplating the Wordpress alternative: Your website content and visual appearance are pretty much independent. If you decide you want to change the look of your site, it can often be accomplished by simply selecting another theme in your Wordpress control panel. Of course, exceptions abound. Some of the older themes do not gracefully handle menus, and other more recent Wordpress features. But in general, it is a fair statement that you could put all your content in your Wordpress installation and decide a year later that you don't like the Hello Kitty theme that seemed so cool at the time, and simply upload your alternative Pinstripes and Wingtips theme and your site's look-and-feel instantly goes from a 'bubbly female pre-teen' to a '55 year old Proctor and Gamble executive'. Cool stuff.

 

[Tim Gray]

To be fair clay, that's pretty much true with any blogging setup. In reality, any HTML page where all the layout is done in CSS can be restyled by merely changing the CSS file. Though it is super easy to switch between premade themes in in Wordpress.

 

[clay]

Tim, that is absolutely true. I probably wasn't clear that this advantage applies to more CMS's than just Wordpress. Joomla, Drupal, Movable Type, and others all take advantage of the separation of content from styling.

 

[deisenlord]

Tom,
Kerik's site is using Thesis.

Dalton,
I like your theme as well, very clean. I turned a friend onto it who's using it.

 

[Tim Gray]

It's not just CMS's that do that though. Separating content from styling has been a hot thing to do since the early 2000's. I forget the exact date, but it was definitely pre-2004. Once we got past layout with tables, and turned to layout with CSS, good things happened.

EDIT: I'm not trying to be argumentative, just trying to help those out making their sites for the first time in a long time. If you haven't played around with CSS yet, you can do quite a lot of things with it.

 

[Tom Kershaw]

It's not just CMS's that do that though. Separating content from styling has been a hot thing to do since the early 2000's. I forget the exact date, but it was definitely pre-2004. Once we got past layout with tables, and turned to layout with CSS, good things happened.

EDIT: I'm not trying to be argumentative, just trying to help those out making their sites for the first time in a long time. If you haven't played around with CSS yet, you can do quite a lot of things with it.

Tim,

I have done a couple of simple sites in the past using CSS so can cope with a degree of scripting but have started to explore the Wordpress option in terms of providing a framework that may result in an easier to update website.

Tom

 

[clay]

You are totally correct about this. The main thing is that the CMS systems enforce this practice. If you build a hand-coded website using CSS and HTML, you have to consciously write your markup in a way that separates the semantic markup from the stylistic markup. It is still quite possible to build a handcoded HTML site that inadvertently includes stylistic stuff with the actual markup. The CMS's just make it easier to keep the two separate. But you are quite right that if you don't want to use a CMS, you can build a beautiful site the has the style completely separate from the content. You can go here and see a demo site that has many, many different styles applied to the same content.

Originally Posted by Tim Gray
It's not just CMS's that do that though. Separating content from styling has been a hot thing to do since the early 2000's. I forget the exact date, but it was definitely pre-2004. Once we got past layout with tables, and turned to layout with CSS, good things happened.

EDIT: I'm not trying to be argumentative, just trying to help those out making their sites for the first time in a long time. If you haven't played around with CSS yet, you can do quite a lot of things with it.

 

[Tim Gray]

I have done a couple of simple sites in the past using CSS so can cope with a degree of scripting but have started to explore the Wordpress option in terms of providing a framework that may result in an easier to update website.

It's good stuff Tom. Like I said earlier, I've been running a site for the past 6 years on Wordpress and wouldn't consider any other software for that at this point. I will admit though that some of my views of Wordpress have been colored by those last six years. I've had to do many upgrades (which used to not be automatic but required because of Wordpress's many security holes), including 2 major upgrade versions, 1 -> 2 and 2 -> 3. Upgrading before the automatic upgrade capabilities was NOT fun. With the automatic upgrade feature however, it is pretty easy now to upgrade your site and plugins now.

Things I've learned during these 6 years that I would caution other users about:

- You WILL need to backup your site. At some point, your host (or you) will screw up and whatever backup service they provide will not suffice.

- Backing up content stored in MYSQL databases is not quite as straight forward as content stored in flat file systems.

- Wordpress sticks content in several places. Themes are one place, images and other files are elsewhere, page content is in the database, etc. You need to back up all of these to be safe.

- This scattering of files and the database makes it tricky to export your site to a new CMS. It can certainly be done. However, on my current Wordpress site, we have 760 entries categorized with 470 tags, 3200 comments, and about 4 gigs of associated content (images, videos, etc.). Major CMS software will provide an import function for the MYSQL dump files, but doing any thing by hand is not feasible in my mind.

Obviously, a lot of those concerns above, especially the exporting bit, are not as looming if your site is kept small, which it would be for most portfolio sites. But it's something to keep in mind. Plan for the future

 

[Tom Kershaw]

Tim,

Thanks for your comments, I've just installed MySQL on a local machine for development work (Mac OS X 10.5) and will proceed to get WordPress up and running. Will also need to check up on 'Thesis' or another theme. I see the book I have here, the 'Wordpress Bible' gives extensive attention to themes.

On the issue of backups: have you come up with an effective strategy?

Tom

 

[David Brown]

One of the main reasons I do not have a website (yet) is that I only understand about 10% of this thread.

I do have a blog, however, and I'll get there.

 

[Tim Gray]

Backups: only kinda sorta. I rsync the whole website about once a week back to my laptop, which is backed up daily at work and twice a week at home. That covers most of the content - uploaded pictures, etc.

