First WordPress Project

I didn’t intend for this to happen so soon—and certainly not on what I consider my first official project—but I am now involved in building a website using WordPress as a CMS. I figured I would build at least a few static HTML sites before delving into the world of content management systems. But this project I’ve been “barterlancing” on (see previous post) has morphed from a simple multipage HTML site to one that is driven by a CMS. Now this goes against the original intent of me building the site, since I was going to teach Patrick how to build websites by using his site as the tutorial. But I think the reality of the situation is that it takes time to learn how to build websites, and you certainly don’t learn it all on one project. Plus Patrick has a thriving design business so he needs to keep at that in order to pay the bills and not wander off with me into the land of HTML and CSS. And I knew I needed to gain experience in how to build a site that will incorporate a CMS, so in the long run it’s better that it happened this way.

I had already built the site in XHTML and was almost finished with the CSS when Patrick and I agreed that we should use a CMS, and I suggested WordPress. I don’t know PHP, and my only experience with tinkering with WordPress was when I tweaked the layout on my two blogs, but I knew WordPress could be altered to suit your needs and I wanted to gain more experience with WordPress.

The next issue was where I was going to build the WordPress dev site. Do I use my server or Patrick’s? If I used Patrick’s his site would potentially be down since I would have WordPress installed at the root level. If I used my server I’d be facing the task of migrating the database and files to Patrick’s server. I could have hosted the site but Patrick had just renewed his hosting and he was reluctant to move. The answer came when Patrick emailed me an article he found about installing WordPress locally on your Mac. That turned out to be a great solution, which I’ll write about in my next post. In the mean time I’m making my way through PHP and WordPress, and it has been going smoothly so far.