Posts Tagged ‘Php Files’

30
Oct
2009

How do you use WordPress to run a website?

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WordPress is a blogging package right? Well if you think that you’re absolutely right but only partially. WordPress, which is most likely the worlds most popular blogging package is also a great piece of software to power small business websites. In fact, I’ve used WordPress to power websites such as:

In all of these cases as well as many, many others WordPress was used to create and manage complex websites which skyrocketed to the top of Google’s Search Engine Results Pages because they used WordPress as a powerful content management tool, making the website much easier to manage and therefore a better tool for busy marketing staff.

How do you use WordPress to run a website?

Actually, that’s the best part of WordPress. Once you’ve signed up for a great hosting package such as Bluehost’s $6.95 per month solution, you can install WordPress by simply clicking their one step installation process and voila! You’re website is setup with the world’s most powerful blogging package instantly.

So then, how do you use WordPress to run a website? Once you’ve installed WordPress you’ll need to make changes to a few key files, called template files. These template files are what control how your website looks to visitors. Here’s what you need to know:

  • The header.php file is what appears on all pages at the top of your page
  • The footer.php file is what appears on all pages at the bottom of your website
  • functions.php is where you store common PHP code to call if from all pages, most often you can ignore this
  • index.php is the heart and soul of your website, technically you can remove all the other .php files and format just this page to make every page on your website look the same.
  • pages.php is used to format content edited in the Pages tab of the WordPress control panel
  • single.php is used to format content edited in the Posts tab, by seperating these two you can format pages (such as About Us or Contact Us) to look different than content pages (such as a press release or CEO blog)
  • categories.php is used to format pages which list posts, archives.php is similar but for tags
  • search.php is used to format the results of a search

Once you’ve changed the look and feel of your website, you can use the built in WordPress editor to allow different members of your team to post content to the website, add marketing or press releases and even adjust prices!

You can get started with your company website today but signing up for a great hosting account, just $6.95 per month with BlueHost.

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Posted in Questions and Answers

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17
Jan
2008

Adobe Dreamweaver Tip – Cleaning Up Unused Files

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Here’s a great tip for Dreamweaver users, ever finish a website design and then not know which files are active and which are not? It happens to me all the time, lots of spare graphics, even some HTML or PHP files that are simply not in use anymore. So how do I clean them out?

Step One – Backup

It may sound silly but the first thing I do is click on the file folder icon under Files and select Reveal in Finder which opens the folder on my hard drive. I back this folder up completely but copy and pasting it to my desktop.

Step Two – Recache

Under the Site menu I select Advanced > Recreate Site Cache to make sure I have the most up-to-date data about my site.

Step Three – Web Documents

Now here’s where Dreamweaver gets sexy. In your File list, simple start selecting files that you think are suspect and hit the delete key. If they’re linked anywhere in the site, Dreamweaver will warn you that the file is links … and you don’t want to delete it. I do this with whole groups of files to save time, if it doesn’t let me delete them then I know at least one file is still live.

Step Four – Graphics

Once I’ve cleared out the Files list, I move onto images and start doing the same things. If the image is found in a web document, it will warn you before deleting this but an even better way to do it is to use the Copy dependent files option on the original files. This option is seriously cool … set your Remote folder to a new folder on your desktop and then back in the file list, select all your files but not the images folder. Now, upload your website to the remote folder. Dreamweaver will ask you if you want to include dependent files which includes any CSS, JavaScript, rich media or images that are included on the pages. The resulting folder will contain everything you need to upload to a website but none of the junk.

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Posted in Learning

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