Groovy Sputum

T-Minus 5 Days

I met with Pastor Mike last week and showed him the initial build for the CFAC web site and he really liked it. I thought about providing a link for you to check it out, but because the content is just gibberish, I decided to wait until the site is up and running to reveal it.

Some of you may be wondering why I appear to have an obsession with WordPress. Well, when I first investigating CMS (content management systems), I realized that there were many to choose from. I had a list of criteria that the CMS needed to have, and as I began to investigate the possibilities, a few platforms really stuck out. Here is what I was looking for:

1. Open Source (i.e. free)
2. Well supported and tested
3. Large community of users for support and the sharing of layouts & customizable features (because I an not that creative)
4. Built on an open source database (again, free)
5. Easy to use login and user interface (if it is too difficult to change, the site will never be updated)
6. Blog ready, but not necessarily blog only
7. Able to be self hosted with my domain name (I didn’t want third party ads or logos on the site nor did I want my domain name to be whatever.blogityblogblogblog.com)

Based on these criteria, I narrowed my choices to Joomla! and WordPress. They are nearly identical platforms and fit my criteria to a tee, but I eventually chose WordPress because of the out-of-the-box blog features. Although Joomla! can be used as a blog, there is much more set up and customization involved to get there.

The more I have used WordPress, the more impressed with it I have been. It uses MySQL as it’s database and runs on Linux servers. It uses the scripting language php to access the database, although some programmers have complained that it is not a true php, but a modified version of it. I honestly don’t care because it is fairly intuitive and anyone with the slightest bit of scripting background can figure out the syntax. WordPress also has a huge following of users and that means tons of extras like themes and plugins (a small program that provides an extra service not normally preformed by the CMS). The main WordPress site also has a large resource area to assist people like me in customizing.

In my research leading up to our church web site, I came across many churches using all kinds of blog software. In my opinion, those running Joomla! or WordPress were by far the nicest. They just seemed to strike the right balance between and online billboard and an online community. I think that is really what I am going for. Too much of either and the site becomes a static ad or simply a church forum. I am not interested in either of those.

So, we are set to go live on Sunday. When you see it, I hope your reaction is, “Wow, that doesn’t look like a WordPress blog.” I am planning on explaining what we did with the layout in a future post, so stay tuned for more!

We’re Online

I recently got the ok from Pastor Mike to build a website for our church and last night I got the ball rolling with the purchase of a domain name. I also loaded WordPress onto the server and set up the MySQL database, so we are ready to roll. At this point, we just have to settle on the content, layout, and overall look of the site. Since we are going with WordPress, this shouldn’t be too difficult.

I also discovered a little plugin that is handy if you use WordPress. It is called Maintenance Mode and when active, it takes your site off line and replaces it with a customizable front page. As the name implies, this tool is used when you are doing maintenance on your site. It is nice to be able to quickly take down the site and put up a temp page. It is also nice for visitors to see a real page while you are working and not get one of those nasty “server not found” message. Check out the site and see what I mean: clearforkalliance.org. I just put up the church name, location, and meeting times. It will work for now and we can be working on the build behind the scenes and as soon as we are ready to go live, we can deactivate MM and BAM!…have an official web presence.

I thought about putting a spinning gif of a stick man digging with a message that says “under construction” (demo), or simply this icon (I like the backhoe), but I thought the simple page was more appropriate. The sad thing is, even in my 10 minutes of work getting the site up, it is probably better than 90% of the church web sites out there right now. I particularly like this site (check out the dancing Jesus) and am thinking of contacting the web master for some design tips.

Useful Plugins

I hope you have enjoyed reading my Top 5 Greatest OSU Moments the last few days. I have been doing some research about the WordPress platform and wanted to share some of the useful plugins that I have discovered and am using presently. I have found that these plugins really help me as I am blogging.

• Simple Tags: this is a great little tag manager. You can rename any of your tags globally (great for the times you misspell a tag and end up with 3 of the same thing, i.e. word press, Wordpress, and WordPress), have tags automatically generated for each post, or get tag suggestions from Yahoo and the web using the click tag feature.
• All in One SEO: this is a search engine optimizer, hence the name SEO. This will generate unique meta information in the header of each page of your blog based on the content of each page. For instance, instead of every page having the top 10 tags and basic blog description, each page will be tagged with the tags you created for that post and the page description will be the excerpt of your post.
• CyStats: logs just about every data you might want about your blog. Number of unique hits/visits, number of bot hits/visits, search query returns (both internal and external), page usage, trackback data, and on and on.
• WP-Polls: my latest plugin addition, this little guy enables internal polls and is very customizable. I am not a huge fan of external blogging services for things like polls, calendars, and galleries. I just don’t like to log in to a gazillion sites to do something simple.
• Search Everything: this extends the search capabilities of the standard WordPress search bar. The default WordPress search form only searches post content (as far as I know) but this plugin expands that form to tags, categories, image titles, post titles, comments, and more. Basically, it allows your viewers to search everything, hence the name.

If you have never used plugins on your WordPress site, I highly recommend trying them. They are easy to use, easy to install, and very helpful. One thing to note: it is a good idea to get your plugins (and themes, for that matter) directly from the WordPress web site. There have been reports of malicious code being inserted by third party download sites and that is no fun. Get the genuine stuff here.

Tags and Categories

I am fairly new to the blogging realm and so it is natural for me to have lots of unanswered questions. One question that is no longer a mystery is the difference between tags and categories. I used to think of them as one in the same with the differences being that there are more tags and that fonts on tag clouds get bigger the more times that tag appears. After doing some research and adding a nifty WordPress plugin called Simple Tags, I am pleased to say that you will now see a tag cloud on my site.

Here’s a great analogy when thinking about tags and categories: categories are analogous to the table of contents in the front of a book and tags are likened to a word index or glossary at the back of book. There may only be five or six chapters in a book, but key words may be used throughout. Keep in mind that the ultimate purpose of tags and categories is to aid readers in finding what they want to read. If a person wants to look generally at a topic, they should use categories. If someone wants to read about a specific topic, they should navigate using the tags.

Ideally, there should only be a dozen categories at most, but tags should be numerous. One programming blog I read recently had about 50 categories. I then looked at the tag cloud and discovered the same 50 words used there. I thought, what’s the point. If you are not going to differentiate between tags and categories, then why have them both.

So, if you want to read about my family, click on my family category. But if you want to specifically read about Valerie, you can click on her name in the tag cloud and filter out the post’s that don’t include her. Also, you may find that I wrote about Valerie in a post that didn’t fall into the family category.

Now you know. And knowing is half the battle!