WordPress is a great platform, but if you want to harness the ridiculous power that some sites are boasting you are going to need to be familiar with some great plugins.

WordPress is starting to power more and more multi-author sites, and as such WordPress’ default publishing options could use a bit more horsepower.

Summary

Setting up your WordPress site to be as efficient as possible is always the goal, I hope I have given you a bit of insight in to how you can extend it.

If you have ever used a WordPress site than you are undoubtedly familiar with widgets and how they work. For the uninitiated, a widget is usually a block of code that can be dragged around inside the WordPress interface. By making it a drag and drop feature the widgetized area can easily be edited.

You will note that I said widgetized area, not sidebar. That is because a widgetized area does not need to be inside of a sidebar, it can be in literally any part of your site. That’s right you can have a widgetized area in the header, footer or even the content all of which will use the WordPress built in drag and drop features. This makes it exceptionally easy to edit what would otherwise be complex code.

So how do you make these multiple widget areas? Well you have to modify the theme’s function.php file. Most themes support widgets in some form or another but not all of them will support multiple widgets. So grab your favourite code editor and open up that function.php file, if you scan through the code you should find a block of code that looks like this.

if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</li>',
'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));

What this code is doing is looking to make sure the copy of Worpdress you are running can handle a widgetized sidebar, if it can then it goes ahead and registers the sidebar. When the widget area is being defined feel free to change any of the code in the area following the attributes. This is just the code that will be generated to surround the widget when it is created. The fancy ids and classes will generate a unique value for each widget area.

Now we want to make multiple widget areas, so we technically could just create and add as many of these blocks of code that is necessary. But, that isn’t very pretty or efficient. Instead we are going to make use of arrays and build this function properly.

if (function_exists('register_sidebar')) {
register_sidebar(array(
'name' => 'Header',
'id' => 'header',
'description' => 'This is the widgetized header.',
'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="widg %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</div>',
'before_title' => '<h3>',
'after_title' => '</h3>'
));
register_sidebar(array(
'name' => 'Sidebar',
'id' => 'sidebar',
'description' => 'This is the widgetized sidebar.',
'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="widg %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</div>',
'before_title' => '<h3>',
'after_title' => '</h3>'
));
register_sidebar(array(
'name' => 'Footer',
'id' => 'footer',
'description' => 'This is the widgetized footer.',
'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="widg %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</div>',
'before_title' => '<h3>',
'after_title' => '</h3>'
));

}

Now we have the code into the functions.php file WordPress will go ahead and show us multiple widget areas in the administration. Something like this;

But, don’t be fooled we are only mostly done. We still need to tell the template where to show these new areas on the front end. So locate the correct file, in this case I am going to add a widget area to the header. So I open the header.php file in my theme and insert this code:

<?php if ( function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') && dynamic_sidebar('sidebar') ): else:?>
<div class="pre-widget">
<p>Widgetized Area</p>
<p>This panel is active and ready for you to add some widgets via the WP Admin</p>
</div>
<?php endif; ?>


And that is it, simple really. If you want to find a more in-depth review of widgets I suggest the following sources:

Net.tutsplus.com – Widget Search
digwp.com – Declare Multiple Widgetized Areas

The beauty of WordPress is that it is so extensible, if you want a forum there is a plugin for that, if you want a picture gallery it’s got you covered there as well.

One of the most sought after feature of any business website, is the ability to be able to conduct e-commerce. This is another area where WordPress really shines as there are numerous choices based on your needs. Which one you decide to go with will depend on your needs.

Summary

One thing I really hate about these lists, is when you get to the end and nobody steps up to say who they think is best. Well I am not going to do that, right now this is a two horse race with WP e-commerce and Shopp being the best solutions by far. WP e-commerce has time on their side and therefore has had the option to fix a lot of bugs or hitches, unfortunately they have also become a bit lazy, they have a very good product that could be excellent. Shopp on the other hand is the up and comer that is working hard to take away market share from WPE, in my opinion they have the better ‘paid’ solution, but if I need a quick and cheap solution I will probably go with WP-ecommerce. What is your opinion?

As a web developer you tend to use a lot of different platforms to build websites on. Everybody has their favorite, mine is WordPress. Just to get it out in the open I have used a lot of the major CMS’s (yes, I refer to WordPress as a CMS) including Drupal, Joomla, Magento, OSCommerce, Prestashop and about a half dozen others that I have forgotten. They all have really good features, but if I am going to be suggesting a CMS to engine a client’s site I always start with Wordpres, here is why:

Ease of Use

This is not for me, or any other developer, I am talking about the end user, or my clients. There is nothing more frustrating than spending weeks building out a site for a client, who in the end has absolutely no idea how to use a simple WYSIWYG editor. Most people are not technically savvy, and if the administration panel is at all intimidating, you are going to lose them. Remember, it does not matter how brilliant your site is if the client can not use it.

Plugins galore

Most CMS’s have plugins available for them, but if you have ever developed a WordPress site you will know that there is literally a plugin for everything. I recently built out a site using Prestashop, an up an comer in the ecommerce world, and while I was very pleased with the system, I was a bit disappointed in the plugins available, this is not to point blame at Prestashop, they have an excellent platform. They are just not as mature as WordPress, Drupal comes close but they still fall well short of WP.

