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  • A joint meeting with the Nashville SEO Group to discuss WordPress SEO tactics

    A joint meeting with the Nashville SEO Group to discuss WordPress SEO tactics

    Join us for a special meeting of the Nashville WordPress Group meeting as we discuss WordPress SEO tactics that can help your website.

    Join the group and come and learn! »

    This is a joint meeting with the Nashville SEO Group run by Ross Jones of 2 the Top Design. Ross has been a professional SEO consultant since early 1997, 6 months before Google even registered their domain name.

    Ross will give a short presentation on WordPress SEO and lead the discussion on topics such as:

    • Why is WordPress Good for SEO?
    • Easy Steps to Improve Your WordPress SEO
    • How the Right Plugins Can Help Your SEO
    • How the Wrong Plugins Can Hurt Your SEO
  • Widgets, Custom Menus & Settings Pages

    Widgets, Custom Menus & Settings Pages

    This month at the Nashville Meetup we walked through the 3 sections of the WordPress admin. Widgets, Custom Menus & Settings Pages. Now, because there is already a wealth of WordPress knowledge out there I decided to find some well done tutorials on the subjects.

    There were to very well done tutorials done by Deltina Hay who has put a lot of time and effort into these these. (they are well worth the watch, or listen if you have other things todo) As for the settings pages we simply went through each page and clicked on all the options and updated all the fields to see how they effected our test site.

    I believe that learning WordPress is much like learning any other web application. Learn from trial and error, word of mouth and doing your home work. (search the web at all hours of the night to find that one bit of information to complete your masterpiece)

    Widgets & Sidebar

    By Deltina Hay

    This tutorial is a bit long because she goes into a lot of detail.

    [youtube width=”630″ height=”380″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM3XfwxjQ-4[/youtube]

    Custom Menus Tutorial

    By Deltina Hay
    This tutorial starts off a little slow but only because she does a great job of going through step by step. This is perfect for those of you have not yet worked with the WP Custom Menus.

    [youtube width=”630″ height=”380″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDW8OTDUIDI[/youtube]

  • Nashville WordPress Meetup August 2011

    Nashville WordPress Meetup August 2011

    Our August Meetup went pretty well, we had about 15 people come together in CoLab’s Nashville location. We started off with a brief introduction on “Why WordPress” and then moved into a demonstration on the text-editor and publishing a post. As a bonus we were fortunate to have Ross Jones in attendance who was continually helping us out with SEO questions through out the demonstration. Ross is the organizer of the Nashville SEO Group.

    We also had plans to do a short demonstration on how to move a WordPress installation from server to server, but our developer attendance was a little low so we extended the text-editor demo. In the extension we briefly touched on the difference between pages and posts, permalink settings, bulk editing of posts and some random questions.

    A person goal of mine is try and cultivate Nashville wp-developers community to a point where we can have our own meetup to discuss building for WordPress. We could talk about some of the basics of template hierarchy, template tags, the loop, using menus, building widgets and plugins. We could also get into some heavier subjects based around a more CMS approach using custom post types and taxonomies beyond the norm. I believe that there is large number of Nashville developers out there looking to break into WordPress, but just need a place to meet. If that describes you then signup for the group and post on the message board!

    September’s Meetup

    At this point the September meetup is still open to suggestion. At Augusts meetup there was a group of member that express interest in learning how to move from a .com account to self hosted installation. As well, I think there is definitely a need for a demonstration on the Navigation Menu system as well as the Widgets page.

  • Transferring WordPress from Server to Server

    Meetup Presentation 08-09-11

    Required

    • wp admin access
    • ftp access or control panel access
    • phpmyadmin access or database access
    • Domain Names are all ready in place and pointing in the right direction.

    Basic Outline

    1. Download WP
    2. Export SQL
    3. Upload WP
    4. Import SQL
    5. Update DB

    Download WP
    Download your all files that in the directory where WordPress is located. Most of the time this will be your root directory. Optionally, if you have a control panel like cPanel, you can use compress all the wp-files in to one compressed file to make this process extremely faster and easier.

    Download SQL
    Export your current database. You may do this from either phpmyadmin or if you do not have access you can use a plugin like WP-DB-Backup.

