Few days back, a friend of mine who runs a company called KWeb Marketing asked me to explore certain features in WordPress. His company’s main business is to create virtual / online real state. Exploration areas were …
- Installation
- Ease in customizing the look and feel
- Making the website search engine friendly (URL rewriting)
- Options for RSS feed
- Tagging for blog posts
- Displaying Google Ads (AdSense block)
When I was asked to do this, I really had no clue how to go about it since I really had no clue about what actually is the WordPress. I had just heard from my friend that it is a famous blogging software. Never mind that because I trust google to direct me to sources where I can find information I want which has been put on the web by people of various community.
Installation turned out to be as easy as it could be with the help of Fantastico utility hosted by our Web Hoster. Took me about 5 Mins to install it. It was simple enough to install even without the Fantastico when I tried it on my laptop. So one task done without a hint of trouble.
When it came to look and feel, I found out that there are so many good looking themes freely available for WordPress that I could not help myself being amazed. Deploying the downloaded themes was again a simple task. Just unzip the folder, upload it in the /wp-content/themes folder on the server using any FTP tool then log into the administrative section using admin user id and password/ Go to Presentation section which displays all the themes available (uploaded earlier along with the default ones). Select the one you like the most and your WordPress got a new look. That’s it. Simple, isn’t? OK, If one needs to customize the look of a particular theme, it is easy if you know little bit of CSS, HTML and PHP since you end up editing the template files of your theme selected. This could be a bit of time consuming. Though I had given my friend few options by uploading few themes on the server but eventually he decided to go for the default theme of WordPress. I did some changes in the default theme later to meet his exact requirements.
Options for RSS feed for entire blog and individual post was already taken care of by WordPress. One more task got over without any sort of effort from me left one big grin on my face.
Next came the Search Engine Friendly (SEF) URLs which are the URLs that excludes unfriendly items to search engine such as ‘%’, ‘?’, ‘=’, ‘%’. In WordPress, Default URLs are in the form of as http://www.domain.com/index.php?p=2 where p is the post id. In order to make these URLs Search Engine Friendly, I took my favorite route, I did google and found the article: How to configure WordPress to create search engine friendly URLs for permalinks
Knowledge acquired from this post, I went to Admin Panel -> Options -> Permalinks. In there, there are couple of Pre-Defined formats as Date and Name based and Numeric based along with the default ones.
The last and most flexible one, the one I was looking for, was the custom structure and trust me, I just had to enter /%postname%.htm to include the title of the post in my URLs. Hassle free SEF. Earlier I had to put my rewrite rules in htaccess file when I was configuring SEF URLs in OSCommerce. WordPress does this work for you by modifying the htaccess file if your htaccess file is writable and if not it displays the rules which you have to put in there.
Till this time, I really didn’t face any problems. Everything went so smooth, a kind of unexpected but happy scenario 
that I decided to take a break and take up the next set of actions next day. Probably I just wanted to prolong the happy feeling.