wordpress for beginners

[billbenson]

I'm going through the wordpress tutorial: First Steps With WordPress WordPress Codex

I've never used wordpress before, so excuse stupid questions.

I uploaded a new theme. I go to the dashboard and select change theme in the center top section or appearance in the left column. I select a theme, either the one I uploaded or one of the preinstalled ones. It show the selected them, but if I open up the index page in the site in a new tab, the defaut theme is still there, so the theme has not been changed, its just showing a sample of the new theme in the admin section.

How do you actually change the theme. I tried clearing cache BTW.

Never Mind - I didn't see the activate link in the upper right corner.

[orion_joel]

You need to select apply theme in the top right hand corner of the preview when it opens up.

[vangogh]

Bill if you're interested WordPress just put up a new site with video tutorials at WordPress.tv. I haven't watched any yet, but I assume the videos are well done.

[billbenson]

Thanks Joel, I found it after I posted. I also figured there might be some lurkers here interested in trying WP, so a thread on the subject may be appropriate.

The video is good VG. There were actually 4 videos there. Seems like a work in progress where they will be adding more videos. For anybody just thinking about using it, take a look at the videos. It shows how easy the program is to use for a number of features.

Having played with Joomla and used oscommerce for years, the online support and clean design is really pretty amazing. You still need to learn it, but its really well done. One of the things that surprised me is how few db tables there are. Just a handful. I'm sure plugins all add tables, but its a clean simple design. I think I have 92 tables in my oscommerce site - I've written a bunch of specialized ones though.

[vangogh]

The .tv site is very new. I think it launched sometime this week and I assume more videos will be coming. Good to know you liked them. I'll have to take a peek. The site has a feed so you can follow along when new videos come out if you want to subscribe.

The Codex is great. It's usually my first stop whenever I have a question. Sometimes you run across a page that's incomplete or talking about an older version of WordPress, but most of the pages are very good and there are about a dozen I'm constantly referring back to.

So much better than osCommerce. I have one client using osCommerce and it's often several hours of wading through forum posts to even find out what I should have been searching for in the first place. Not fun at all.

[billbenson]

Oscommerece is horrible, but I think I've said that elsewhere. My site is buggy, but I'm just trying to convert to Zen Cart on that one. The table structure is the same so it makes that easier than using a different cart.

I made it through the initial tutorial for wp this evening and its pretty straightforward. Took a look at where stuff was added or changed in the db as I was doing it. Unless someone tells me otherwise, I think looking at how templates work is probably my next step.

[vangogh]

I agree with you about osCommerce and it does make sense to move to Zen Cart for the db. Be aware that Zen Cart is still mostly put together like osCommerce.

You should be fine moving on to templates with WordPress. I'm not sure there's a particular order you need to go. At some point you'll just start using it and looking things up when you have a question.

[billbenson]

Ya, I think I'll play with templates and then add plugins that I have seen recommended here and on another forum by a heavy wp user. After that I'll start adding posts. As I initially want to use it for some product manuals, I'll get it looking similar to my store site with some good manuals and then move it over to the store from my practice site.

In other words category 1 will be product X Manual, category 2 product y manual etc. Not a real difficult way to start out.

A couple of questions:

Do you tend to just use the html editor in the program or do you write you post in code, dreamweaver etc and paste it in there?

Can you imbed php in a post, say an include or something more complicated?

Can a post contain JavaScript?

I didn't think to backup the initial install db before I started messing with the program. Is there an easy way to take it back to its original empty db (when I first installed it) or is it easiest to just run install again?

Do you find that you spend much time editing / doing much in phpmyadmin or does the programs interface do most of what you need? For example, for oscommerce I either write a script that does something I need or I use phpmyadmin. phpmyadmin is always open on my pc. Product description error, price error, put something in bold etc., phpmyadmin is much faster.

[vangogh]

I write my own code directly. I never use a WYSIWYG editor of any kind. I always work in html view and type the code directly. You don't need to type everything. If you leave a space between paragraphs, WordPress will wrap <p> tags around them. But I'll add html tags when I want a heading or I want to add a list of if I specifically want to add a div or a class to a paragraph.

You can't embed php directly in posts, but there are some plugins that will let you. By default it won't work, but the plugins add the functionality. Same thing with JavaScript. You'll need a plugin, but then you'll be able to add JavaScript.

I'm hardly ever in phpmyadmin when it comes to WordPress. Other than to fix something that's gone awry there's really no need. WordPress will export your database as an xml file and import similarly. If it's faster for you to use phpmyadmin you might still end up doing that, but you probably won't need to.

[Harold Mansfield]

The plug in to add php into a page or post is here.

If am not mistaken, Google ads are java script, and those embed fine without a plug in.

As far as using outside editors. I don't. I have found that many of them, distort the post in some way. The available editors in word press work just fine for me. I may use just a simple notepad if I need to.