How do I install and set up a WordPress website?

1. How do I install and set up a WordPress site?
2. How do I add a new plugin to a WordPress site?

1. How do I install and set up a WordPress site?

To set up Wordpress, you need to

* Ask Tech for a mysql database. Tell them what it should be called and the username that will access it. The WordPress installer (which is ver easy to use) includes a config file where you enter your database information, and then it creates the necessary tables and populates them appropriately. I have not touched my database since I created the site.

* Follow the instructions on the WordPress site for installing WordPress.

* After the installer is finished go to /wp-admin to log in and set things up. Be sure to go to setting/media and uncheck "Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders" in order to avoid some permissions issues with file uploading.

* Give the 'webserver' afs rlidwk rights in the wordpress/wp-content/uploads directory

* Since the webserver has more permissions that normal, tech requires that you put a .htaccess file in the uploads directory with the following contents:


<FilesMatch "(.*\.php)$"> 

Order allow,deny 

</FilesMatch>

As far as I recall, that is all there is to it.

There are a number of free plugins available on the wordpress site for more complicated site functionality, and there are also many free themes. In addition to the built in Akismet spam protection plugin I use:

Member Access: Allows you to restrict specific pages to only registered users.

Users to CSV: Allows you to export all of your users and email addresses to a CSV file.

Social Login: This is a really convenient plugin that allows you to specify various social network logins that your users can register with instead of creating a new account through wordpress. It requires a little bit more setup and an account with oneall.com, but it's not too complicated. RuleBender uses this with Google accounts.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Adam Smith

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2. How do I add a new plugin w/out ftp?

There is a great post about this on stack overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/640409/can-i-install-update-wordpress-plugins-without-providing-ftp-access. The short version is that if you install plugins manually (like I always did) then you do not need to enter ftp information. Also, if the webserver has rights to wp-content then it also will not have to ask for ftp information. Look at the afs permissions for the wp-uploads directory (or something like that; I can't check it now) to see which permissions I gave the webserver. Any directories where the webserver has write access needs to also have the .htaccess file updated to match the one in the wp-uploads (or whatever it's called) directory. The easiest thing would be to just download the plugin and manually put it in the wp-content/plugins directory (again, those are approximate names).

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