For my first post, it’s a recursive one. I’m not a programmer, but I’m willing to learn enough to accomplish simple goals, and I’m noting here how I actually installed and configured WordPress. Remember, you don’t actually have to install anything, you can opt to sign up for a free account at their site.
It was incredibly easy to set up; especially with all the options available. I’m fortunate to know enough to be dangerous. What’s nice about WordPress templates is that they are fully customizable for design, without destroying the content—the whole point of CSS-based design. Everything was done on my fully-enabled PowerBook, then uploaded to my server.
I followed the guides here at the All Forces WordPress installation tutorials.
Everything was working fine, up until I changed the Permalink schema from http://blogname/?p=000 URLs to something more human-friendly, such as: http://blogname/welcome. This was fixed by heading over to WordPress’ very extensive codex and digging up this entry, and this one:
<Directory “/path/to/wordpress”>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride Options FileInfo
</Directory>
Changing this httpd.conf file works great on the PowerBook. It involves /etc/httpd/httpd.conf to do this. If you don’t know what this is you need to go back and get familiar with Unix, Apache and the very powerful Terminal command line. Though familiarity with these tools is helpful, you could still edit some of these files without the Terminal, using the powerful BBEdit text editor, or its free cousin, TextWrangler.
This is an example of a plug-in available from another developer to make the WordPress Dashboard more OS X like. Along with other snippets and technological wisdom, he’s got his Tiger administration dashboard up on his blog. Quite nice, and very well done, Steve.
Next up: Editing WordPress’ default Kubrick theme.