WordPress tutorial

There was a short while when WebMonkey was toast — I don't know if they lost funding or readership or what, but they disappeared. So sad. I wrote my first JavaScript after burning my eyes for a while on some WebMonkey screens. Anyway, at present they are featuring a WordPress tutorial!

First, I think this is an interesting sign of the direction that the web is taking. WebMonkey used to be about basic skills – HTML, PHP, JavaScript, etc. Blogs and syndicated content have become so prevalent that WordPress itself has become a skill.

Second, my impressions of hosting WordPress: very easy. There's an automatic configuration script, so all you have to do is make a MySQL database. And you can do that via a graphical interface on most webhosting accounts. Adding new themes is as simple as copying the files to the remote wp-themes directory. I even ported a Blogger theme to WordPress. It took me a bit to figure out all of the new functions (the loop, list_cat(), etc.), but it was mostly a matter of looking through some existing templates and figuring out how they worked. I have to say that for what seems like a fairly complicated system that combines several technologies, running WordPress is surprisingly easy.

Not that there weren't problems — I couldn't get the permissions set up quite right, so I couldn't back up my database or upload photos, because I couldn't seem to write to my directories. I think I could have called the host and had this fixed, but I was mostly experimenting so it wasn't a big deal. This _is_ the kind of thing that could stop a n00b dead in his tracks, though, but similar problems could arise using any blogging software, so WordPress should hardly be faulted.