Web Designer's who are New to Wordpress

[administrator]

Hi,

 

I noticed that Andrea just put up a Wordpress blog - something new. If I recall Andrea, you were taking our Wordpress theme video tutorial ... how is that going (with the tutorial) and what do you think about working with Wordpress overall?

 

Stefan

[Andrea]

The tutorial was great. I followed along with it and build my own theme as we went. However, I did not worry about formatting at all. I had fun randomly picking all kinds of colors. Once I was finished with the videos, I removed all my random formatting and started over developing my own look.

 

It's going pretty well, but at times, I realize I've forgotten how the different parts belong together and am now considering doing the videos again, but this time integrating my new theme, now that I've figured out what I want my site to really look like, as I follow along with Jon. I think I'll have many 'aha' moments along the way, as I've now seen the big picture already.

 

As to Wordpress in general, I haven't explored too much so far. On my private blog, I've had fun playing with the language switcher, but that's about as exotic as it's gotten. For now, I want to convert my design site to Wordpress, and then focus on exploring its potential further.

[administrator]

Thanks for the feedback.

 

I think modern web designers have to learn at least 1 blog or CMS to base their work on; Wordpress I feel is a good choice because:

 

- easy to learn

- lots of themes

- lots of plugins

- mature: works well and it's hard to find bugs.

 

I wrote this beginners article a while back that has a diagram and an explanation of how the wordpress theme engine works.

 

... It may give you another take on things.

 

That said, I think there are several worthy options besides Wordpress.

 

Stefan

[LSW]

I have an issue for you guys, my wife switched hosts and all we have is a database backup and all the folders she had saven on her PC. We installed the new wordpress and I created all the extra tables and inserted the data into those and the WP data into the WP tables that were installed.

 

Problem is now all we get is a blank page, I mean a blankpage as in not even rudementary HTML... nothing, zipp, nada.

 

Any thoughts?

[administrator]

You should be able to take the database backup, assuming it was an SQL dump, and plug that into the phpMyAdmin to recreate the Wordpress database.

 

From reading your post, it would seem you attempted to manually added in the data?

 

Stefan

[falkencreative]

Problem is now all we get is a blank page, I mean a blankpage as in not even rudementary HTML... nothing, zipp, nada.

Usually that means an error of some sort... Can you turn error reporting on, and see what error it is giving you? If you had some extensions installed before the switch, and those haven't been re-installed (and the extensions made changes/updates to the database) that might cause issues.

 

http://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php#Debug

[LSW]

Ben, you may have it.

 

Stef - I originally tried just importing the tables, but it would not install thinking word press was in. I loaded table structure, same thing. So finally she installed it, but it would not import. So finally I went through the database file and ran each create and insert query separately. It seemed to be OK, so I truncated the WP tables and inserted our data so my wife has less to do... and that seems to have broken it.

 

But Ben may have it, I did all those plugin databases, and the plugin folders had been uploaded... but maybe it still has to be installed. OK, you gave me a few things to look at.

 

Thanks

[LSW]

Actually it seems to have been the WP_Options table, the content of which I replaced with the old website's.

 

I truncated it, inserted the fresh install options and the page is back.