From gear to Reputation grinds to non-combat pet collections, Blizzard seems keen to make players feel like they’re making progress. Unlike many competitors, however, they have yet to add the most significant, non-combat progression path: player housing.
I finally gave in. After spending hours trying to simulate behavior on Blogger that was supposedly easy to implement via WordPress and months of silent but growing jealousy of several great Priest blogs, I rerolled Resto4Life as a WordPress blog. There’s a world of difference between the two and here are a few of the things I’ve learned so far:
- You can directly import your posts from Blogger to Wordpress … assuming your Webhost has OpenSSL included as part of its PHP install. Mine did not so I had to create a separate blog through the WordPress site, import my Blogger posts to that, and then export them to XML so that I could import them into the WordPress install on my custom domain. A headache but still a huge time saver over importing each post manually!
- WordPress eats some HTML code. It’s completely borked my item displays! I’ll have to spend some time and effort sorting that out.
- You have to be willing to get your hands dirty to really leverage the power of WordPress. All those shiny plugins and modules that first attracted me to using WordPress don’t install and configure themselves. More so than with Blogger, I’m having to delve into actual code.
While you may really, really, really love your Season 2 PvP armor, it doesn’t necessarily make for a very inviting web site appearance. One of the reasons it took me so long to get up and running was struggling with a new design based around the Druid’s Merciless Gladiator set. The result, while authentic, was pretty dreary. I finally gave up and applied the colors from my Blogger blog to a more modernized layout.- Categories are not tags. When you import from Blogger, it automatically converts all your tags to Categories. I think I ended up with something like 60 categories after importing which looked pretty silly. I deleted them all and restricted each post to a maximum of 3 categories out of 15 that I intend to serve as a catch all. I should probably retag all my posts (WordPress allows for both Categories and Tags), but the prospect of rereading and labelling 120+ posts is less than appealing.
I haven’t finished moving in yet and still have a few things to sort out, mostly setting up the WordPress blogroll plugin to display in my sidebar (sorry — I’m working on it), finalizing my layout, and sorting out a few remaining aesthetic glitches. Overall, I’ve been very pleased with how easy it was to make a transition. For those of you out there who have WordPress blogs of your own, do you have any sagely advice to share with me? Are there any plugins you would recommend?
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I am excited that BRK is back, though!
/cry I love you, ty for everything.
Congrats on the move, Phaelia! I think it won’t be long before you’re even happier with your decision.
I don’t know a thing about coding CSS or php, but I’ve been able to change a few things in my theme with some trial & error. I’d be happy to try to answer any questions you might have.
As for plugins, be sure you enable Akismet. It’s a great spam-catcher!
As for plugins, here are a few suggestions:
1. Get a better editor. The default is wimpy at best. A good free one is WP SuperEdit, http://www.funroe.net/projects/superedit/
2. Of course you want to track your site stats: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/
3. If you want to give your readers (and/or yourself) the ability to edit comments, http://www.raproject.com/wordpress/wp-ajax-edit-comments/
4. And if you want to display recent comments in a sidebar, http://blog.jodies.de/archiv/2004/11/13/recent-comments/
(be sure you disable the built-in widget).
Play with widgets–they really give you a lot of flexibility over your site layout.
Welcome to WP!
Thank you so much, Kestrel!! This list of plugins will no doubt be a ton of help. I look forward to checking each one out. I did install the stats plugin and one that displays recent comments (down at the bottom of the page). But the ones for comment editing and a new editor sound great!!
Thank you again! =)
I figured it would only be a matter of time before you made the switch. A very wise decision!
http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/
If you want traffic, you’ll want the Google XML auto-making-plugin thingy. It sets up all your pages to be read by most search engines.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1730
If you use firefox and want to skip the entire step of having to log in to your admin page to make posts, grab the scribefire addon. It’ll automatically publish from your browser.
Otherwise, you’re set! Feel free to ask me or any of the other Wordpriests if you hit any problems. I’m sure they wouldn’t mind helping either.
OK – I don’t know if this is intentional, but on my Mac, when viewing the front page of the site the comments for the post above are level with the title for post below, making it look like those comments belong to the wrong post…
This is why my last comment was on the wrong post.
@Matticus: Thank you for additional recommendations!! The XML sounds very helpful, especially since I’m probably going to be a lower priority for Google to spider since I no longer use Blogger. I don’t actually use Firefox (for shame, I know), but I’ll keep Scribefire in mind if I ever switch.
@Leafshine: Thank you for pointing that out. I’ve made a correction to the template so that it’s more obvious. I was first clued into the fact that something might be wrong when the wrong comments were showing up on the wrong posts!
Thanks for the work on the site- effort should always be recognized. Lots of good things to ponder and read here.