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Home » Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) » WordPress

WordPress

What is WordPress? #

WordPress is a blogging software (weblog script). In their own words, “WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability”.

Using WordPress software, you can setup and start publishing your own blog in minutes. For more information about WordPress and downloading the free software, visit the WordPress website.

WordPress is by far one of the easiest blog scripts to install, upgrade and configure. WordPress is the blog script used by the majority of our customers and we even use it for Laughing Squid, on our art, culture and technology website.

WordPress uses PHP, MySQL, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and validates as XHTML. WordPress is developed and supported by an active open source community, under a GNU General Public License (GPL).
Do you meet all of the minimum requirements to run WordPress on your servers? #

Since Laughing Squid is one of the web hosts recommended by WordPress, we meet all of the minimum requirements to run WordPress on our servers. Here are more information on our system specifications.
How do you install WordPress? #

First you’ll need to download WordPress and read through their installation instructions.

If you need help installing WordPress, please follow our Laughing Squid WordPress Installation Tutorial.

For more information, please see WordPress’s online documentation, support forum and WordPress Codex.
How do you upgrade WordPress? #

First read through the WordPress upgrade instructions. The latest version of WordPress includes a built-in upgrade feature.

The WordPress Automatic Upgrade (WPAU) plugin written by Keith Dsouza is another way to upgrade your WordPress if you are running a version older than WordPress 2.7. Just install the plugin, follow the directions and the plugin will backup the files and database, download the latest version of WordPress, place the site in maintenance mode and then run through the upgrade steps outlined by the WordPress team.

For more information, please see WordPress’s online documentation, support forum and WordPress Codex.
How do you change the appearance of WordPress? #

If you want to change the appearance of your blog, there are some great themes and plug-ins available for WordPress. Themes can be easily modified to match the look and feel of your website just by editing the XHTML and Style Sheet.
How do you setup permalinks in Wordpress using mod_rewrite? #

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to refer to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message.

By default, Wordpress permalinks will look like this: http://yourdomain.com/index.php?p=1. The “p=1″ part of this example URL refers to a blog post (“p”) with an ID of “1″. Some of you more advanced Padawans may recognize this ID from the original Hello World! post that came fresh with WordPress when you first installed it.

If you want your permalink URLs to look something more like this: http://yourdomain.com/2006/05/08/sample-post/
then you are wanting what are called pretty permalinks, for obvious reasons. In this case, you should create an .htaccess file.

Here are instructions on how to create an .htaccess file:
1. On your local computer, create a blank Wordpad or Notepad document. (For Mac, create a blank TextEdit file)
2. Save the empty file as “.htaccess”
  NOTE: Some operating systems do not allow the creation of a file named “.htaccess” because of the initial dot (“.”). You can always name the file without the initial dot or with a standard extension (e.g. “htaccess.txt“). Once the file is uploaded to your weblog’s directory, rename it with your FTP software. Most FTP programs should provide a way to rename files.
3. Upload the file via FTP to root directory of your WordPress install.
4. Change the file writing permissions (CHMOD) to ‘666′. More information on how to change file writing permissions can be found here.
Once you have uploaded and changed the file writing permissions for the .htaccess file, you need to log into WP Admin and update your permalink structure.
1. Go to Options -> Permalinks
2. Select which permalinking option you prefer
3. Click ‘Update Permalink Structure’
  NOTE: If .htaccess is writeable by the server (CHMOD 666), you will get a message that says “Permalink structure updated”.
  
  NOTE: If .htaccess is NOT writeable, you will see a message that says “If your .htaccess file were writable, we could do this automatically, but it isn’t so these are the mod_rewrite rules you should have in your .htaccess file. Click in the field and press CTRL + a to select all.” This means you’ll have to do one extra step yourself. In the text box, WordPress displays several lines of rewrite rules associated with the permalink structure you chose. You will need to copy everything in this text box and paste it into your .htaccess file to make your new permalinks work.
You can read more about permalinks in the WordPress Codex.
How do you upload images into WordPress blog posts using the ‘upload’ feature? #

WordPress can archive images in blog posts for you automatically. All you need to do is upload them into the post you’re writing and WordPress will do the rest.