As far as the MYSQL database, I do a dump of that twice a week. You could also rsync that, or save it in your html directory and download it, etc. Personally, I have dropbox installed on the server, so I copy the dump to that, which syncs it to my laptop and a friends computer. I use mysqldump since I wanted to automate it. Instructions for Wordpress are here.

I know it sounds paranoid, but somewhere around 2003, the host we were using lost the main drive and all three current backups. They had an offsite copy or something, but it was like 2 months out of date, and it was going to take them quite a bit of time to restore from it. Fortunately, I had a 2 week old backup at the time and was able to restore from that. I'm more careful than that now

Enjoy Wordpress. It really is great software. I remember tentatively going with it many years ago and hoping it would continue to get developed. Looks like I somehow chose right, since it's definitely a leader now. And thanks again Dalton for you great plugin!

 

[Tom Kershaw]

Can phpMyAdmin be used to create the MySQL database in the first place?

Tom

 

[Solarize]

What has not be mentioned yet either, is that if used properly, a blogging platform for your website should improve your search engine visibility massively. With very little SEO knowledge, I've installed the 'all in one SEO' plugin and improved my ranking almost overnight.
There are also plugins that will back up your site automatically, e-mailing the site contents to you as often as you like.

Ciaran

 

[clay]

Tim, I am using the phpAdmin backup scenario right now and making a compressed copy of the database once a week and sending it to my gmail account (Thanks Ike!). But I guess that mainly catches the database itself. How did you set up rsync to copy your entire site? Are you just SSH'ing into the site and syncing the whole /html directory structure? Is something else necessary to capture the database component?

 

[Tom Kershaw]

Instead of going the full manual route. I found an free application (for the basic version) called MAMP which auto-installs the components and works straight off.

http://www.mamp.info/en/index.html

Tom

 

[Tim Gray]

UNIX geeky stuff to follow: I use a shell script that runs twice a week via cron to run mysqldump and copy/email/rsync/whatever you want. To rsync the rest of the site, the non-database content, I run rsync from the command line. That is not automated yet, but again, it could easily be automated by adding the appropriate line in as a cronjob.

As long as both your source and target computers have rsync installed, and the remote computer has ssh open, you should be able to rsync data with no problems. I believe OS X, at least since 10.5, has rsync built in. Most hosting services also give you ssh and rsync access, so you should be fine. If you want to catch the database component at the same time, you'd need to make sure to dump your database to a file in an appropriate location (a backups subdirectory maybe?) and then rsync the whole website.

There are of course other options than rsync. I like it because it can be automated easily. Many FTP/SFTP programs have 'sync' features that let you sync up a local copy of a remote directory.

 

[clay]

Thanks! That is about what I thought. I use OSX, so I have SSH and rsync at both ends. Now just need to pull out my OReilly sysadmin manuals and brush up on cronjob scripts.

UNIX geeky stuff to follow: I use a shell script that runs twice a week via cron to run mysqldump and copy/email/rsync/whatever you want. To rsync the rest of the site, the non-database content, I run rsync from the command line. That is not automated yet, but again, it could easily be automated by adding the appropriate line in as a cronjob.

As long as both your source and target computers have rsync installed, and the remote computer has ssh open, you should be able to rsync data with no problems. I believe OS X, at least since 10.5, has rsync built in. Most hosting services also give you ssh and rsync access, so you should be fine. If you want to catch the database component at the same time, you'd need to make sure to dump your database to a file in an appropriate location (a backups subdirectory maybe?) and then rsync the whole website.

There are of course other options than rsync. I like it because it can be automated easily. Many FTP/SFTP programs have 'sync' features that let you sync up a local copy of a remote directory.

 

[Tim Gray]

Here's my rsync script:

#! /bin/sh -
EXCLUDE='--exclude **.svn --exclude .DS_Store --exclude cache --exclude error_log'
OPTIONS='-av'
DELETE="--delete-after"

DEST='/Users/me/localdir/'
SOURCE='user@host.com:/path/tosite/onserver/'
rsync -e "ssh -p 22" $OPTIONS $DELETE $EXCLUDE $SOURCE $DEST

I run this from my *local* computer. It rsyncs from the remote server to the local destination. You obviously need to set DEST and SOURCE appropriately. You also might want to take a look at the options. I have it set up to delete files locally that no longer exist remotely - it's a mirror. Obviously, this can be playing with fire if you don't know what you are doing.

You could also have a version that runs remotely on the server, but the destination would have to have a port exposed to the internet and always be on with a known address. Since that's not true of my laptop, I 'pull' stuff from the server instead of 'pushing' it from the server.

 

[clay]

Thanks!

Here's my rsync script:



I run this from my *local* computer. It rsyncs from the remote server to the local destination. You obviously need to set DEST and SOURCE appropriately. You also might want to take a look at the options. I have it set up to delete files locally that no longer exist remotely - it's a mirror. Obviously, this can be playing with fire if you don't know what you are doing.

You could also have a version that runs remotely on the server, but the destination would have to have a port exposed to the internet and always be on with a known address. Since that's not true of my laptop, I 'pull' stuff from the server instead of 'pushing' it from the server.

 

[Tim Gray]

Oh yeah, if you add in a '-n' option to the rsync command, it will do a dry run - not actually copy anything. You can and should do that the first couple times to make sure it is going to do what you think it should.

 

[Tom Kershaw]

Tim,

Do you have any advice in terms of uploading a locally hosted Wordpress site to a remote server (linux based in my case)?

Tom