Stardate and Other dates on FREE version of Wordpress - wordpress

newbie here.
A 'Stardate' question here:
I am creating an offbeat news site 'thedailyplanetonline.wordpress.com' using the free version of Wordpress, and would like to put something in the top widget bar that calculates and displays a Star Trek Stardate, Julian and Gregorian Dates, Mayan dates, and so on.
Since Javascript has no 'easy way' of working with the free version, do you have any advice or crafty suggestions on how to get this to work?
At the moment its not possible to buy a upgrade
And again. Keep in mind this is the free version of Wordpress.
Thank you in advance!

I know this isn't an answer you'd want to hear, but wordpress.com hosted sites most likely cannot do this for you, unless you find a WordPress.com theme that already does this.
The free, hosted version of WordPress does not allow you to add your own themes or plugins, or modify existing themes. You are given a small set of allowed themes and allowed plugins.
If you wanted to have something more custom, you will need to look into self-hosted Wordpress instead. That means either setting up your own web server (only recommended if you know what you're doing), or set up web hosting.
For more information on the limitations of Wordpress.com sites, please see this link:
http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/what-are-the-limitations-of-wordpress-com/
and if you do go the hosted route, here's a helpful article on migrating your Wordpress.com site:
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-properly-move-your-blog-from-wordpress-com-to-wordpress-org/

Related

Building a website for a hotel - is WordPress the best idea?

I'm researching to see if building a full website for a hotel be a good idea to do on WordPress.
I read that wordpress is okay but there are better options.
I want to design and code my own front end look to the website, but have the backend on a stable platform that can take all the reservations seamlessly.
My main concern is to be able to have a backup of all the files and easily switch to another server in case something goes wrong.
I can host the website on my server or host with the service you suggest that comes with the platform all together.
Any ideas and/or suggestions are greatly appreciated!
There are other options, no doubt, but yes, it can and is really possible to build it using WordPress as CMS.
If you want to design and code your own theme, you'll need to study the WordPress Theme Structure and, since you'll build it by yourself, you'll also need to develop plugins to create custom post types (aka CPT) to make the hotel management easier on the WP back-end.
About the theme structure, files, child themes and everything, I'd recommend you to read https://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
About the plugins development: https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/
About Custom Post Types: https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/post-types/registering-custom-post-types/
About the backup: it's super easy and you can even make a full backup using free plugins via back-end. But if the site goes down you can easily do it via FTP downloading only wp-content folder and the database. It's really simple to migrate from one WordPress to another, or from host to host.
About the hosting, you'll need to use a server if you want to build this project. There's a difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org
The .com is simpler, you are not able to build everything you want. The .org is the open source project, which you get the files, upload to your server and connect to database (MariaDB or MySQL). Most hosts offer automatic installation for WordPress and, from there, you can change whatever you want and need.
Note: many developers create CPTs INSIDE the theme's code, but this is not recommended by WP as you can see in We recommend that you put custom post types in a plugin rather than a theme. This ensures that user content remains portable even if they change their theme.
WP is not really hard, after 1 week studying you'll see yourself getting over most difficulties. Even if it takes longer, don't give up. There's a huge community to help you with WP questions.
Hope it helps and I'm sorry my bad writing, I'm not an english native speaker.
C ya

Integrate blog into own website

There are already several questions with a similar title, but they received either no answers, or the answers were too specific.
I would like to integrate a blog into a website, so that content can be updated using a simple interface, e.g. from a wordpress/blogger/... account. I find the solutions with iframe cumbersome and unprofessional and I am not sure that modding a wordpress/blogger/... theme gives satisfactory results either, plus, I am not fond of running a whole wordpress engine on my website.
I build my light-weight websites from scratch (in gedit, Notepad for Linux), so I am not tied to any particular system or software and have full control over the layout.
Do you have any suggestions for achieving a satisfactory solution? Will I have to learn ASP.NET and IIS?
Many thanks.
WordPress is a good solution for your system. It's easy to install and use.
Requirements from WordPress Codex:
WordPress server requirements for Version 3.2:
o PHP version 5.2.4 or greater
o MySQL version 5.0.15 or greater
o (Optional)(Required for MultiSite) Apache mod_rewrite module (for clean URIs known as Permalinks)
It is also required that you install it on Apache. So, no need to learn ASP.NET and IIS.
If you want to have a blog, just pust the wordpress files in a folder called blog and install it there. You will then be able to access the website from yourdomain.com/blog/
Perhaps, I think integrating WP will be the best solution.. Integrating WordPress.
And for the IIS alternative, ChiliASP can be an alternative for IIS on Linux, but costs $$$ and I heard it wasn't working well. Alternative to that, learn PHP/MySQL. You'll never regret learning it, and you'll never go back to IIS/ASP. Linux/GNU opens doors like you wont beleive.

Using wordpress as external content management system

We are planning to create an asp.net website (probably mvc), that needs a cms for news items.
Our content managers and others who require to publish news have asked if they can use wordpress for content management.
Our users have different roles, and news items should be visible to certain roles, or even specific users if possible.
The reason they want wordpress is the manager's user friendliness, so if some other alternative with the same kind of user experience would be ok.
Could anyone please point me in some direction?
NOTE: I'm still doing research at the moment, so I've got nothing holding me back at this point.
There is an API plugin that has been developed to spit out information in JSON, but I have not actually implemented a site with it:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/json-api/
Perhaps you could have the authors work on a wordpress install and create your app to draw content via that plugin?
I too was facing the same issue, little different. We want to have WP as CMS so that our site can take the benefit of SEO which is very easy with WP. SO we installed WP under a folder in the Main ASP.net based website. Initially there were issues, I was unable to run it. Finally managed to run it. Solution is posted here - http://www.wwwlabz.com/how-to-run-a-php-based-website-from-a-subfolder-in-asp-net-website. Hope it will help someone. Actual site where we implemented this is http://www.periproperties.com/content/.
Now I want to have specific section of WP to be accessible on my site. SO I am exploring different options and will post, if found something
Thanks.
DotNetNuke is the most popular ASP.NET based CMS (source). I am implementing my first project in it and so far I am very happy with it.
Note the free edition will not work for you since you need customizable security roles and free has a limited set of predetermined roles. You'll need the pro edition.
I don't know how similar it is to WordPress. Overall, WordPress is much more popular but of course there are platform issues with WordPress since it is Apache based and you want to create an ASP.NET website.

