Customising Wordpress - Day 1

I'm finally getting a blog going with WordPress. Since I'm going to attempt to create a completely customised look & feel, I thought I'd keep some notes, in case anyone wants to do the same.

I downloaded the latest WordPress (2.01) -- again, it was dead-easy to install. Of course, my web host MediaTemple makes adding a MySQL database easy as well. After that, you just edit a file, upload it, and follow the two-step process in your browser.

Next, I can't stand the WordPress admin pages. I highly recommend re-skinning it with the WP Tiger theme. Again, easy to set up. Download. Unzip. Upload. And then activate the plug-in from the admin pages. WP Tiger is much slicker, and keeps the main commands on the left-hand side, which I find much more convenient.

The third step was a little tricky. I had to add a blank '.htaccess' file to my Wordpress folder, and then set the permissions so that WordPress could edit it. I didn't get it right at first, but once I did -- WordPress automatically sets up the file structure for the site. So instead of "blah.com/index.php?p=349" i can have links like "blah.com/category/tag/" ... nice and clean.

So, now I'm ready to start reading UrbanGiraffe's tutorial on how to strip down my template and create a new one.

To see the work in progress, visit my test blog.

More to come.