Creating a new site in WordPress really did take 5 minutes.
Okay, maybe, not quite… but since I did already have PHP via FastCGI and MySQL working on my Server 2008 IIS7 and because I already had WordPress running here. It only took about 5 minutes for my to copy the base WordPress folder, type in the 3 lines to create the database, then change 3 lines in the wp-config.php. That was it. Done.
The result? My Mom gets a nice new website at GoStainedGlass.com. Now the really amazing thing here isn’t that WordPress took only 5 minutes for me to set up for her. It’s that I literally took ALL the content that was on her previous static website and converted it over to a dynamic RSS enabled site with about 4 hours worth of work.
Pages were created for the static content, and posts were created for the actual items. Categories serve as navigation points. The tag served as a way to quickly import all her previous photos and have them linked correctly. While she still needs to go back in and provide a title and description for all the images, the important thing was that 100% of the content was moved and the new site went live in under 48 hours from when I first installed.
The only real caveat was the titles actually. I’m sure there’s probably some Plugin to do this, but it was a minor annoyance having to import photos with the actual post so they’d be attached right, oh I couldn’t figure out how to change the photos’ attachment status either to switch to a different post.
I suppose the real test will be to see whether my Mom can now manage her own website, it should be easy enough. If not now that it’s not a total pain in the ass to add content to her site I might not be so lazy about it.