    Upload WP
    Upload the your files or your zipped file. If you zipped your file you will need to decompress the file and be sure that the wp-files reside in the directory you intended them to be in.

    Import SQL
    Access your database via phpmyadmin or another database application. Import the sql file that you exported. If your exported file is a zip be sure to decompress it before uploading.

    Update DB
    The tricky part. Start by doing a search for the old-domain this will allow you to see exactly how many changes are going to be needed and where they are at.

    NOTE: From my experience the method we are using will not work on serialized data so be sure not to run the following script on any row that uses a serialized format to store data.

    Here are the two most common sql sting you will need. As a personal note, I NEVER run this type of sql on the options table. I do those manually, typically there are only about 4 values that need changing. Notice that I am only using the bear necessities for the domain name. there is no http:// or training slash. Keep it simple and strait to the point. The only time you may need extra is if you are dealing with an installation that has been placed in a sub/directory.

    UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace( post_content, 'old-domain.com', 'new-domain.com' ) ;
    UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace( guid, 'old-domain.com', 'new-domain.com' );

    To perform these lines of sql click on the sql tab of the phpmyadmin and enter these lines into the textarea. Hit Go! The admin will notify you of your updated rows.

    I like to keep an ongoing file that holds all the different type of updates I’ve done to make workflow faster. UPDATE sql

  • Nashville Meetup – Meeting Format

    Nashville Meetup – Meeting Format

    The Nashville meetup group has been meeting since January of 2011, and over the last 8 months we’ve seen quite a bit of fluctuation in attendance. In an effort to be more consistent I thought it would be helpful to put together a meeting format I will follow anytime we are not having a special presentation.

    Special presentation are always welcome and we are always looking for anyone who is interested in getting involved with speaking or doing demonstrations. However, if we do not have anything special planned you can expect the following.

    This format should meet the basic needs of most users ranging from curious to beginner, bloggers to website owners and wp-hacker to wp-developer.

    Here is a short list of what I have planned.

    1. 5-10min intro to WordPress.
    2. 30min demo on the WordPress admin, pre-determined or requested.
    3. 30min demo on WordPress Development php, css, html – pre-determined or requested.

    Extended descriptions

    1. 10-15min intro to WordPress.

    • Intro to WordPress – Paraphrased blurb from .org “About” page.
    • Why – Stats and facts about usage, seo & community.

    2. 30min demo on the WordPress admin, pre-determined or requested.
    The general concept is to help people learn WordPress to perform the basics of what the system is designed to do; publishing content.

    • Pre-Determined – Editing and publishing content, Settings and options, ect.
    • Requested – Something specific that you would like to learn with in the standard WordPress admin.

    3. 30min demo on WordPress Development – php, html – pre-determined or requested.
    Some Ideas:

    • Transferring a wp-install in less than 15min.
    • Turning static html into a theme.
    • Template Tags
    • Using WP_Query and the Loop.
    • WordPress functions to know.

    If you have a request leave a comment below or post it to the Meetup Message Board.

  • BuddyPress & WordPress Social Media Integration

    BuddyPress & WordPress Social Media Integration

    Below is Jeff Lee‘s presentation from the May Nashville WordPress meetup on the WordPress social network plugin BuddyPress and ways to integrate social media into your WordPress site. Links to the plugins that were demoed and mentioned during the presentation are also below.

     

    Plugins, Sites & Services Discussed In Presentation

  • WordPress Themes and Updates

    Below is John Housholder’s, president of Ah So Designs presentation from March 22nd, 2011. Enjoy and please comment below if you have suggestions of improvements!

  • Your ideas, notes, or suggestions for WPNashville.com

    As the Nashville WordPress community grows through our meetup group it would be great to see the WPNashville site take shape.

    What would you like to learn about that we can do to wpnashville.com in an effort to show you how to use WordPress for your site?

  • WordPress Planning and Branding

    Below is John Housholder’s, president of Ah So Designs presentation from February 8th, 2011. Enjoy and please comment below if you have suggestions of improvements!

  • How to setup WordPress from Scratch

    Below is John Housholder’s, president of Ah So Designs presentation from February 8th, 2011.  Enjoy and please comment below if you have suggestions of improvements!