Basics of Configuring WordPress

Basics of Configuring WordPress
WordPress is an online, open source website creation tool written in PHP. But in non-geek speak, it’s probably the easiest and most powerful blogging and website content management system (or CMS) in existence today.There are a few parts to WordPress. You’re in good company if you use WordPress to publish on the web. Many famous blogs, news outlets, music sites, Fortune 500 companies and celebrities are using WordPress, even our inodecloud.com site uses WordPress. 

WordPress is 100% free to download and use and once you downloaded the package file there is a few steps installed to configure it, but today i will only be explaining the main file and folder structures that you should familiarize yourself with.

This is not following the wizard guide and is merely a guide to the code level organization of wordpress and how to configure it via code.

You will need a FTP client such as filezilla or what i use Coda 2 which is a FTP & Code editor for Macs or Notepad++ to configure wordpress.

The main wordpress directory contains all the necessary files required to run the wordpress system. In your main directory (it might be called httpdocs, public_html or www directory) this contains a main configuration called wp-config.php, this configures the database under line 17. Which looks like below:

// ** MySQL settings – You can get this info from your web host ** //
/** The name of the database for WordPress */
define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘DATABASE_NAME’);

/** MySQL database username */
define(‘DB_USER’, ‘DATABASE_USERNAME’);

/** MySQL database password */
define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘DATABASE_PASSWORD’);

/** MySQL hostname */
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);

/** Database Charset to use in creating database tables. */
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);

/** The Database Collate type. Don’t change this if in doubt. */
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

The text which is bold is whats required to be configured, firstly you need to setup a database on your hosting site and then configure these settings.

The Plugins, Theme files and Images are stored in wp-content folder

– The plugins are kept in the Plugins folder in /wp-content/plugins

– The Theme files are kept in /wp-content/themes/THEMEFILE

To make changes to your Front end site and change the layout it is done under the Theme folder under your template name.

There are a few file structures you will need to familiarize yourself with.

header.php – this is to mainly modify the top section of the website, the logo, slogan, menus etc..

footer.php – this is to modify the bottom end of your site, this includes copyright information, footer menus, contact details etc.

style.css – use this file to modify the colors, layout, size, height & width, fonts of your site.

These are just the basics and to surely get you started.

Just comment below if you would like to know about anything in greater depth with wordpress.

We offer free wordpress migrations for any customers moving to our shared hosting platforms

About Kappy Prasad
Founder & CEO at iNode Cloud