Assignment #2: WordPress Experience

This assignment was a new experience for me. I have used Frontpage before to do a website, but had never used a content management system. I began this journey by going through several of the tutorials. Once I felt comfortable with the terminology, I went to the site and began tinkering.

The first thing that I did was to change the theme. Then I changed some widgets. I must have forgotten to add the meta widget because my team members could not sign in. Then another team member did it to me later. Good thing Dr. Oguz had given me an alternate url.

My team members and I had several conversations about the site, such as what we did, what we added, what we were going to do. It was good to have someone else trying out different things so we could talk about what worked and what didn't. I added a lot of posts to my team members as I worked my way through the site and asked a lot of questions for help.

I had problems with loading images, but my team member did not. So she sent me directions. I still had problems. Later we discovered it wasn't the site but the connection since other people in the class had problems also.

After I felt more comfortable, I went down the list on the left side of the page and opened and tinkered with every single item. I opened each item and made changes. I added categories for us to post under; links to O'Reilly's Radar and Ogeechee Tech's homepage, and added a profile page.

I tried each of the themes that we were given, but ended up using the Arjuna because it gave us more widgets. I quickly learned that when you change the theme, then you have to go to the widgets to add them. Each theme places them differently. I liked the Arjuna theme because I was able to add my Twitter page.

To me the hardest part was the plugins. I activated two of them: Akismet and Vkontakte. I understood what they did, but it was a process to activate them. I am still not satisfied with the Vkontakte button because I want to edit it, but I did not understand the website.

In the comments you can see the replies to your blogs. You can decide to
unapprove, reply, edit, spam or trash them. I think if you had a public site that this would be an important feature.

This experience had been a learning journey. I have enjoyed tinkering with WordPress. I can see the value in the use of content management systems to help you get all your documents, videos, pictures, blogs, links, and many other items in one area.



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