Setting Up wordpress/comicpress

[Turnsky]

Well, new account and all, figured i'd go in head first, and start with the content management system, so i went for wordpress and comicpress, and i was wondering about initial setup in layman's terms, since my PHP skills are somewhat minimal, and i'm eager to get some semblance of a working site up and running, at least from the content side of things, i can worry about "prettying up" things later.
so i was curious about setting it up in order to get it up and running with Xepher, as well as tips for initial setup would be cool, too. =]

[griever]

You have to set up Wordpress and ComicPress yourself via an SCP program.  View this topic for help regarding SCP, if you have Windows.  Log into your Xepher.net account page and run "Fix File Permissions".  Go make yourself a sandwich.  If you still can't access the install.php page as Wordpress dictates, go make yourself a cup of coffee/tea.  Try again.  The installation package Wordpress has is painless.

[fesworks]

Well, I set up a WordPress + PodPress for my webcomic netcast. I can't say anything for ComicPress, but WordPress is fairly straight forward. It only gets real murky if you don't know... whatever the heck coding they use for blogs... And this is when you want to customize the design of the site.

I based my main format off of an existing style/layout you can download. It had BASICALLY everything I wanted (columns, and positions of things I wanted), and then I butchered it to hell to get it more closer to what I wanted... which took a LOT of trial and error to figure out what line of code did what and where, and so on.

So, maybe not really help, but that is basically what I did.

[Xepher]

Ignore what Griever said about "Fix File Permissions" as that was something necessary on the old server, but not this new one (it's not even an available option now.)

I haven't personally installed wordpress, but as it's very similar to most other PHP install methods, I'd say you're pretty safe just following their directions. Specific database settings for here are explained on http://xepher.net/help.php if you're using MySQL. The only other thing to watch out for is if the instructions tell you anything about file permissions (aka "chmod 777 file.php" or something) In which case things here might differ slightly from most other web sites. You should NEVER (for security reasons) chmod 777 anything, as that sets it so anyone can edit (or even delete) a file/folder. Generally speaking, if they give you numerical file permissions, you should be able to change the last two numbers to 0s and be safe. Ex: If it says "chmod 777 /uploads/avatars/" you should change that 777 to 700. In fact, a more general rule is that all files should be 600 and all directories 700, and since those should (some upload programs can override that) be the default for any new file you've uploaded, you really shouldn't have to mess with chmod/permissions at all. You can adjust permissions via the file properties (right click) in WinSCP. 700 = User has read/write/execute and both group and world/other have no permissions (everything for them unchecked) 600 = User read/write and everything else unchecked.


Note to self: Put this file permissions info into the help page.

[griever]

Ignore what Griever said about "Fix File Permissions" as that was something necessary on the old server, but not this new one (it's not even an available option now.)

Oops...shows how much I don't pay attention.  x.x  I do most everything via Cyberduck anyway.

[fesworks]

Oh, I should add that when I put in Wordpress, I did not seem to have any php file permission issues....

Except that it will not send out password e-mails out to people that register for the site... I end up having to do that manually....

[griever]

I think that's from Xepher's email ban, not a misfunction of Wordpress.

[fesworks]

gotcha. Well, so far the manual effort is working just fine.

[Xepher]

As noted in the announcement section, scripts can only send email if they're setup to use authenticated SMTP... most forums (and I imagine wordpress) should have a way to configure that. The reason was too much bounce-back spam was being generated by spam bots hitting on a lot of people's forums, and a lot of it by people that don't even use email here, so the rejections were going to my mailbox (as their's doesn't exist.) This forces people to have email enabled (so they can see rejects and bot spam problems) and theoretically know what they're doing if they DO setup auth smtp in their scripts. For a low-traffic site, manual account activation is probably best/safest, but it's up to you if you want to enable direct email.

[Turnsky]

http://foxfire.xepher.net/

getting there, while not making with the pretty just yet, i'm gonna spend my weekend picking some poor sap's brains to do so

[Xepher]

Still, looks pretty good so far. I'm gonna have to go back and start reading through your archive when I get the time.

[Turnsky]

Still, looks pretty good so far. I'm gonna have to go back and start reading through your archive when I get the time.

thanks   

[fraunie]

This might be me just hitting my dumb point as my sleep deprivation hits, but after you upload the wordpress onto your directory, it says you're suppose to run the installation script, by accessing wp-admin/install.php. This is where I lack a certain understanding by what they mean. It's probably super-simple, but feel super dumb not being able to figure it out. Help?

[griever]

http://yoururlhere.com/wp-admin/install.php, unless you have wordpress in a separate directory in which case it would be yoururlhere.com/yourdirectory/wp-admin/install.php.

[fraunie]

yeah, that's where I got stuck. It gives me a 404 error right now. I might have to take a few steps backward and see if I messed up something in the upload process...