As part of our Professional Practice part 2 module we were asked to create a live and responsive portfolio website. As I already have a portfolio site that is powered by Tumblr, I took this opportunity to move my content over to my CMS of choice, Wordpress. My main reason for this is that although things like domain redirection, posting and themes are fairly simple, the sites functionality pretty much ends there. I would have liked to add a proper content form and a twitter feed to my original portfolio but these things were either impossible, or had very bad implementation.
At first I considered using Squarespace to move my work to but after signing up and moving some of my content in I found that there is no cheap option to maintain a fully featured site. Although the themes and plug-ins are very well thought out and designed I wanted to keep it as cost effective as possible.
The next option I looked at was Wix but I found the interface for managing the content very hard to use, something which is a deal beaker for me. I did use Wix for my very first portfolio about 5 years ago but at that point I wasn't aware of anything else.
After settling on Wordpress for its flexibility and familiarity I investigated how to set it up using my existing domain registration company. This method turned out to be fairly costly (about £30 a month) so I started to investigate other methods. After doing some thinking I decided to run my own server from home and use my existing internet provider to save myself some money.
As my main computer is my laptop, which comes out of the house and isn't always on, I went for the option of using my Raspberry Pi to be the location of my server. The main advantages of doing so are reduced cost, very small size and the fact that is runs a very light-weight Linux already making server installation very easy.
Once I had my Raspberry Pi up and running an optimised version of Debian (Raspbian) the first thing I need to do was change my hosts file to include an entry for my pre registered domain.
The next step was to install Apache2, a very well documented HTTP server software package that will form the base of my portfolio site. To install this and 2 preference changes that enable https secure browsing, I entered the following commands into the Debian command line interface:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install apache2
sudo a2enmod sslNow that I had Apache2 installed on my server I needed to change the override properties in 2 files to allow Wordpress to make changes to the files that my server will utilise. These apply to the rewrite properties of both standard http browsing as well as https (SSL) files, allowing Wordpress to make the necessary changes it needs to. To do this I opened the text files in the GUI interface containing the preferences for both, using the 'sudo leafpad' command and changed the AllowOverride parameters to "All"
sudo a2ensite default-ssl
Now that the base software was running the next step was to install the software that Wordpress required to function correctly, the first being PHP. To intstall PHP and enable PHP cache to speed up loading times I entered the following commands into the command line interface:
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5 php5sudo apt-get install php5-mysql
sudo apt-get install php-apc
MySQL database software was also installed using the following command:
sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client
In order to easily set up and maintain my sites PHP I also installed myPHPadmin so I could use a GUI to change and add records.
The next step was to download, install and copy Wordpress into the right directory using the following commands:
tar -xzvf latest.tar.gz
cd wordpress
sudo cp -r * /var/www/
I then created a new user with full permissions in myPHPAdmin along with a matching database, which I then transferred the details of into my 'wp-config' file (I have omitted the actual details for obvious security reasons).
To finalise my Wordpress account I headed over to http://192.168.1.238/wp-admin/install.php where I created my account, logged in and proceeded to my dashboard.
Now that everything was set up and running nicely I went about searching for a theme to use. At first I considered using Hueman, which I used for my first Wordpress project due to my familiarity to it but eventually decided against it. This was because its a very general theme with a skew towards events and site with lots of info to display at once and want my site site to look much cleaner.
After trawling many portfolio theme round-ups I found one I really liked called Stanley. it is a purpose built portfolio theme with plenty of great features baked in like portfolio grids and contact forms. It also has a very clean-cut look which I think will complement my existing work very well.
Once I have added all the content from my previous site to the new Wordpress powered one all that remains is to change the DNS records on my existing domain to point to my new server. I will provide a short update on this towards the end of the project to show my progress.
Overall I have found this experience quite a steep learning curve as I previously struggled with file management through a command line interface. I think it has forced me to learn much more about how websites function as well as visualising folder structures and getting a better grasp on different commands and how they work. I found it especially satisfying being able to look at the actual server space that is hosting my personal portfolio.
