Deployment and configuration of wordpress blog engine - my impressions

Finally, I finished initial configuration of my new blog (you read it now). It was my first time to do it and I’d like to share my impressions and experience about it.

First of all, I’d like to thank Mr. Michael Pollock for the nice theme Zeke. The second person I’d like to thank is my friend, the web front-end development guru, Alexander Gyoshev. Thanks man you help me a lot with configuring my wordpress engine!

It is clear that before to start I download the wordpress engine zip. The next step was to find some more information how to this and I got sample installation doc. I started the deployment and all went nice except of a problem with importing XML file with data (see my old post).

I’ve changed a bit the Mr. Michael Pollock’s theme in order to have gray body color and to remove the shadow. First of all I edited style.css. I removed URL reference to images/planks.gif from body background and set my color. Then I removed the shadow from both sides of the zekebg2.gif image. The last thing I’ve done was to change padding of #contentright from padding: 15px 0 15px 15px; to padding: 15px 0 15px 30px;. And that is all I got the theme in the way I’ve wished it. During research of Mr. Michael Pollock’s code I found that it is very well organized and ordered. Well done, man! After doing it I installed several plug-ins I’ve considered as helpful.

• Akismet - it was installed but I activated it;
• CyStat - nice statistics plug-in but I still cannot find how to configure it to not collect statistics connected with administration. There is an option in its settings page but it seems it doesn’t work;
• Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator;
• Syntax Highlighter Plus - I cannot leave without it.
• Wordpress Stats - I really nice statistics plug-in with base information needed to watch for your statistics which do not collect admin visits as well as logged user visits.
• [Update 07/10/2008: Google Analytics - a really useful plug-in.]
• [Update 07/10/2008: Rate It - just to allow people to rate my blog.]

I did not have any problems with installation and configuration of any of the plug ins. The next what I’ve done was to configure my blog to be accessible directly through http://devblog.antongochev.net instead of http://devblog.antongochev.net/wordpress/. In this sample installation doc they offer you to configure index.php file like so.

[sourcecode language="php"]

[/sourcecode]

It is good but after accessing the site the address will display http://devblog.antongochev.net/wordpress/. Alex told me how to this much smarter way. I configured my blog address URL into wordpress admin->settings->general and I replaced index.php in my root website directory with those from wordpress directory and changed the path to ‘wp-blog-header.php’ from

[sourcecode language="php"]

/* Short and sweet */
define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
?>

[/sourcecode]

to

[sourcecode language="php"]

/* Short and sweet */
define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);
require('./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php');
?>

[/sourcecode]

The last think was to configure my post url generation. It can be done via wordpress admin->permalinks. I configured the second option - date and name. But NOTE for this to work you should have .htaccess file in the same directory where your wordpress’ index.php is placed. If you have not such file just create it. If it has enough permissions (755 or 777) wordpress will be able to change it automatically but if it has not enough permissions you can copy generated info from admin->permalinks page and you ca update .htaccess yourself. I prefer second option in order to keep files with 644. The .htaccess file looks something like those in the next snippet.

[sourcecode language="php"]
# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

[/sourcecode]

Well, I think it was all. I have my new blog now!