WordPress for Artists

Table of Contents

1 Workshop
2 Themes
3 Plugins
4 WP as an App Platform

WordPress is an open source software to run websites. It started as a blogging platform but now its become online presence platform. Its versatile enough to be a blog or a content management system.

WordPress is no more just a blogging platform. WordPress has become now the most preferred platform for independent, community and even commercial journalism efforts. Some of the well-known journalism sites that use WordPress are

Even with all this WordPress is extremely user-friendly to set it up and run. Its theme is easy to design and play around. Its plugin system makes it easy to add or remove functionality.

Workshop

In this workshop we will aim to set up a WordPress Content Management System to run a full featured website. As part of the workshop we will learn to

What to Bring

Laptop
Firefox browser
Credit card or bank account for buying the domain and hosting
Interest to learn

To Know

Whats a domain name?
What is a server and What is Linux?
What is a database and what is MySQL?
What is PHP?
How they talk to each other?X`
What is WordPress?
How it is set up?
What is a post and post types?
What is a page?
What header, footer, sidebar and widget?
What is a theme?
What is a plugin?

To Do

Search and Buy Domain
Setup wordpress hosting
Setup clean theme
Customize themes with sidebars and footers
Setup some essential plugins for SEO, Twitter Cards, FB Open Graphs, Google SiteMap, Newsletters, Simple polls and forms etc
Setup a podcast if interested (we can even submit to iTunes)
Backup strategy and backups
Caching for higher traffic
Security

Themes

There are thousands of good themes available. Below are a few I like.

Blogline WordPress Theme - A classic blog design with a large sidebar image to present yourself. This personal blog also includes a featured carousel for your favorite posts. Github Repo.
Kontrast A solid responsive high resolution magazine & blog theme. With slide-toggle sidebars you are in for a great viewing experience on any device. Github Repo
Enspire With a carousel and clear design, the articles you feature in Enspire will stand out. A great theme for a blog or magazine. GitHub repo.
Typecore - A detailed and polished magazine theme with a premium taste. Positioned to the left of the screen, it gives a unique look with large social buttons. Github repo.
Customizr is a versatile and easy to customize WordPress theme, instantly giving a professional look to your online presence.
Hueman is a responsive 100% high-resolution theme for blogs and magazines. Unique toggle sidebars give a great browsing and reading experience on both tablet and mobile.
Quest is a free, open source, responsive wordpress theme with an amazing Page Builder
Patio a beautiful image-centric WordPress themes
Sparkling’ is a clean, modern, flat design theme developed using Bootstrap 3. The frontend framework optimizes this theme for smartphones, tablets, desktops and any other device. With pixel perfect design, awesome widgets and full-screen slider it stands out among WordPress themes. It has a premium look and feel that can’t be confused with anything in the market.
Opus A theme with personality for those who have stories to be told.
Launch Effect is a free responsive one-page WordPress theme that lets you create a viral campaign in minutes.
Largo is a A WordPress framework for news websites. Finely crafted and expertly honed by the Institute for Nonprofit News.

