WordPress NYC Community

Video Transcript

[Nate Cooper]
How's it going? Everybody good? Cool. So ...

Welcome to New Work City. Ummmm.
How many yous first time here?

Great. Cool. Welcome.

So, my name is Nate and

I'm going to be doing some basics of WordPress.

I kind of got a few bullet points I'm going to hit.

Steve said there's no hard stop time.

I'm kind of going for a roughly 40 minute conversation.

So I'd like to get through most of the topics

stopping for questions

and then if there's a lot of questions on a particular topic

we can always circle back to it.

So to give you some background on who I am and

why I'm here talking.

Is that I actually work for a university.

I was up until February of this past year, working for Apple

at the Fifth Avenue store.

I was running all the workshops
and events at Fifth Avenue

and it's funny that I'm here now in this WordPress event,

giving a presentation because I was in a WordPress,

event just like you are now and I was thinking

about a year ago, that I'd like to leave my job
and start my own company where I teach people

how to do stuff aside from just Apple products.

I'm happy to teach Apple products as well but, you know, doing my own thing basically so,

I left, as I mentioned in February,

and I started doing this class called
"Website Bootcamp For Creative Professionals"

- actually doing my third one tomorrow night.

The idea of that class is that it is a 3 hour class

so if you can imagine that what I want to talk
about roughly fits in between about 45 minutes

and an hour, a 3 hour class, that gives you an overview,

but it covers some topics but you might want
to think about, some of those things when

we're talking about some of these things
that what goes into WordPress might have to relate

to server management, might have
to relate to knowing something about coding

and I'll try to make it as clear as I can about where to go.

My point isn't to sell you classes
but just to get you an idea where my head is.

It's a lot of information to fit into a small span of time so there might be more things to look at down the line.

I'm also doing an introductory WordPress class series,

a four part series that is going to be going over everything I'm talking about more in depth.

There's even more than that can contain too if you really want to get into into this world of WordPress so

just the idea of this is so that you can walk away

with roughly a good broad stroke outline of what WordPress is,

why you might use it, where you might fit in.

There's lots of places you might fit in. Okay.

So, we're going to talk about
WordPress.com versus WordPress.org,

start there and then move into things like the Dashboard,

and if you don't know what that is don't worry,
we're going to talk about it.

Talk about things like themes and plugins and each one of

those, to give you an idea, is a single class
in this 4 class structure.

So you can talk a lot about those things and, hopefully, you'll get a little taste of what it is and where to go from there. Ah ...

and then, dadadadada, that's gonna be a lot to talk about.

So, we're gonna make sure we can kinda stop

and take questions and make sure everybody's
kinda following along.

Sound good? Any questions about the talk
before we jump into that outline? Yeah?

[audience]
What's your name?

[Nate Cooper]
Nate

[audience]
and your site

[Nate Cooper]
oooh, my site

[audience]
you just announced

[Nate Cooper]
oh, the, the class, yeah, that's nycwebsitebootcamp.com

But, if you want to go to all that stuff just go to
nwc.co.

That's this place and there's classes
on that website as well.

That's probably the better place to go if you're struggling.

[audience]
nwc

[Nate Cooper]
nwc.co

That's where we're at. New Work City

Yeah.
[audience comments inaudible]

I'm teaching those classes that I mentioned but we have a lot of other classes as well. Okay.

So, um, just to give you an outline of WordPress.com

versus WordPress.org, I don't really have,
there's not much to show as far as that goes.

I do have a slide that I use in my website bootcamp class

which is that slide

and it kind of illustrates a lot of very complicated things

in a very, you know, overview type slide, so a lot of these things have nothing to do with WordPress but

at least while we are talking it's something we have
on the screen and maybe you can follow along

if you know some of these ideas.

Basically WordPress is an open source project,
as Steve mentioned. It's an application.

It's a script that runs on a server. Okay, and basically it is written in PHP, if you know what that means.

Go ahead, it doesn't matter if you don't know
what that means. That's okay.

But basically, you're going to need to have a host, somebody, a server, right, that keeps all your materials

and gets it all out to the world, okay,
not just your computer alone.

If you want to build a website, you're going to have to have someone else to take care of that material.

Everybody clear on that part?