Which CMS should I use when I hand a website over to my non-techie friend?

I'm designing a simple website for a friend - four static pages to advertise a yoga retreat she is running. I have a couple of requirements:
My time is short; I want to quickly build a theme template.
She has no technical skills; she wants to log in to the backend and update page content.
Working for myself, a static site builder such as nanoc or jekyll would be ideal: I can build a template.html with room for some content, then update content files, rebuild the site and redeploy. As a bonus, the whole site could be hosted free on GitHub pages. This satisfies requirement (1) but not requirement (2).
I've also considered Wordpress, because I've got plenty of experience running WP sites and developing custom themes. This satisfies requirement (2) but not (1). There is simply too much development overhead building a WP theme - it is not straightforward to modify the markup structure of all those template files, and there are plenty of snags involving ugly page titles or "Comments are disabled" strings which need to be removed.
It shouldn't be this difficult. I want a site engine which has a simple template.html file for easy re-theming, and an accessible backend for content changes. Bonus points if free hosting is available somewhere.
Perch - http://www.grabaperch.com - is made for this sort of thing, though it's not free (£).
Could you hack a site together using tumblr pages?
What about Google Sites? Dead simple.
If you're open to .NET i think you should look at n2cms.
WordPress using a premium theme bought in any of the many sites offering quite nice themes for a reasonable price (60 USD). Then, you just change the logo and ready to go.
Since I'm not a web designer myself, this is what I´ve done myself for my sites and I´m quite happy with the results

what the best solution for user driven content on my website

i have created a website for a non profit organization. People on the site want to post stuff . i want to figure out the best way to allow them to do this.
Can i host a wordpress site and somehow embed it into my website
Do i need to install some whole CMS solution?
Other solutions for supporting user driven posts.
to clarify, the functionality of wordpress is all i need (people posting content and pictures).
It's easy to integrate Wordpress into a static html site.
Integrating WordPress with Your Website « WordPress Codex. (You do need mysql, but almost every hosting company out there offers it.)
If you want to convert an existing html site to Wordpress, look at Theme Development « WordPress Codex. Developing Wordpress themes is no more complex than other CMS's, and here are lots of tutorials out there. You divide up your html into header.php, index.php, page.php, footer.php, etc., and css into style.css. If you do a standard Wordpress theme, then plugins will work fine.
Go ahead and do a full install of Wordpress; there's no option for a minimum install. WP is small, anyway.
If you need a finer degree of working with editors, subscribers and contributors than Wordpress offers out of the box, look at different plugins that offer role managing capability, giving administrators the power to give different levels of permissions to users to write, edit and publish. WordPress › Search for roles « WordPress Plugins
You can pull other content into Wordpress via RSS, too, and either have that content appear as an RSS feed, or have it integrated into published posts. FeedWordPress | simple and flexible Atom/RSS syndication for WordPress
You can get a free account at wordpress.com and try out a limited version of Wordpress, limited in that it is hosted by wordpress.com and you have a small number of plugins and css modifications you can make. But once you selfhost Wordpress, then you can do much more with it in terms of plugins and adapting the css to an existing site.
You could use a Wiki.
There are a few popular free Wiki packages out there these days. By far the most popular would be the framework behind Wikipedia - MediaWiki. Wikis' are a proven way to let users create the content, with systems in place to prevent vandalism/spam. MediaWiki also has a whole bunch of great plug-ins for anything you would need.
Another Wiki option is to use the Wordpress-Wiki plug-in for Wordpress. It lets you use Wordpress, but with some features of a Wiki. Not as feature rich as MediaWiki, but a good option if you really like Wordpress.
You do not need to install a whole cms solution, though wordpress can host an entire site, not just blogs.
You could hack it by using a hosted weordpress and displaying it in an iframe (this one might get some flames - but it works and it's easy)
You could also install wordpress on your server. By the sounds of it this is not your expertise, and while setting up wordpress is getting easier every release, for smaller sites I would much rather recommend pivotx
wordpress has a lot of overhead and requires a mysql database. The templated, while there are more available than in pivotx are harder to create. So I'm suggesting the other solution because it does the bulk of what wordpress does, and though it has far far far fewer plugins, it is a lot easier to theme, as it uses smarty.
This problem/scenario is pretty common. And the most common solution is to install a CMS. Our compagny installs Drupal to let end user manage their website easily. They can edit menus, and change content as easily as you write a document in word processor software.
But there is a lot of CMS out there...
Have you tried blogEngine.net?
I have two sites http://www.dotnetscraps.com and http://www.abhyast.com/ that are hosted using blogEngine.net. It is free and has multi user support, and the best part for me is that it supports both XML and SQL hosting. Anything that you post automatically ends up in the App_Data folder which is what you need to backup.
http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/
There are a plenty of themes to choose from, and if you wish you can customize your own theme without much effort.

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