Setting up WordPress on your own server

2014-01-29

Here are some useful tips I found when installing WordPress on my own server.

Installation

• Follow the Debian installation guide

• In /etc/apache2/sites-available/wp, make sure the Alias

  Alias /wp/wp-content /var/lib/wordpress/wp-content
  

  comes before

  Alias /wp /usr/share/wordpress
  

• In /etc/wordpress/config-SITENAME.php add

  define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);
  

• If you bork the MySQL database accidentally, and need to fix things install phpmyadmin.

• If you trust users and want to increase the file upload size, add this to /etc/wordpress/htaccess:

  php_value upload_max_filesize 20M
  php_value post_max_size 40M
  

Useful Plugins

Absolute Privacy

Moderated user registrations, and only logged in users can access content.

Peter’s Login Redirect

Fix brain malfunction with WordPress design. Redirect users (esp. subscribers) to the blog after login, and not the admin page!

Theme

I couldn’t care less about colors or fancy images. But I WANTED the main text to be more than 10 pixels wide, and the default blog text to be in a large font. I found the Customizr theme, disabled the sliders / featured posts, and set the layout of all pages to only have a right sidebar. Additionally, to get rid of the social icons (which are pretty useless for a private blog), I created a child theme, and put the following in style.css:

@media (min-width: 980px) {
  .tc-header .brand {
    float: none;
    text-align: center;
    width: 100%;
  }
  .tc-header .outside {
    display: block;
    text-align: center;
  }
}

/* Hide social icons */
.navbar-wrapper.clearfix.span9 {
  display: none;
}

For larger fonts in posts / etc. use the following in style.css:

section.entry-summary, section.entry-content, article div.entry-content
{
  font-size: 16pt;
  line-height: 1.2em;
}

All my theme customizations are here.

Quirks

• Enable the theme’s retina support (or you won’t be able to edit images).

• Disable the theme’s lightbox effects if you’re using the different lightbox plugin.

🗫 Comments

• 

  Ikiwiki is better

  Anonymous (2014-03-16 03:30:01)

  Using ikiWiki is a lot better than using wordpress. Too bad I can’t convince non-geeks to use ikiwiki… :)

• 

  Good post

  Venkat (2019-01-28 06:11:12 EST)

  Thanks for sharing your valuable information. This is a very useful and informative post.

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