[audience inaudible]

[Nate Cooper]
Regardless, talking about building a website,
you have to have a host, you have to have a server.

Regardless of WordPress. Makes sense?

Okay. So, WordPress is an application
that runs on a server.

Now where it gets really tricky is that WordPress itself
is an application, in that, you can install

on your own host.

If I wanted to setup a website,
I don't have to make a WordPress website.

I could just build a page in HTML or any number of different technologies, whatever, whatever, buy a host,

put it up online and its live. Alright.

WordPress is prebuilt, so it's going to do a lot

of work to help me out to get those things done

even if I don't know a lot of very complex technologies.

Now let's say you're starting from absolute
zero and you want to build a website,

you don't have a host yet. You don't know HTML.

You don't know any of these languages.
I'm speaking Greek to you right now.

You want to setup your own website.
Well, WordPress.com is a place where you can go

which is a hosting service that does have WordPress already going for it. So when you use WordPress.com,

let's say you want to setup a blog.
You want to setup a website.

You don't have to pay anything extra.
In fact, it's free to sign-up for the WordPress Camp.

You want to get a blog going.
You want to get a site going.

You don't have to go to GoDaddy.
You don't have to go to BlueHost

or any one of those other hosting companies.

WordPress.com is doing that work for you.

When we talk about WordPress.org, that's the foundation

for, it's the central place where people go
to get access to this application.

It's also where people go to get documentation.

So, if I already have a host setup
and I want to run it on my own site,

I would go to WordPress.org to actually get that software
and install it, and I would also go there

to get plugins and themes.

So, most of what we are going to be talking
about tonight is actually has to do with WordPress.org

assuming that I am going to be getting
my own host, right, setting WordPress up on it.

A lot of hosts, by the way,
have automatic setup, one-click setup.

So you might sign-up for a host like GoDaddy
and just click a button. [snap]

It installs it for you.

That's WordPress.org roughly if you want to kind of
break them up into categories.

That's more of the WordPress.org category versus WordPress.com which is talking about a self-hosted,

or not a self-hosted but hosted by WordPress installation.

Everyone following along so far.
It's a lot of complex information, I understand. So, yeah.

[audience]
What does get your own host mean?

[Nate Cooper]
So, when you want to put a site online,
you have to get a server.

You have go get someone to keep track of that material.

So I say "get your host," they're not doing for free.

When you go to GoDaddy or something, they make their money by keeping your materials and putting it out online.

So, if you want to set up a website
and you're starting from scratch,

you can go to WordPress.com [snap],
they'll take care of that part for you.

Or you have to go to GoDaddy, or I feel like
I'm advertising for GoDaddy, anybody other than,

I know that GoDaddy is a really poor example
[inaudible discussion].

So there's lots of different places you can go
and then they might have WordPress install

or you can actually install it as long it, it's a
[inaudible]

[audience]
It's like buying a URL. It's like buying a URL.

[Nate Cooper]
That's a good question. I'm going to talk about that next.

That's a good question.

[audience]
So, that's something else? Okay.

[Nate Cooper and audience]
Yes.

[Nate Cooper]
Yes?

[audience]
With which WordPress.org or WordPress.com
you have to have your own domain name
before you can publish?

[Nate Cooper]
With WordPress.com?

[audience]
.com

[Nate Cooper]
Yeah, so with WordPress.com,
you sign up for an account and they give you a domain

which is your account name.wordpress.com.

[audience]
Okay. Alright.

So it does that automatically for you. It gives you a domain but that domain is automatically .wordpress.com.

[audience]
Okay.

So, this question of domain
is a great question to be thinking about.

The domain for those who have no clue
what we are talking about is the name of the site,

right, so nate.com, or whatever, that's,
which is not my site.

But nate.com, right, that's the domain name.

That address can be attached to any site.
You can attach it to WordPress.com.

WordPress.com does have an option
to do a custom domain.

It's not free, you would have to pay for that.

Or, when you sign up for your own host, then you can register the domain at the same time.

Or, if you're not ready yet, you can register the domain
and then decide about hosting later.

If you're worried about that domain being snatched up,

that's a separate process
and it's usually much less expensive.

Hosting might cost closer to $100 or so a year
where as a domain registration is very inexpensive.

Is that making sense? Everybody following that so far?

You guys are good.
That's a really hard concept so
I'm glad to go through that first.

[inaudible feedback]

So, this little diagram is just basically illustrating a kind of

typical workflow for someone running

their own WordPress site.

So, in this scenerio, we said that we have our own host
we set up, BlueHost, just as an example.

That's the server, that's the host, up there.

I am a production machine which is my computer where
I do all the work to put this site together.

I put this stuff up on the server
and then the client would be the end user

which technically, it's, you notice there's sort of this area where there's bleed over between the client

and the production machine because I'm also a client,

right, I'm talking to this machine remotely.

The reason I have this diagram in my WordPress Bootcamp classes because what WordPress does

as a content management system is it attempts
to make this a much easier workflow, okay.

For those of you, anybody, uh, build a website
or have to use FTP typically? Or ever have, yeah,

You, who raised your hands?
It's not the easiest technology.

In fact it's pretty old technology.

So, for those who don't know what I'm talk about,
that's great, because you're coming in where

you're living in a world where WordPress
kind of takes care of that for you.

FTP is kind of, it's still used.

It's still necessary, but if you have to manage
your own files in terms of now

I want to put this photo up on my website.
I want to put this page up there.
I want to put a link up on my site.

Right, it's a lot of work. You have to know coding.

You have to know file management.

WordPress and these other content management systems, what they're doing is taking care of that part for you and that's really the advantage of that.

So, you might have to decide, you know,
when you're starting out. What do I do?

Do I do WordPress.com or do I do WordPress.org and that's a really interesting question to start out with.

The nice thing about WordPress.com is that it looks
the same in a lot of respects, not like this,
let me see if I can find my window.

So, if I go to ....

Once you're logged in,

it's going to look roughly the same
as a self-hosted WordPress site,

but where you're going to run into is a lot of limitations using WordPress.com

and most of those have to due with customization,
how far you can go into adding things to it,

adding functionality and then also changing
the look of the site.

So I want to take you through just some of the basic functionality of a WordPress install, start from scratch.

You've just installed it. What is it look like?

How do you navigate it? Basically, how do you move around in it and how do you use it?

And then we'll talk about some of those more specific customizing options like themes and plugins. Questions?

[audience]
Did you mention that with a client, you don't need
an FTP client to upload a file to server?
Do you use the WordPress client to do that?

[Nate Cooper]
So, what I mean when I say it takes the place of FTP
is that, let's say that you have a lot of photos

you know you're going to be adding to your site,
and that's just an example.

You know that every week you're going to add 10 photos.

Traditionally, if you don't have some kind
of content management system like WordPress,

that's a lot of work. You have to keep track of those files.

WordPress is going to do a lot of that work
for you once it's installed.

To get WordPress installed,
you might have to do FTP initially.

If you go with a host that has a one-click install,
you can avoid it pretty much seamlessly

and that's what we're going to look at next
which is the Dashboard and talk about how

you actually manuever through.

Yeah.

[audience]
What's the difference between Ning?

[Nate Cooper]
Ning? Um, it's a different content management system.
I'm not as familiar with Ning.

There's a lot of content management systems out there.

There's WordPress. There's Drupal. There's Joomla.

I'm sure you've heard of a lot of them.

WordPress is pretty popular for a couple of reasons.

One is, it started out as a blog platform.

So if you know you want to do something
that has blogs in it, it's really, really strong
in it's affiliation with a blog.

So, that's great.

The other thing is that it's a lot easier to set up.

I've set up Joomla sites and Drupal sites and WordPress sites and the installation.

I'm intentionally avoiding this
because I don't want to go down the route

of walking you through an installation process but

just because it can vary for everybody,
so, I can show you one way to do it

and then one step is missing
and you totally don't know what I'm talking about.

So, I just want to show you
that it's part of their documentation.

WordPress has, [Nate chuckles] a criticism of it, okay.

[audience chuckles] A five minute installation,
oh, he's talking about why he doesn't use it.

I use the five minute install.

[audience inaudible]

I didn't work for you?

So, I mean, take that as you will,

but roughly speaking I'd say on the whole,
90% of the people I know use it worked fine.