How do I start with WP?

CMS & WordPress
1

I’ve been hand-coding HTML for 20+ years, and know basic CSS, but I want to transition over to a CMS, and I’ve heard nothing but good things about WordPress. I’ve purchased several WP books, but all seem directed toward getting a blog on-line, and that is NOT my interest – my interest is in general websites (which may have a blog, but probably not).

So, using Sitepoint resources, what are your recommendations for starting. FYI, with my 4-monitor development setup, I much prefer Ebooks to hard copy books, and in somewhat prefer Ebooks to on-line courses – book on left screen, editor in center, browser(s) on the right.

Thanks!

Bob
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2

Hi Bob,

Learnable has some good resources on Wordpress (here: https://learnable.com/topics/wordpress). I’d strongly recommend that you learn some php as well as you’ll need it to be able to make any substantial changes to a theme.

Out of interest, what do you have on the fourth screen in your development setup?

3

I don’t know of any books. A good under-the-hood Wordpress development book would be handy, that’s for sure. As far as getting started, are you looking for information about using Wordpress, writing, publishing, basic administration, using Wordpress as a CMS? Or are you looking more for programming resources, developing themes and plugins and that sort of thing? I have a bunch of links in a file somewhere. I would have to look for it.

http://codex.wordpress.org/
Wordpress as a CMS

You don’t mention any experience with PHP. Maybe you are more interested in the HTML and CSS of Wordpress?

http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development

You may have heard good things about Wordpress, there are a few drawbacks as well:

  • Wordpress is big and bloated and without the use of a caching plugin consumes more than 100 times the server resources of a static HTML page request
  • Wordpress is prone to hacking if a security vulnerability is found meaning that anyone using Wordpress has to check for updates regularly, preferably every day.
4

I worked with three monitors for years, and icons kept getting in the way. So I purchased a used 15" monitor that swiveled to portrait aspect ratio and it is now my icon corral. It’s off to one side – only used a few times/day.

Thanks for the Wordpress input. I’ll investigate.

5

Don’t discount the “WordPress as a blog” articles. First step is to get WordPress setup and knowing it in & out from a user’s perspective - which section is where and how to adjust a setting, how to use the software. And then comes the part where you take a peek under the hood and start developing over WordPress. :slight_smile:

6

Ive only ever setup wordpress on a one click installer before.

How do I set wordpress up on local host to play more with it?

7

If you already have PHP, Apache & MySQL setup on your machine then its really as simple as:

  1. Create a database in MySQL
  2. Go to wordpress.org & download WordPress
  3. Unzip WordPress into your web root (say /path/public_html/wordpress/)
  4. Browse to where you unzipped WordPress in your browser (like http://localhost/wordpress/ )
  5. Follow the wizard that opens

Its pretty straight forward. For more checkout http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress

And get familiar with WordPress Codex, the documentation is quite extensive and your best friend. :slight_smile:

8

Youtube man, has the answer to every question I’ve ever asked it.

9

Thanks for sharing tutorial. kindly can u suggest me any channel on youtube of wp