{"id":7,"date":"2007-08-17T10:51:14","date_gmt":"2007-08-17T09:51:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/67bricks.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/17\/setting-up-a-website-using-wordpress\/"},"modified":"2021-12-16T11:01:24","modified_gmt":"2021-12-16T11:01:24","slug":"setting-up-a-website-using-wordpress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/?p=7","title":{"rendered":"Setting up a website using WordPress"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve set the <a href=\"http:\/\/67bricks.com\/\">67 Bricks<\/a> website up using WordPress as a content management system. Previously, I&#8217;ve used either simple static HTML pages, or a traditional, full-featured CMS. I decided to use WordPress here because it is easy to use, and has an ecology of templates written for it making site design much simpler. It also describes itself as a &#8220;Semantic Publishing Platform&#8221;, and for a knowledge-management company such as our own, semantic publishing is important.<\/p>\n<p>Setting up WordPress requires very little technical knowledge: my ISP, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.heartinternet.co.uk\/\">Heart Internet<\/a> allows you to do it with a few clicks in their script library, but even without that, it&#8217;s still simple. The changes that I&#8217;ve made to make it work as a CMS are:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Installing the <a href=\"http:\/\/adahas.com\/work\/navigo\/\">Navigo plugin<\/a>: which makes it easy to create a menu<\/li>\n<li>Installing <a href=\"http:\/\/dancameron.org\/wordpress\/\">Search Everything<\/a>: so pages can be searched as well as posts<\/li>\n<li>Installing <a href=\"http:\/\/helvensteijn.com\/blog\/2007\/07\/03\/wp-last-posts\/\">WP Last Posts<\/a>: to put the text of the last few posts on the home page<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Then, I created the bulk of the site using WordPress &#8220;pages&#8221;, and the news items as &#8220;posts&#8221;. I set the front page to be a static page under the Options | Reading menu.<\/p>\n<p>To create a design for the site, I looked through the library of templates on the WordPress site, downloaded four or five that looked interesting, and tried them out locally. Having found a template with a good layout, clean HTML code, and a reasonable license, I then customized it to remove the sections I didn&#8217;t like, and to change the graphics &#8211; a much simpler process than building a web site design from scratch.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s really all there is to it.<\/p>\n<p>So, what did I learn?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Setting up a website with WordPress is very quick<\/strong>. Installation of WordPress took a few minutes, installing plugins took maybe quarter of an hour, choosing and customizing a theme about an hour, and the rest of the time was spent creating content.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The WordPress way of separating content from presentation using PHP functions works well<\/strong>. This is more powerful than the pure CSS approach of <a href=\"http:\/\/csszengarden.com\/\">CSS Zen Garden<\/a>, since it allows different templates to display different content. An alternative would be to use XQuery: which would probably be more versatile, but the PHP developer community hasn&#8217;t had a wide take-up of XQuery and seems generally sceptical of XML.<\/p>\n<p>(thanks to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.twenty3design.co.uk\/\">twenty3design<\/a> for help with choosing WordPress plugins)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve set the 67 Bricks website up using WordPress as a content management system. Previously, I&#8217;ve used either simple static HTML pages, or a traditional, full-featured CMS. I decided to use WordPress here because it is easy to use, and has an ecology of templates written for it making site design much simpler. It also &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/?p=7\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Setting up a website using WordPress&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41,"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions\/41"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.67bricks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}