WordPress 101

You can do it — Steve

If you can type you can create a website. If you have an artistic eye you can make a pretty website, or use the supplied proven themes. If you can take a picture with your cellphone, and use drag and drop to copy that picture, you can add it to your website. From there it’s up to your time & interest as to where you take it.

The cover photo above shows an image of the UI for creating this post. The left side has the blocks/widgets for laying out the elements. The right-side panel is for settings on some blocks and some additional manual styling.

There are lots of YouTube videos on using WordPress, from short overviews to hours long deep dives. Watch a few videos, play with WP, throw it all away, do it again and you will start to get comfortable building a post with images, quotes, columns, groups and be a web guru in no time.

Another one of those dashboards, this is the main one for WP where you can monitor site stats or jot down notes to start a future post, or of course navigate with the familiar left navigation to other features and functions to keep a site working.

I happened to read an article today about the co-creator of WordPress, President of Automattic, head of the WordPress Organization and owner of wordpress.org, who is in a tiff with wordpress.com; this has been in the news the past few months and not worth pursuing here other than to say he’s a great proponent of open source, the main thrust of WordPress Organization, but he’s not opposed to making a profit via plugins; that’s the reason things are so bare bones.

That explained quite a bit about my experience with WordPress. Everything on this site is done with the plane jane vanilla WordPress or a few free plugins, which are sorely needed and barely work. But, hey, it’s all free, shows what can be done and whets the appetite for that hidden feature that a few dollars will enable.

WP comes with a media library, but it’s one big bucket, no subdirectories. If you want that functionality there’s a plugin for that. Unfortunately, not only are the good features disabled without paying, but the other plugins won’t recognize the sorting and subdirectories you’ve added, because they don’t know about the plugin. So, when you want to add an image to a post you have to find a thumbnail from the ever-growing pile of thumbnails.

For the photographers out there with the multi-mega pixel sensors, wanting to highlight their work in pixel peeping splendor, be forewarned, the default maximum file upload to WordPress is a measly 2 meg. This setting is not easily changed, for the neophyte (me). It’s in a config file, that the default Docker install makes difficult to access.

I ended up removing and discarding the WP container and recreated the Docker script to install it, specifying the install path and adding a database management tool to the stack. About the time the new container was up and running I’d found a free WP plugin that would let me set the upload to a new minimum for the max threshold at 16MB with option for much larger. But I’m serving from a tiny underpowered Pi, so I won’t servr any large images.

In fact there’s another plugin Smush to squeeze and smush images even smaller for faster load times, I am using that plugin getting a whoping 8% compression.

My basic approach to this site has been that I’l put in the time to learn how to do what I want. I’ll use the free tools to see how far I can push them and how much I can get from them, before I throw money at it. There are several plugins that do the same or similar functions so you have to shop around.

From some articles found while researching a gallery to use with WP I was steered to two, I tried them both and have chosen the Modula gallery. It doesn’t recognize the subdirectories created by the media management plugin, but that plugin recognizes the gallery plugin structure, which are the same. I’ve found that importing directly into the gallery not only saves a step of loading the gallery, but the bigger task of finding the correct thumbnail to load from its one bucket view of all the media.

For Calendars there are several, but they all tend to be for ticketed events. For what I wanted they were overkill. I’ve chosen Sugar Calendar as the best fit for my needs; I just wanted something I could share date for good celestial photo ops, these typically occur for a few to several days. Reoccurrences are not part of the free calendar package, but with the help of the database management tool I added to the build script I looked into the database found the table with the calendar events and editing 3 fields on the event record to get it reoccurring on the calendar without being all day events. A sunrise from Portland Women’s Forum does reoccur, but isn’t an all day event on the calendar now.

There’s a lot of power & capability in WP that I have yet to utilize, first I have to learn how to wield it. That will occur on a needs basis, when I need it I’ll learn it; maybe by then I can just say, “make it so.”