All Coming Together

Through a series of unfortunate events, I was unable to call into our class this past week. I did, however, listen to a recording of the class which was helpful, but it was pretty difficult to follow along with the more technical “setup” things we were working through. By some miracle (a.k.a. Google search), I was able to fill in gaps by googling how to do certain things. I am almost positive I am now caught up and successfully created my local development stage in MAMP and phpMyAdmin. AND, I was able to launch my WordPress.org site and play around with all the offerings. WOOT!

*As a side note, I am unclear as to what the phpMyAdmin database is for exactly, but will be sure to ask Greg in class this week.

Setting up my server, signing into my WordPress site, and seeing everything we have talked about in class allowed this week’s readings, and really a lot of what we have done so far this semester, to all come together. I searched through the theme, widget, and plugin directories, and took a look at the different post formats and types. A few questions come to mind:

1. Can a meta box be anything or is there a directory?
2. What is the benefit of using a child theme vs. just creating a new plug-in?
3. If I wanted to add an About section or Menu, is that a widget or am I just adding it to the HTML or JavaScript file for the theme?
4. I’m still a little confused on the difference between a post and a page. Is a post an individual post, and a page would have many posts and pictures and other functionality?

This exercise also really got me excited to dive deeper into our final project. Just selecting a theme is going to be hard for me, so I am going to spend more time this week looking through what is available. And I have a feeling that as I get more familiar with WordPress.org, new ideas for my final project will present themselves.

And finally, I found adding PHP to my homepage to be trickier than expected. Mostly because I’m not sure if it works or that I uploaded the right files to GitHub. I added a new repository and included what I think are all relevant files, including my index.php file which now echos “The time in my current timezone is ___.” GitHub wouldn’t let me upload my entire WP_content file or the file I created when I downloaded WP — said it was too large? Hopefully what I did works though.

Cheers,

Jane