My WordPress Installation
Published Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005 at 9:54 pm
WP Installation
WordPress installation was very smooth. I followed the Famous 5-Minute Install without a hitch. Novice users may be confused by the need to setup a mySQL database but the tutorial includes instructions on four different ways to do this (use what ever fits your server).
Blogger Import with Comments
One thing I was really afraid of when I was planning my migration was that I might have to manually import my blog posts form blogger. I soon discovered that WordPress includes the ability to import posts directly from blogger. Even better I used Andy Skelton’s Modified Blogger Importing Tool to retain my comments comments. There is even an illustrated tutorial presented by Catsudon.
Links Import
Up to now I have been using a simple Excel sheet to store all the links on the RHS of my blog. The Excel sheet was setup to allow me to generate the HTML I needed for embedding into my blogger template. WordPress includes an integrated links manager. With this I can manage all my links from within the WordPress admin pages. The links manager includes the ability to import a list of links in the OPML format. With just a few tweaks to my Excel file I was able to generate OPML links list for importing. Nice and smooth.
Look and Feel
The look and feel of the default WordPress theme is pretty nice. It’s clean and functional but of course needed tweaking for my needs. To do this in WordPress you edit the PHP template files directly but luckily this can be through the admin pages. You can simply select the page you want to modify and edit. The template system takes some time to figure out, but so did blogger’s. Luckily the WordPress wiki is a great resource for Stepping Into Templates.
WYSIWYG Plugin
So after all this I was already more then completely satisfied (is it possible to be 150% satisfied?). The transition was smooth. The template system was easy enough to get the look and feel I wanted. Plus for the first time I now have categories. The only think I felt was missing was a WYSIWYG editor. I am familiar enough with HTML that I can create the HTML by hand. However, I often copy and paste text from various applications (Outlook, FireFox, etc) into my post. When you copy in paste into a WYSIWYG text area it retains all your links and fonts, etc. But when you past into a plain text text area you lose all formatting. So I went about searching for a WYSIWYG editor plugin for WordPress. Turns out there are quite a few. So far my favorite is xinha4wp. xinha4wp is a WordPress plugin that implements the Xinha editor withing WordPress post and comment editors. The Xinha editor is very powerful and xinha4wp gives the ability to tweak the Xinha layout and feature set from the WordPress admin pages. I’m very impress so far although the spell check is non-functioning (because of my server not xinha4wp).
The only thing missing is image uploading. I’ll figure that out later. [Edit: xinha4wp includes a image manager that is disabled by default.]