Category: Wordpress

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Experiment: Installing a WordPress plugin

WordPress has a community of developers who contribute features and so if you want to add a feature then “There’s a plugin for that”.

Choosing a plugin

Keeping track of the people (and search machines) visiting and viewing your website or blog is helpful. Google Analytics has become almost industry standard for tracking and reporting. Therefore I searched for Google Analytics plugins at in the WordPress Plugin Directory, found one that looked promising and installed the Google Analytics Dashboard for WP plugin.

Compatibility

Although it was stated as only compatible up to version 3.7.1. (We are using WordPress 3.8), two others had tested it with our version and it works.

Installation

The documentation (including video) was easy to follow. The plugin installed without a problem and then it was the simple matter of adding this property to our Google Analytics account.

We will report on more success and failures with WordPress plugins as we continue to develop and experiment on this blog.

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Changing usernames in WordPress

For security reasons, it is advisable to use different username from the default (admin) and make it more difficult for hackers to attack your blog or website with brute force.

However, changing usernames is not always easy. On the profile editing form for WordPress is a warning that “Usernames cannot be changed”:

WPlies

While it is true you cannot change the username with the profile editing form, it is possible to change it in the database. Contact your systems administrator if you don’t have this level of access and take care – a wrong database entry could break your whole blog or website.

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Why does a TYPO3 developer use WordPress?

Having developed websites with TYPO3 since 2005, why would I want to use WordPress for blogging?

TYPO3 is an enterprise content management system – it should easily handle something as simple as a blog. TYPO3 can, but when you are busy building websites for others it can be a challenge to find the time and resources to build your own things in any technology.

Here’s some reasons for making this in WordPress:

  1. WordPress is popular and simple to use.
  2. WordPress is fast to get blogging. TYPO3 does not yet have many high quality packages that provide the same “minutes out of the box and you can use it experience”.
  3. Many of our customers want WordPress or are already using it. If we use the same tools we can better support them.
  4. Using different tools can create a cross-pollination of ideas. There are many features of TYPO3 and WordPress that could be improved on by learning from other content management systems.
  5. WordPress like TYPO3 is Open Source so I can have full access to fix any problems in the software myself.