Week Four (MGDP2060)

This article lists topics for week four of Web Design and Development III (MGDP2060).

See also Week Four Exercises (MGDP2060).

In the news

• You Don't Have To Be Good At Math To Learn To Code @ Slashdot
• 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"
• Data is a liability, not an asset @ BoingBoing - see also Technical debt
• Your baby monitor is an Internet-connected spycam vulnerable to voyeurs and crooks @ BoingBoing

Items of interest

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

Little Bobby Tables

See:

• Little Bobby Tables
• Data sanitization

Get versus Post

...

student_ftp

The class web server now has a folder named student_ftp for students to store class-related resources which are not part of their website, such as class notes, Photoshop files, etc.

If you wish to use the student_ftp folder, create a subfolder for your files.

Give your subfolder the same name as you gave your subfolder under the website folder (www.htcwebcreative.com).

Web page conventions

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

See also Naming convention for more general information.

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

All of the WordPress files must remain in a single folder.

The folder name does not matter; wordpress is common.

The folder can be the local root folder for a website, 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

Alternately, the WordPress folder can reside with your local root folder, which is what we will do in this class.

You can browse your WordPress site like this:

Alternately, you can make WordPress appear on your Home page, while leaving the WordPress files in a subfolder of the local root folder.

• Do this by naming the Home page <code>index.php, and entering PHP code which references the WordPress files in their subfolder.

Browse website

View your WordPress site in a browser.

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

Manage 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 -- see [ Mondovi Dental]

Demonstrations

• WordPress installation
• phpMyAdmin - browser-based database management tool

Exercises

• Week Four Exercises (MGDP2060)

Vocabulary

See complete list.

New vocabulary

• Codebase
• Login session
• Project management
• Revision control
• Session (computer science)
• Technical debt

Previous vocabulary

• Bit
• Bootstrap (framework)
• Byte
• Cascading Style Sheets
• Control flow
• Delimiter
• Deliverable
• Expression (computer science)
• Hostname
• HTML
• Hyperlink
• JavaScript
• LAMP (software bundle)
• Legacy system
• localhost
• MAMP
• MySQL
• PHP
• Portability
• Problem solving
• Responsive web design
• SQL statement examples
• Statement (computer science)
• Static web page
• Title (HTML)
• Uniform resource locator - URL
• Web application framework
• Web server
• XAMPP

See also

• Web Design and Development III (MGDP2060)