This is the second in a series creating a local mirror of your blog. Before going on you should have read the last post, Install a web server and Wordpress, and completed the tasks in it.

In this post we shall install a theme and the plugins. I will be writing this for a person who has little or no experience of blogging, so some parts will seem a bit simplistic.

Create a folder on your desktop called WOS, to hold any files you download from your blog.

The Old Theme

If your blog’s theme has been modified in any way then you should download the theme from your blog otherwise skip ahead to The New Theme section. The reason for this is that you want a duplicate of the blog that you have online, but if you want to start over and keep the same theme then you too can skip ahead to The New Theme section.

I’ll assume you have an FTP program because you uploaded your theme to the blog. I use FileZilla, it’s free and easy to use. All you need to do here is startup your FTP program, got to the wp-content/themes folder and copy your theme’s folder into the WOS folder. Now jump ahead to Transfer The Theme.

The New Theme

If you haven’t got a theme yet go get one! I gave you some advice in the How To Choose A WordPress Theme post. Download a theme and unzip it into the WOS folder.

Transfer The Theme

• Press the Windows key and the E key to open Windows Explorer.
• Navigate to the WOS folder.
• Highlight the theme folder and press Ctrl-C.
• Make sure your flash stick is plugged in and navigate to:
  FLASHSTICK:\www\wordpress\wp-content\themes
  where FLASHSTICK is the drive name assigned to your flash stick.
• Press Ctrl-V to paste the theme in that location.

You can now double-click on wos.exe to start the server. Start your browser and go to the WordPress login page:

http://localhost/wordpress/wp-login.php

Enter your username and password and press the login button.

Changing the Theme

1. Click on Presentation in the menu bar. You should see three themes, the two default themes and your theme. Click on the image of your theme.
2. Right-click on View site and select either a new window or tab to see your theme.

That’s it for the theme for this lesson, in the next lesson I will show you how to modify a theme that you already have. To make it more useful to you, please leave a comment on what you have had a problem with or something what you would like to do, it can be layout changes, CSS or just about anything to do with theme changes.

WordPress Setup

Before you start loading up on plugins and creating posts, you should configure WordPress so that it works the way you want it to. Go through the Options menu and make your changes. If you are making a local mirror of your blog then copy the settings you did there. There are a couple of additional things I would do:

Permalinks

Go to Options > Permalinks, click on the Custom radio button and enter either
/%category%/%postname%/
or just
/%postname%/
This will make the URLs to your post a lot more readable. Once you have changed it and made some posts do not change it again.

header.php

Open the header.php file and delete the line:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" /> <!-- leave this for stats -->

This is a security measure. Hackers will not be able to tell what version you have, making their job a little harder.

Viewable Directories

Some directories can be viewed by the casual (hacker!) visitor. To stop this, download this file, change it’s extension from txt to htm and copy it to:
FLASHSTICK:\www\wordpress\wp-content\plugins

Plugins

Plugins are pieces of code that give the blog extra features, much like having a basic car and then you buy extras to make it go faster or look better. Fortunately 99% of all plugins are freely available, the ones that you pay for are usually highly specialized and not needed for general blogging. For example, a plugin that turns WordPress into a membership site.

If you are making a local mirror of your blog then install those same plugins on it and ensure that you set up each’s options the same as your blog’s.

Default Plugins

WordPress comes with two plugins, press Plugins on the menu bar to view them.
The first is Akismet, a comment-spam killer. You need an API key to enable it so click on the link on the plugin page and follow the instructions before activating it.

The second is Hello Dolly, to my mind this is a useless plugin and can be deleted.

How to Delete a Plugin

Open Windows Explorer and go to:

FLASHSTICK:\www\wordpress\wp-content\plugins

You will see a file called hello.php, highlight it and press the Delete key.

In most cases a plugin will consist of more then one file, these will be inside a folder and you delete the whole folder. For example, the Akismet plugin (DO NOT delete it) is a php file and a gif file inside the akismet folder.

A word of caution: Do not be seduced into downloading and installing any plugin that takes your fancy. Each one that you add will slow down the pages appearance. The more you use, the slower the page shows. Before installing, ask yourself if the addition of the plugin will help the visitor to your page.

Recommended Plugins

Here is a basic selection of plugins that are almost universally recommend. Download them into the WOS folder. If you download plugins from elsewhere, you should check for compatability with your version of WordPress.

Enforce www Preference: A site can general be found by either www.sitename.com or sitename.com. As people link to you they can do it either way. In a search engine’s eyes they are two different sites and so your ranking will fragment between the two. With this plugin you can decide which you want. Any reference to the other will be redirected to your choice.

Google Sitemap Generator: This will create a sitemap in the format required by the search engines and submit it to them automatically. This will help them spider your blog quicker.

All in one SEO pack: This one is gold. With it you can configure:

• Titles in the browser title bar.
• Meta Descriptions.
• KeyWords.
• Removal of Duplicate Content.

Spam Karma 2: This is another comment-spam killer. Highly recommended.

Subscribe to comments: This enables a visitor to receive blog comments via email.

Lestchan.net: This is a page full of useful plugins. I would especially recommend WP-PageNavi 2.20, it provides a clean navigation from page to page. You can see it in action at the bottom of this blog’s homepage.

Brian’s Threaded Comments: This allows commentators to reply to individual comments.

FeedSmith: This is for those of you that use Feed Burner for your rss feeds, which should be all of you!

Ping Optimizer: Every time you create or edit a post WordPress will send a ping. So if you edit one post a lot in a relatively short time you might be banned for spamming. This plugin controls when a ping is sent.

Simple Tags: Though WordPress 2.3.1 has now got tags, tag management leaves a bit to be desired. This plugin fills those gaps.

Installing Plugins

This is easy in most cases. Download the zip files into the WOS folder and unzip them. Read any help files that come with the plugin and follow the instructions. Generally you will copy the plugin’s folder to:
FLASHSTICK:\www\wordpress\wp-content\plugins
Go to the Plugin Page, you should see your plugin there and on the right there is an Activate link - click on it.
Then go to the Options Page and configure the plugin.

Wrap Up

You have now completed the local mirror of your blog. The only thing it is missing is some posts, so go ahead and create four or five posts. They don’t have to be real posts you can just copy and paste blocks of text.

HomeWork

• Complete the tasks above, so everything is working.
• If you have a theme that you want to modify, and you are not sure how to leave a comment here as this will be the subject in the series.
• If you are wanting to create a new theme, grab a sketch book and some felt-tips and start drawing what you want your theme to look like.

If you have a problem completing the local mirror of your blog as above then leave a comment here and I will help. As I said, the next in the series will be on how to modify a theme.