This site is now running WordPress, pretty much the best blogging software out there, and so I thought it might be good to quickly write about the process and why I love working with it.

Installation

WordPress is fairly straight forward to install, provided you know how to create a database and change some permissions on your webserver. A typical install for me goes like this:

1. Create a Database and User – Login to MySQL and add a new db, and create a user that has access only to this table. This is important because I do have some other sites running on my server. Although you could do this from the command line, I often find it faster to just load up Navicat for MySQL.
2. Download the wordpress archive. You can download this from your browser or ssh in to your server and type:
   • wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
   • tar -zxvf latest.tar.gz, and move the files to the right place.
3. Load up the site in my browser and fill in the details. I also always change the password that is assigned to you. I have no idea why it assigns you one instead of asking for an admin password.

Theming

Theming WP is really easy. I take the design, usually a PSD, slice it up and write HTML as if I was doing a static page. Next I duplicate the default theme and rename the folder. I drop in my CSS and my images, and edit the header and footer files. That’s pretty much it. You can write the HTML how you want, but I find it easiest to stick to the default theme’s structure: #header, #footer, #sidebar, and #content divs.

Using WP

WP’s admin makes extensive use of AJAX which makes the interface snappy. They’ve really done great job working on the layout and design of the admin. It’s really simple to start using and very powerful once you get into the more advanced details.