Hi Mark - I guess we need to coordinate our presentation on September 21st. I started a wiki page that we can maybe use for an outline. I just added a couple things - more to come. I'm fine with presenting WP as a content management tool and discussing some of the recent improvements and plugins that are available. Or if you want to do that, that would be fine too. One of us needs to cover the blogging functionality, for sure. And the difference between hosting your blog at wordpress.com and hosting it yourself... pros/cons... What else can you think of? Basic concepts... Commons tasks... History of WP...

sorry, forgot to provide link to the working outline: http://gslis747.pbworks.com/WordPress-Outline

I'm interested in covering the blogging functionality because that is what I just got used to in creating my first blog (for this assignment). Shamefully, perhaps, I looked up WordPress in Wikipedia. I think it is safe to say that I did not understand a great share of the info that was written on that page so I'll try to make sense of the history of WordPress...

Categories
real life pain:
jump on line and look at week 4 work which happens to work in with the fact that I have to experience and report on blogging..."build a category" on the blog page turns out to be the major stumbling block. I entered the term "new category" and saved, then went back to the homepage to see my changes in action. No changes. I hr later I am still trying to get the log to accept my category change. Tried to use the video (created by WordPress) to learn more about adding a category but my machine is not really fast and it would not show the video properly. Irritating enough, the "Right Now" column on my Dashboard (remember that's the admin page) states that I have 2 categories. Now how do I find (and let others find) that second category?

Went to the Category widget and looked for more help there but unfortunately, that seems active and set up properly...tried to be a smart aleck and set up a tag and then used the tag-to-category converter. Great idea, got a new category (now have three) but when I read the blog, only one category is showing, the original one...went to the menu, "Support" (where did that come from?", used the search phrase "add category" which told me all the stuff I already knew to add a category, naturally what they don't know they dont tell you...now I've created a "new page" and will try to put a different category on the new page...

now, when I edit a post, at the same time I click the checkbox under Categories" and the checkbox I click shows up on the right sidebar...I'm testing to see if all categories show up by checking all of the checkboxes simultaneously for this single test-post...I push update...I go to read my blog...yep, now all of the categories are present even though test-post is not in the plants category...now I've removed all of the categories, as promised by WordPress, all of the posts are still extant and when I look them up in Dashboard they are still assigned to categories that no longer exist - that has a really mechanical feel, if it is not deleted, it is not removed even though at another level in the program it does not even exist

categories link works, in that clicking it takes the reader to a separate page with only the post assigned to that category so the question remains, how to un-assign posts to the universal category on the homepage...accessing the reading settings divides the blog into two parts, the face of the blog and all of the rest of it...but still, if I want a category to appear, then I have to create a post to fill the blog and then that post will appear on the front page which is not what I want to happen...not being able to create a category that does not require a post and that will not appear on the 'frontpage', I have decided to create two additional pages, entitled "Find Me Online" and "Recent Comments." These pages should appear in the menu line in the black area below the header picture and should be accessible only upon clicking, not automatically...this will be a shortcut to success

Mark Bruak, Mark Bruak, Mark Bruak (signed my name thrice...)

Mark,

Interesting to read all your comments. I really like them. Leave them here. Don't delete them. They have shown your train of thoughts. I know you are in pain, but it leads to your success, I am sure.

Hi Mark -
I started working on my powerpoint presentation and posted a work in progress on our WordPress Outline page - http://gslis747.pbworks.com/WordPress-Outline How are you doing with your section?

Hi Mark - I added your and my powerpoints to the group presentation page.