In order for this convenient feature to work, you will need to create an ‘uploads’ directory and allow it to be writeable by the server by manually changing the file writing permissions (CHMOD) to 777. This can be done a few ways:

FTP:
1. with your FTP program, establish a connection to the server.
2. navigate to your root WordPress installation and locate the ‘wp-content’ directory.
3. navigate inside of the wp-content directory and create a folder called ‘uploads’.
4. make this new ‘uploads’ folder writeable by setting the file writing permissions to 777. (If you are unsure of how to do this with your FTP program, search the web for CHMOD and the name of your FTP program.) This will allow WordPress to create year and month sub-directories in this ‘uploads’ folder that organizes images corresponding to the year and month when the blog post was made.
Plesk File Manager:
1. log in to your control panel
2. select the domain name where WordPress is installed
3. select “File Manager”
4. navigate to the root directory where you have WordPress installed and locate the wp-content directory
5. navigate inside of wp-content
6. click ‘Add New Directory’ and name it ‘uploads’ and click OK
7. navigate back up one level to the wp-content directory by clicking on ‘wp-content’ link
8. under Permissions, click on the permissions (rwx r-x r-x, et al.) for the ‘uploads’ directory
  NOTE: You may have to scroll right slightly to see the Permissions column.
9. put a check in every checkbox, then click OK
10. the permissions for ‘uploads’ should now read rwx-rwx-rwx
After you have successfully created and changed file writing permissions on the ‘uploads’ directory, you will be able to use the upload feature in WordPress to import images (or files) into your blog posts. Here is more info from the Codex about using the upload feature: Using Image and File Attachements

You can find more info about changing file permissions in the WordPress Codex:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_File_Permissions
How do you backup WordPress blog posts? #

In order to backup your WordPress blog posts, you’ll need to use phpMyAdmin to access the MySQL database that you created for WordPress.

Here are instructions on how to locate the phpMyAdmin section of your WordPress database:
1. log in to your control panel
2. select the domain name of the WordPress database you want to access
3. select “Databases”
4. select your Wordpress database name
5. select “DB WebAdmin”
  NOTE: If you click and don’t see anything, you need to allow popup windows in your browser. After you have allowed a popup for this site, click “DB WebAdmin” again and you should see a popup window.
Once you see the popup window with your database, you are in phpMyAdmin. From here, follow the WordPress tutorial for backing up your MySQL database.
What can I do to keep my WordPress blog secure? #

An excellent guide to securing WordPress can be found in the WordPress Codex. Remember to upgrade whenever new versions become available. You can find announcements of new versions as well as other important news by following our status blog.

If you’ve already been exploited, you should remove any foreign code in your site that you find immediately. If you are not sure what to remove or if you want to make sure you have removed all of an exploit, we recommend using the WordPress Exploit Scanner plugin. If you have any questions about items that register in the scanner, please submit a help desk ticket and always backup your files before deleting anything or making changes.

Do you offer any automatic installation or upgrading of WordPress? #

We do not offer any automatic installations or upgrades of WordPress on our servers, but the process is pretty straightforward. If you run into any problems, let us know by entering a support ticket through our Help Desk and we will try to help you out.
What can be done to reduce comment and trackback spam on WordPress? #

Check out the Akismet plug-in. It does a great job of eliminating most comment and trackback spam.

We did a write-up of Aksimet over at the Laughing Squid Hosting Blog. You can read the post here:
http://laughingsquid.wordpress.com/2006/07/14/tackle-blog-comment-spam-with-akismet/
How can I optimize my Wordpress installation for high amounts of traffic? #

WP Super Cache is a plugin for Wordpress installations to store cached versions of your dynamic PHP pages. Installing WP Super Cache can also greatly reduce the amount of load on the server, improving the stability and security of your site.

To install WP Super Cache, follow the instructions provided for the plugin in the readme.txt file.

You can test that your super-cache plugin is working by loading your site, refreshing twice and the viewing the source in your browser. If the cache is working properly, you should see at the end of your source the following comments:

<!– Dynamic Page Served (once) in 0.350 seconds –>
<!– Cached page generated by WP-Super-Cache on 2009-02-11 11:34:32 –>
<!– super cache –>

NOTE: WP-Super-cache will be disabled for any logged in admin user, so make sure to log out and clear your cookies, or test in a different browser.

If you have any problem getting this plugin working correctly, please feel free to open a support ticket by contacting us at our support page
Do you recommend any WordPress developers? #

Wordpress has a mailing list of professional consultants providing Wordpress services that you can subscribe to called wp-pro.
Do you know of any resources where I can get help with WordPress? #

Yes, check out our friends at WordPress Help Center, they can help out with any kind of WordPress issues, inducing installation, upgrades, configuration and customizations.
Do you support WordPress MU? #

We only support the single version of WordPress in our standard hosting environment, not WordPress MU. If you want to run WordPress MU, you’ll need to move over to our new cloud hosting service.

Laughing Squid Web Hosting

WordPress

FTP:

Plesk File Manager: