The One Minute Blog Installation

At Gioorgi.com we have no time. So we was very happy to find out a blogging platform which can be WordPress Pumpkinconfigured, tuned and rolled out in short time. If you are watching for such thing, you are welcome.
Let’start!

After testing a lot of CMS and blogging platform (Drupal, Joomla, Zope, MovableType and so on) our recommended choice for the casual user is WordPress.

The following note can be applied to WordPress 2.7 and also to the 2.6 old release. 
Wordpress 2.7 interface is a bit better, but you can still stick with 2.6 if you like it.

WordPress is this very good blog platform, for the following reasons:

  • User interface is done very well. Also user experience is well designed. Compared to WordPress, Drupal admin interface is a mess
  • It is easy to enrich via themes and plugins. WordPress.org site offer an organic view of them.
  • WordPress comes with “battery included”, with a strong antispam with it. You do not need to install it as a second step.

To Install a wordpress blog, do the following:

  • Download and install WordPress.
  • Install the “Plugin Central” plugin.
    This seems optional with WordPress2.7 but it is very confortable to use so we think it is worth to continue using it.
  • Go to “Plugins>PluginCentral” and copy and past the following plugin list for a  BASIC Feature startup
    http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/insights.zip
    http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/nextgen-gallery.zip
    http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/page-link-manager.0.3.zip
    http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/all-in-one-seo-pack.zip
  • If you need some advanced features, add also this list of plugins:
    http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/redirection.zip
    http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/adsense-manager.zip
    http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/stats.1.3.4.zip
  • And finally, for security and auto upgrading check the following:
    http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wp-security-scan.2.3.zip
    http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/wordpress-automatic-upgrade.1.2.2.zip
    http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/bad-behavior.2.0.25.zip

You will be pleased by the fact the plugins will play nicely together, delivering a quite good publishing platform.

This ends our one-minute blog installation instructions & advices. To understand what you are doing (!) continue reading…

All the plugin listed here have been deeply tested by our developement crew, and have been used on production sites. They are quite bug free on day-by-day use.

nextgen-gallery Gallery

Insights is a very userful plugin because it allows you to quickly access and insert information (links, images, videos, maps..) into your blog post.

Redirection is good for redirecting users which points to moved pages or so on. Sometimes its monitoring logic can lead to trouble, so it is not recommended for casual bloggers.

Bad Behavior is effective, but in our own opinion it is not required if you install the built-in antispam. It must be carefully monitored, to avoid cutting out legitimate traffic. Anyway it seems good.

Why I do not like Sniplet plugin

I have tried the Sniplet plugin, and it is very userful for inserting some pieces of messages.
Anyway Sniplet plugin is not optimal for these reasons:

  • Some themes (like Carrington) supports custom pages per tag/page/section, so you can customize your site very easily
  • If you disable a plugin, some of your sniplet can break or be useless. Said it simply: Sniplet often depends on some theme or on some other plugin, and this is too bad.

My advice is: try sniplet plugin for some time, and decide if it is worth to.