Plugins

General

Akismet - is quite possibly the best way in the world to protect your blog from comment and trackback spam. Need a wordpress.com account
Jetpack by WordPress.com - Many features - Secure, Stats, Short codes for embeds, Sharing, Email Subscriptions, Auto Sharing(Publicize), Likes, Related posts, Contact form, Site Verification Tools
All In One SEO Pack - Out-of-the-box SEO for your WordPress blog
FD Footnotes Plugin - Add elegant looking footnotes to your posts simply and naturally
Podpress plugin gives you everything you need in one easy plugin to use WordPress for Podcasting.
Table of Contents Plus - A powerful yet user-friendly plugin that automatically creates a table of contents. Can also output a sitemap listing all pages and categories.
WordPress HTTPS is intended to be an all-in-one solution to using SSL on WordPress sites.
WP Emoji One Add Emoji One emoticons to your posts and pages.
WP Super Cache A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files.
Zip Recipes is the perfect plugin for recipe/food blogs. Creating elegant recipes with images that increase your Google ranking is easy and simple.
WP Greet Box - Display a different greeting message to your visitor depending on which site they are coming from.
Smart Archives Reloaded - Easily display posts grouped by year and month, in one or more elegant formats
Google XML Sitemaps - This plugin will generate a special XML sitemap which will help search engines to better index your blog.
Maps Marker - The most comprehensive & user-friendly mapping solution for WordPress
Editorial Calendar makes it possible to see all your posts and drag and drop them to manage your blog.
Broken Link Checker This plugin will check your posts, comments and other content for broken links and missing images, and notify you if any are found.
FD Word Statistics Plugin Shows word and sentence counts plus a readability analysis of the post currently being edited using three different readability measurements.
AftertheDeadline uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology to find your writing errors and offer smart suggestions.
Updraft Plus can be used to save your complete installation including /wp-content/ and push them to an external Backup Service, like Dropbox, S3, FTP and many more
PollDaddy Create surveys and polls that match your brand, budget, and vision.
Woocommerce
Inline Comments adds your comment system to the side of paragraphs and other sections (like headlines and images) of your post.
WP Live Search uses the WP REST API endpoint available for search. It will deliver results just as fast as the REST API on YOUR server can send them back. In the end it's important to realize that the REST API is just a wrapper for WP Query, and still uses PHP to process the requests.
OptionTree attempts to bridge the gap between WordPress developers, designers and end-users by creating fully responsive option panels and meta boxes with an ease unlike any other plugin. OptionTree has many advanced features with well placed hooks and filters to adjust every aspect of the user experience.
Form Maker is a fresh and innovative form builder. This form builder is for generating various kinds of forms.
Code Embed allows you to embed code - JavaScript and HTML primarily - in a post. This is incredibly useful for embedding video, etc, when required and is used, amongst other, by Mozilla. It cannot be used for server side code, such as PHP.
Last Modified Timestamp This plugin adds information to the admin interface about when each post/page was last modified (including custom post types!).
FeedWordPress is an Atom/RSS aggregator for WordPress. It syndicates content from feeds that you choose into your WordPress weblog; the content it syndicates appears as a series of special posts in your WordPress posts database. If you syndicate several feeds then you can use WordPress's posts database and templating engine as the back-end of an aggregation ("planet") website.
Inline Tweet Sharer is a plugin that allows you to easily and simply create links to share your content on twitter. These links share whatever the anchor text is (as well as a prefix or suffix if context is needed), so it is designed to share tweetable content (like stats, quotes, titbits or competition entries) easily and quickly on twitter, hopefully encouraging people to click on said links, increasing traffic to your blog.
TablePress is a free WordPress plugin that enables you to create and manage tables on your site. No HTML knowledge is required, as a comfortable interface allows to easily edit table data. Tables can contain any type of data, even formulas that will be evaluated. An additional JavaScript library can be used to add features like sorting, pagination, filtering, and more for site visitors.
Members is a plugin that extends your control over your blog. It's a user, role, and capability management plugin that was created to make WordPress a more powerful CMS.

For Developers

TGM Plugin Activation is a PHP library that allows you to easily require or recommend plugins for your WordPress themes (and plugins). It allows your users to install, update and even automatically activate plugins in singular or bulk fashion using native WordPress classes, functions and interfaces. You can reference bundled plugins, plugins from the WordPress Plugin Repository or even plugins hosted elsewhere on the internet.
Custom Post Type UI (CPTUI) provides an easy to use interface to create and administer custom post types and taxonomies for WordPress. CPTUI does NOT handle display of registered post types or taxonomies in your current theme. Its goal is to simply register them use.
Advanced Custom Fields is the perfect solution for any WordPress website which needs more flexible data like other Content Management Systems. Use the Advanced Custom Fields plugin to take full control of your edit screens & custom field data.
HM_Rewrite is a wrapper for the WordPress WP Rewrite system
Debug Bar adds a debug menu to the admin bar that shows query, cache, and other helpful debugging information.When WP_DEBUG is enabled it also tracks PHP Warnings and Notices to make them easier to find. When SAVEQUERIES is enabled the mysql queries are tracked and displayed.
GlotPress - Many open source projects span regions, countries and dialects and need to support a variety of translations, GlotPress is here to help you collaborate online with your translators to ensure your users see your software in their native language.
wp-statistics allows you to track statistics for your WordPress site without depending on external services and uses arrogate data whenever possible to respect your users privacy.

EDU or Learning

H5P makes it easy to create, share and reuse HTML5 content and applications. H5P empowers everyone to create rich and interactive web experiences more efficiently - all you need is a web browser and a web site with an H5P plugin.

WordPress MU

Mercator WordPress multisite domain mapping for the modern era.
WordPress MU Domain Mapping - Map any blog/site on a WordPressMU or WordPress 3.X network to an external domain.

WP as an App Platform

WP-API - WordPress is moving towards becoming a fully-fledged application framework, and we need new APIs. WP-API was born to create an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand and well-tested framework for creating these APIs, plus creating APIs for core. WP-API is a way to access your WordPress site’s data through an easy-to-use HTTP REST API. WP-API is availabe as a plugin. It provides REST API via HTTP and responds with simple JSON format. You can get all WP data including users, posts, taxonomies as part of API request. API allows all CRUD operations and more.
Aesop Story Engine is a suite of open-sourced tools and components that empower developers and writers to build feature-rich, interactive, long-form storytelling themes for WordPress. At the heart of ASE are the suite of storytelling components, which are created on the fly while crafting posts within WordPress.

This Notebook was last updated on Jun 14, 2018 @ 3:38 PM.