What’s the first thing I think of when I hear “Wordpress”? Gutenberg’s printing press.

Anyway, I’m the type who likes to know what goes on behind-the-scenes so let me share a few technical things about our installation of WordPress.

I had initially thought that incorporating WordPress into our current site design would be the most difficult task. However, after dumping the contents of the old Jenkins Webblits (our homegrown blog) into the new software, it was easy to wrap our existing templates around the blog. The biggest technical issue was getting the subdomain of http://blog.jenkinslaw.org to redirect to http://www.jenkinslaw.org/blog/index.php without breaking the way I set up the permalinks. That’s when our Sys. Admin (aka Ken) came to the rescue. It had something to do with a loop-de-loop interaction between various .htaccess files associated with our site. But, as you can see, that’s all fixed now. Getting through the logistics of who’s going to post when or what categories we should have also took some time to sort out. Apparently, we’re not the only ones who have run into these sorts of questions when starting a group blog.

To really make WordPress shine you need to take advantage of its many available plugins. For example, a few we’ve installed are:

• Akismet – for spam protection
• CyStat – for general blog stats
• Spam Karma 2 – for spam protection
• Tiny MCE Advanced – for tweaks to our wysiwyg editor
• WP-Sticky – so we can make certain posts, such as important announcements, “stick” to the top

We also decided to use Feedburner for our RSS feed stats and it’s working out pretty well. It looks like 142 people have subscribed to our blog! (Give or take 100 or so…)

So what do I like best about using WordPress?

1. The amount of customization that’s built into WP as well as being able to customize using plugins
2. Saving posts for future editing before publishing and automatically scheduling a post to publish in the future
3. It’s free!

Submitted by: RayAna Park, Former Web Developer
on December 27, 2007 - 10:53 am

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