Week Four (MGDP2060)

This article lists topics for Week Four of Web Design and Development III (MGDP2060).

Exercises: Week Four Exercises (MGDP2060)
Screenshots: MAMP - phpMyAdmin - WordPress
Reading for Week Five: Chapter Five of the textbook (WordPress Themes)

In the news

Computer programming

See:

Web scam

Wikipedia founder backs site's systems after extortion scam @ The Guardian
- "Jimmy Wales says system is secure after users posed as senior editors and demanded payment from businesses"

Web security

Your baby monitor is an Internet-connected spycam vulnerable to voyeurs and crooks @ BoingBoing

Cryptocurrency

Nine of world's biggest banks join to form blockchain partnership @ Reuters

Nine of the world's biggest banks including Goldman Sachs and Barclays have joined forces with New York-based financial tech firm R3 to create a framework for using blockchain technology in the markets, the firm said on Tuesday.
It is the first time banks have come together to work on a shared way in which the technology that underpins bitcoin -- a controversial, web-based "cryptocurrency" -- can be used in finance.
Over the past year, interest in blockchain technology has grown rapidly.
It has already attracted significant investment from many major banks, which reckon it could save them money by making their operations:

Faster

More efficient

More transparent

Big data

Data is a liability, not an asset @ BoingBoing

Items of interest

AsciiMath - "An easy-to-write markup language for mathematics"

Little Bobby Tables

See:

Get versus Post

Get method

The Get method is for repeatable transactions, which request no action from the server other than returning data.

Example: submitting a keyword to a web search engine.

The technical term for this repeatability is Idempotence.

Post method

The Post method is for one-time transactions, which request that the server take some action, in addition to returning data.

Example: completing an E-commerce purchase.

Web page conventions

Follow these web page conventions when creating class-related web pages.

See also Naming convention for more general information.

Class FTP server

The class server now has a folder named student_ftp, which is accessible via FTP, using your classroom FTP credentials.

The student_ftp folder is for students to store class-related resources which are not part of their website, such as class notes, Photoshop files, etc.

Create a subfolder in the student_ftp folder.
Give this subfolder the same name as you gave your website subfolder.

Within your FTP folder, you are free to store create further subfolders, to organize your work.

Do not store web pages on your FTP folder
- The FTP folder is not on the web
- It cannot be accessed by HTTP -- by only FTP

Some classroom exercises will require you to make specific subfolder inside your FTP folder, and store particular files there.

Wireframe

In your FTP folder, create a folder named wireframe.

Upload your wireframe to this folder
Keep any other wireframe-related documents you make in this folder

wordpress.htcwebcreative.com

See wordpress.htcwebcreative.com.

Downloading WordPress

WordPress is available for free download at:

[ wordpress.org]

Do not confuse with wordpress.com -- a commercial web hosting service.

About .tar and .gz

.tar and .gz are file formats for archiving and compression
- OS X has built-in handling for these formats
- Microsoft Windows does not, you will need to download 7-Zip or some other application

WordPress folder

Move the wordpress folder into your local root folder.

Alternately, you can move the WordPress files into the local root folder, which automatically makes the Home page display WordPress.

Don't do so for this class, but you may wish to do so for other sites

Using the subfolder gives you options:

You can browse WordPress using the subfolder in the URL
You can make your Home page display WordPress by running a PHP script in the Home page
- This is a widely-used approach

Changing the folder name

You can change the subfolder name from wordpress to something else.

To do this, you must specify the new subfolder name in the admin console
Don't do so for this class

Some people (TO DO: who?) advocate changing the folder name to something not obvious, hoping to escape the attention of WordPress-exploiting bots

My own feeling is some WordPress-exploiting bots can almost always identify a WordPress-based site, and that changing the folder name does not do much good. Some good -- some bots may fail to identify a WordPress site, if you change the file name. But I'm skeptical.

None of this is significant when you are running on localhost -- only when your site is on the World Wide Web, where bots can get at it.

See Security through obscurity.

Running phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin is a browser-based tool for creating and managing MySQL databases.

MAMP provides a convenient shortcut to phpMyAdmin.

Creating a database in phpMyAdmin

Browse phpMyAdmin.

..

Browsing your WordPress website

View your WordPress site in a browser.

http://localhost/wordpress - Example, not working link -- enter the URL in browser address bar

Managing your WordPress website

Manage your WordPress site by logging into the administrative control panel:

http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin - Log in to WordPress admin console (example, not working link)

WordPress Themes

In WordPress, a theme provides the HTML and CSS (the front end) which WordPress will use when generating web pages.

Many free themes are available, along with commercial themes.

You can create your own WordPress theme; we will do so in this class.

WordPress: any type of website

WordPress was originally written as blog software, but you can make any type of website with WordPress,

Blogging can be omitted altogether
Blogging can be re-branded as "News" or whatever, can appear on interior page(s) rather than home page.
Custom post types allow you to specify new post types, which behave like blog posts, but are customized to your subject matter
- For example, profiles for dental clinic staff -- see Mondovi Dental