Template haven

Here is an idea go to a template site like TemplateMonster or ThemeForest. Look at the number of themes that are available for WordPress and compare them to anything else. Enough said!

SEO

Ok, this is not secret but a lot of people seem to ignore this. Google loves WordPress sites. If you want traffic to your site, use WordPress and I will guarantee, that out of the box, you will get more favorable SERPs than any other CMS, except maybe Drupal. And I am still not sure the big D can touch WP.

Community

WordPress has a very active community, if you are looking for an answer you can usually find it by doing a simple Google search. Trust me that is a huge advantage over competing CMS’s.

Ok, so now I have you convinced that you should be developing using WordPress. How do you get started? This couldn’t be easier, head on over to WordPress.org and look through the forums and the codex. Or if you are more of a visual learner ThemeForest.net has an excellent video series on getting started on WordPress. Or do you like books, Digging into WordPress has just published a title.

Like I said, a great community.

Summary

So, these are the reasons, I love WP. Do you have a favourite CMS, tell us why. Or add your own reasons in the comments below.

Web development is not for everyone but sometimes things are so easy everyone should know how to do it. Installing WordPress is one of those things.

There are many ways to install WordPress, I am going to cover 2. One will be installing it manually on a local server and the other will involve using CPanel and the one click solution Fantastico.

Installing on a Local Server

For the sake of the post, I am not going to get into installing Apache or phpMyAdmin. I will tell you on my Mac I use MAMP and on my other ‘puters I use either WAMP or XAMP, these are super easy all in one solutions that will install Apache, MySQL and PHP on your local box.

Once you have a server running on your local server you will need to navigate to the phpMyAdmin page, this is located on at http://localhost:8888/MAMP on my Mac you will have to refer to your setups documentation to locate. Once there, you will need to create a database and assign a user that has full CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) rights on this database.

That’s all you will have to do in the phpMyAdmin panel so you can close out of it now.

Now, we need to grab a copy of WordPress, surf on over to WordPress.org and download a copy of it and unzip it.

Now we need to figure out where to put WordPress so that Apache can see it. On my Mac I drop it in the htdocs folder that is inside the MAMP folder in the applications. On Windows, using WAMP it is set by default to the ‘www’ folder inside of the WAMP folder that you will find in the root directory (usually C drive). Your configuration will depend on how you have Apache set up.

Once we have placed WordPress in the right folder, the first thing we need to do is hook it up to our new database. To do this open up wp-config-sample.php inside the WordPress folder, open this in a plain text editor. You will see a page that looks like this:

You will need to edit these settings to the ones you set when you created the database. The username is the name of the user you added to the database, the default user for a Mac is ‘root’ with a password of ‘root’ while Windows default use is also named ‘root’ but the password is set to blank ‘ ‘.

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere');

/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

to something like this

// ** MySQL settings - You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define('DB_NAME', 'tutorial');

/** MySQL database username */
define('DB_USER', 'root');

/** MySQL database password */
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'root');

/** MySQL hostname */
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');

/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

/** The Database Collate type. Don't change this if in doubt. */
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

After you have set the database settings, you can be done. If you have decided you are done make sure you save the file as wp-config.php in the same location that wp-config-sample.php came from. However, if this site will ever be accessed by an outside computer I highly recommend that you change the Authentication Unique Keys. You can have wordpress.org generate you some to copy and past by navigating here. Another worthwhile security measure is to change the WordPress Database Table prefix to something unique You do that by editing this line of code:

$table_prefix  = 'wp_';

I recommend something with numbers as well e.g. ‘wp1234_’

That’s it for the hard part. Now the fun begins. Using your browser, navigate to the WordPress install mine is http://localhost:8888/wordpress-test/. If you have everything set up correctly this is what you will see:

Fill in the Blog title and email and hit Install…. that’s it.
You will now see a page like this

Either copy to the clipboard or write down the password and click the button that says ‘Log In’. You will be taken to the WordPress administration where you are free to change the password to anything you like. That’s it for the local install, not that complicated but still a little more technical then the next way.

Installing using CPanel and Fatastico

If you website is on a hosting company’s server, they will have supplied you with an administration panel. There are quite a few different ones that are used by a variety of different providers. I use hostGator, and I really am happy with the service I get. With hostGator they use cPanel which is probably the most common one out there.

Anyways to install WordPress on a hostGator server could not be easier, even if you are not using hostGator the steps will be very similar to these.

First thing is to login into your cPanel account. You will be looking at a page like this:

You are looking for a little icon that looks like this

Click on it to open the Fantastico panel. Fantastico can be used to install all sorts of goodies on you server. You can see the entire list on the left hand side. We are going to choose WordPress.

From there we are going to choose new installation. Make sure you fill out all the forms and click the install WordPress button at the bottom. That’s it Fantastico takes care of the rest! Pretty simple right?

Summary

Installing WordPress is not a big deal, if you can navigate around your computer and are at all technically minded it should only take you a few minutes to have an install up and running.