rtCamp notes, day 12/undefined

WordPress features

Here are some features provided by WordPress:

Multisite: We can manage and edit multiple sites via a single WordPress installation.
Drag-n-Drop: WordPress helps user to do complex tasks with just some drag and drops, for e.g. file uploads.
Auto save: Whenever you’re writing an article and your internet or computer goes down, you don’t loose your article, WordPress saves your draft to the backend in interval of times and even if there is not internet, wordpress saves to to your browsers local storage.
Post schedule: WordPress let’s us schedule posts for the future time so that we can write a post, schedule it, log out & the post would still go up at the time we mentioned.
Platform: You can use any platform to publish your posts, whether it be a mobile phone, a tablet or a computer.
Access control: We can password protect our posts or we can also make private posts which are only visible to specific users.
Preview: We can see a preview of our posts before even publishing them to see how they look for a user.
Privacy: WordPress is totally hosted on your own server, so you don’t need to worry about data leaks.

WordPress installation

For users, usually most of the hosting companies provide one-click app installers which usually contains WordPress as well, but still there are other ways to install WordPress.

You can download an archive of the current version of WordPress from WordPress’s official site, you can unzip it in the directory you want to install WordPress and then open the file wp-config.sample.php and edit your database details there and rename it to wp-config.php and visit your directory from the browser 😀

Or without renaming that file you can also visit the directory and it would take you through an installation script where you’ll have to input your database details and you can register from there as well.

Installing wordpress in a sub-directory

It’s a very easy step,
Let’s take an example that your current WordPress installation is in /home/user/Desktop/wordpress and it point to localhost
to hide the wordpress core files,

You can create a new directory directory_name in your wordpress directory
Move all the files from wordpress directory to the directory_name
Copy the file directory_name/index.php to wordpress folder
Edit the file and change the line which includes wp-blog-header.php to include it from the directory_name : directory_name/wp-blog-header.php
Also change your site url in your options table in database.

Now your wordpress blog would be at localhost & your admin dashboard would be at localhost/directory_name

Different types of WordPress installation

Using the same database : We can create multiple instances using the same database by changing the table prefix WordPress uses for an instance, for e.g. if we already have a WordPress instance in /home (for e.g.) and we want to create another one in /home/test, we would upload the WordPress core files to /home/test and while editing the wp-config.php to add database details we will also edit the $table_prefix variable and set it something else like test_ (instead of wp_) and then we can continue installing the WordPress.
Using different database : We can create multiple WordPress instance in different folders and can provide different database details during the setup of the instances (via the /install or via wp-config.php), in such way multiple instances can be installed in different folders.
Using the WordPress multisite feature : We can install multiple site using the WordPress, we have to configure our main instance for this, we can go to wp-config.php and add this define( 'WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE', true ); to allow the multisite feature. After that we have to go to Tools -> Network Setup and fill in the required details, it will provide us with a code to put into wp-config.php and then we can use the Multi-Site feature from Wp-Admin

Basic usage and administration

Blocks

Previously wordpress used normal rich text editor we see in various platforms, now WordPress has started using Gutenberg blocks, what blocks does is they hold predefined content/templates to particular things, we can just use the blocks in our pages or posts, even this post is done with the help of blocks,

We can choose from a variety of blocks (heading, quote, table, image) or can also add third party blocks,

Media library

Media library stores the media items we have previously used/uploaded to our wordpress site (for e.g. images, videos, etc.) and we can also directly edit the text, description, file name, etc from this panel directly and re-use the image anywhere without re-uploading

Posts

It holds the information of all our previous posts and also allow us to create new posts, we can manage all the post actions from here like deleting/hiding posts, using previous draft posts to publish them, schedule post publish, change permalink etc

Appearance

This section holds all the appearance settings related to our website, we can change themes, edit theme content, edit widgets, edit menus directly from this panel without having to interact with the source coding files

Plugin

This section holds the settings related to the plugin section in our website, we can add/remove plugins from here or we can enable/disable plugins from here as well. Plugins are used to add extra functionality to your WordPress site

Users & User roles

We can create new users or edit existing user information and can also change the roles for the users to a different one to restrict their access to some features on the website.

Regards

–

Aryan Jasala

WordPress Engineer Trainee