Troubleshooting WordPress

WordPress.org has been a god send for me, allowing me to publish websites and content.  There have been some bumps in the road that I have learned to check for and swerve around.  I have spent many an hour freaking out that I crashed my wordpress.org sites, but I just had a conflicting plugin or some sort of little problem, or a slow internet connection, or possible a short lived problem with my hosting.

WordPress.org is pretty user friendly–but at the same time its not.  Its easy to get stuck.  You need to remember to google your problem, someone else out there has had the same problem, and maybe even created a plugin for it. And we are just talking about the technical issues, not the hard part of creating content that people will read and spend time on, and take time out of their day.

The PROS of wordpress:

• it’s open-source,
• it’s free,
• many developers work on it,
• there are a lot of free themes/templates,
• the forums are pretty robust (but can leave you with a feeling that a lot of other people have this same problem and no one knows the answer),
• there is usually a plugin for your problem,
• the editor feature allows you to not become overwhelmed with all the code involved in a theme, you can edit one file at a time,
• you can make a shitty website in 5 minutes,
• you can get your ideas out, you can express yourself, you can learn new things,
• if you have a problem you can google it,
• there are lots of people working on wordpress who know more than you,
• you can learn new things,
• once it is set up people can blog away and not have a stupid .blogspot or .wordpress in their url, they don’t need to know code to make new content,
• it looks like a real website, etc, etc….the possiblities of wordpress are almost endless.

The CONS of wordpress:

• Let’s see cons of wordpress, I can think of some.
• Most people don’t follow through because after installation they get stuck or their blog gets hacked.
• I wasn’t using Akismet and 3 of my early blogs got hacked, mainly just the .htaccess file. but I didn’t know that at the time, then google called them malicious sites.  So deleted it and started over.  Which is okay, that’s how I got better and learned how to properly set up a wordpress site.  So someone can use it.  I probably have 20 or so plugins that I install right away.
• The media library uploader is finicky. One one site I setup, this certain theme doesn’t work with the uploader. Its because of permission issues? or most likely JQuery stuff. Java scripts colliding.