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WordPress from scratch

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Overview

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to create a fully functional blog/personal website using WordPress. This is a great first project if you’re a user starting out with the SRCF, websites in general or want to use a tried-and-tested Content Management System.

This tutorial assumes you have an SRCF personal account (with or without group account admin permissions) and can SSH and transfer files. See our other tutorials for that.

WordPress has huge user and development bases meaning that there is a lot of help available, as well as a plugin to handle just about any desired function. WordPress powers 35% of the web!

That said, it also means that it is a frequently targeted platform for hacks and malicious attacks. Take the appropriate steps we mention here to secure your installation and if you are simply serving static content, consider using a static site generator.

Setting up your database

WordPress needs a MySQL database to run. This works a bit like Excel, storing all of the data for your website in tables and loading this into templates when each page is loaded. You can create your MySQL database here.

Sanity check

Now that you’ve got everything setup, let’s check if you can log in with an FTP client. You’ll want to connect to files.srcf.net via SFTP (the S stands for secure). You should see a folder called public_html which we’ll be uploading all of our files to.

Next up, check that you can access your database: log in to phpMyAdmin. This is a web-based control panel where you can view and edit your database manually. You should see your personal database on the left along with any group account databases. They should all look pretty empty at this point.

If everything is working so far and you have all of your login details and passwords, we’re good to go! Congratulations, that was the hardest bit of the whole process…

Installing WordPress

Head over to wordpress.org and hit the big blue download button. Make sure you don’t get confused with wordpress*.com* - that’s where you can set up a blog directly with the WordPress organisation using their hosting. We want to host our own copy of WordPress on the SRCF.

Once your .zip file has finished downloading, we need to get the files from your computer onto the SRCF hosting. Unzip the file on your computer and upload the files into your public_html directory, making sure that they’re not in a subfolder called wordpress.

You can do this alternatively in the terminal by typing wget https://wordpress.org/latest and extracting the files, e.g. tar zxvf wordpress-5.5.1.tar.gz.

Configure WordPress

Great! Now if you head to your website in a browser https://**crsid**.user.srcf.net for an indvidual account or https://**groupname**.soc.srcf.net for a group account) you should see a friendly welcome screen. Fill in all of the details that it asks for - leave localhost as it is, try not to use wp_ as the database prefix or admin as the administrator username (this makes it harder for hackers to infiltrate your site).

Set up automatic updates

WordPress will likely refuse to do automatic updates, instead requesting FTP credentials – this is because it assumes it can’t write its own files on the server. To make this work you can add the following few lines to your wp-config.php, near the bottom but above the line that says ‘stop editing’:

# Force WordPress to use direct filesystem access so that upgrades work properly.
# https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10205
# https://codex.wordpress.org/Editing_wp-config.php

define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');
define('FS_CHMOD_DIR', (02775 & ~ umask()));
define('FS_CHMOD_FILE', (0664 & ~ umask()));

If configured correctly, the updates page should include text similar to Future security updates will be applied automatically.

If you have a low-traffic or private site, WordPress’ cron service (which handles updates and other background tasks) may not run regularly enough. You can invoke wp-cron.php manually using cron or systemd timers – see crontab or wordpress-cron.timer in /public/societies/sample.

If you are installing WordPress for a group or society then you will need to ensure that the permissions on files in your group account directory are group-writable (and therefore writable by the user that WordPress will run as). WordPress will not check in advance – if some of your files are writable and some are not, you will end up with a half-upgraded WordPress. You can ensure the permissions are correct by running srcf-soc-permfix socname.

Secure your install

There are crucial steps you must take to secure your WordPress installation. As this applies to existing WordPress installations, we’ve written a separate guide for it.

Customising WordPress

You’ll probably want to make your site look a little different and certainly contain some content, so the first thing to do is log in to the WordPress administration panel. There’s usually a link saying something obvious, but if you can’t find it the URL should look like https://csrid.user.srcf.net/wp-admin. Log in with the username and password set up in the previous step.

Content

How you create content will depend on how you intend to use the site. Posts are designed for small regular news updates, Pages are for larger static content. You don’t have to use either, you can use both. If you don’t want to use Posts at all, you can display a page on your homepage in (Settings > Reading).

Visual changes

WordPress websites use themes to customise the way that they look. Thankfully lots of people are nice enough to write these for you and give them away for free (there are plenty of paid-for themes a google search away too). You can browse these directly through the WordPress admin back end (Appearance > Themes) or find one online.

Features

If you want to extend the functionality of WordPress, you need to install a Plugin. Millions of plugins have been written and are dead easy to install. The chances are that if you want your site to do something then someone has probably written a plugin to do it.

Accounts

Log in to WP as admin using the password given at the end of the installation process.
Click on My Profile and change the admin password using the form provided.
Click on Users and create an account for yourself.

Optional steps

Custom domains

You might be thinking that the *.user.srcf.net or *.soc.srcf.net web address of your spangly new site isn’t particularly inspiring. Don’t panic! You can register any domain you like (or even multiple domains) and point them to your new site by following our custom domains documentation.

University Account authentication

You can restrict any site (or parts of your site) so that it requires authentication using a University Account (formerly known as Raven) to access it by following University Account authentication.

Closing remarks

Did you like this or find this cool? We invite you to check out more tutorials or get in touch to tell us what you thought!

If you have any suggestions for how we could improve this documentation please send us an email at support@srcf.net or submit a Pull Request on GitHub!

A big thanks to Phil Ewels for writing this on his own blog and to hmw26 for some of their tips. This tutorial contains some adaptations to their work.

Last modified on Saturday Dec 7, 2024 by Richard Allitt