 So as he tries to set me up, I'm doing introduction to WordPress and I hope you'll enjoy this session. So the objectives for this session is introduction to WordPress, what is WordPress, then you're going to look at hosting, then you're going to try and install WordPress, then you're going to look at how does the WordPress backup look like. So I want us to begin with what is WordPress? It's a content management system, same as... Anybody else? Anybody else who would like to tell us what is WordPress? Good. Anybody else? So like the two have said, WordPress is a content management system. It is free. It is a tool you can use to develop your website and it is an open source software. So when I try to say it's an open source software, when I say WordPress is free, I mean it is free in terms of freedom. That means you can install, you can do almost anything you want to do with it. You can do anything, like it is free in terms of freedom of use but not completely, completely free because if you want somebody to access your website, you'll have to pay for hosting and you might have to buy a few plugins. So it is free but it's free in terms of freedom of use but you might incur some costs here and there, maybe paying the designer or something else. When I say it's an open source software, it is a software that is being developed by a number of people, not two, more than a thousand, ten thousand, a number of people who contribute to the development of WordPress. That is when I say it's an open source software, that is what we mean by an open source software. WordPress is an open source community project where tens of thousands of people have made contribution to make it a great software today, as it is today. So open source software comes with freedom for you to use, modify, build and redistribute the software in any way you like, however. So basically an open source software is a software that you can, many people can contribute, you don't have to be employed by WordPress to contribute to WordPress. So that is what I mean by an open source software. When we say WordPress is a content management system, content management system is whereby, for example, you want to upload images, you want to post, maybe a blog, maybe you want to post, copy paste something from Microsoft Word to directly to your website. That is what it means by content management system, whereby you can manage all your images, all your posts and any other kind of content videos in one place. So WordPress is an open source software, it is free and it is a content management system. We have two versions of WordPress, there is the WordPress.com and there is the WordPress.org. So today in this session I'm going to focus more on WordPress.org, the free version of WordPress. The WordPress.com is where you can have a website like WordCamp2018.WordPress.com. You can also pay for advanced feature where you can have something like WordCamp.com but you have to pay and it's quite limited. So the main difference between the two is that the.com version you will start from, they will have the plugins already for you, the themes are already there installed for you and like almost everything has been done for you. So what you need to do is just create an account and you can get started using it. The version that you're going to look today more is the.org version that you need to have your hosting provider, you need to have to download the WordPress, you need to install your own themes, you need to install your own plugins and all those kind of things. That is the WordPress version that I'm going to focus more on this session. But there are two versions, the WordPress.com and the WordPress.org. So what are some of the places where you can use WordPress for? We have blogging, you can use WordPress for blogging. You can see some of the people who use WordPress. We have Safari.com use it for their blog. We have NationMedia who use WordPress for their news website. We have general websites like the KCB website is on WordPress. We have schools website like J-Quart, E-Commerce, an example is Zuku. We have advertising websites like Magnet, those people who do billboards. We have hospital websites like Nairobi hospital and many more. You can have more than that. So next you're going to look at the requirements. You need two things. You need a domain name and you need a hosting company. So a domain name is something like, let's use WordComp 2018. WordComp 2018 is the domain name and you can choose an extension like .co.ke. So for you to have a website that is being accessed by many people you have to have a domain name and you have to have a hosting provider. So the domain name is for example WordComp 2018 and a hosting service is where your files are stored. When you install beams, plugins, images and all the contents, they are stored in the hosting company. So when I say I'm talking about a hosting company, this is what I mean. They usually have servers, network and so many other things. So a hosting company is where your website is located. So let's look at the types of hosting. We have the shared server that you're going to focus so much today but we have other servers like the dedicated server. The dedicated server is where you have all the resources, you manage all the resources network, physical server and all that. It's more complicated to deal with the dedicated server. A virtual private server is where you have a virtualized operating system where an operating system has more than a machine. One machine has more than one operating system. You can have 10, 20 depending on the capacity of the host. So most people might use the virtual private server or the shared server. A cloud hosting is where you go to people like Google, Compute Engine, people like Heroku, people like Amazon Web Services, they usually offer cloud hosting. Colocation is where you take your physical server to Google and you tell them to keep it there for you. I don't think it's very popular but maybe at some point you might need to do that. But the most common service is crowd hosting, virtual and shared. Unless you are running a very big website, that's why you might need a dedicated server. So today we are going to focus on the shared server. And so I'm going to look at the most critical things you're supposed to look at when you are looking for a company that will host your website. I'm going to focus on two, there's disk space and bandwidth. The rest you might have a negotiation with them but bandwidth and disk space is not something that you can negotiate. Any service provided that is giving you less than 700 mbs, it's not something you can talk about because you need quite some space for your website. I don't know if you have ever gone to a website and found this. At RA509 you have reached your bandwidth limit. And you call your hosting provider and they tell you you have to pay this amount or you have to wait until the end of the month. And that is the second day of the month. So it's very critical when you are looking for a hosting service to ensure that you have very good bandwidth and you have very good disk space. Other important things are security, which most of them have tried to ensure that their security is good. But something like resource limits, those are very common errors that you get from your hosting providers. So WordPress has minimum requirements that you have to have when you are hosting your website. You have to have PHP version 7.2. So I know if you're not very technical, you might get very confused here. But PHP is a programming language that- In coming session, like we have like 100 visitors coming at the same time. So okay, so when I go back to here, to most three about the number of visitors is dealt by the kind of- It's more solved by this part. If you have very many visitors, that means about 100,000 plus. You might not use shared server. If you are using less than that, a shared server will work for you. So if it's more than 100,000, so it's more critical. If you have so many people, this is the part you're very supposed to be concerned about. You cannot go for a shared server and you are running a website like NationMedia. It's going to give you a problem. So that time you might consider going for virtual private server, a dedicated server or depending on the number of people who are coming to your website. So I was explaining the WordPress requirements for a hosting provider that- I'm talking more of a shared server. But they're the same thing that you might need for virtual private and dedicated. So you need PHP version 7.2 or greater. PHP is the programming language that has been used to develop WordPress. So you need version 7.2. If in case you find yourself with a lower version of PHP, some plugins or themes might not work very well. You need MySQL version 5.6 or greater or MariaDB. So here you might prefer using MariaDB. My SQL has been taken by Oracle. Nowadays, it's not very free, it's not an open source. So it's preferred to use MariaDB. You might have better engine for such and all those things. So for this one I would recommend MariaDB. MariaDB is a database. WordPress needs a database for you to run WordPress. You need a database, you need PHP, you need HTTPS support. That is especially if you're using e-commerce. I know Jeremy will be talking about more e-commerce and its requirements. And also somebody else, Anthony, is talking about security. So he will deal much with that, the HTTPS, it's a protocol. So if you're not using HTTPS, you're using HTTP. WordPress will still work without that, but they recommend that you have HTTPS. So the next thing you need are Apache or Engine X. Now, if in case you want to develop WordPress and you don't want, you just want to develop it on your computer, then you'll deploy it in the server later. Most of the times you'll find yourself familiar with these things, Apache or Engine X. Apache is more common on shared, shared servers. Rarely will you find a shared server with Engine X. So if you're trying to look for hosting provider and you find they don't have Engine X, there's no problem using Apache. But if you're using Vatio, you have so many people visiting your website, you would go for Engine X because it has more capability dealing with simultaneous processes that come to your website. It's better to deal with Engine X. That is only when you're not using shared server. If you're using shared server, just go for Apache. So the recommended WordPress hosting, because today, one of the sponsors today is Bluehosts. Bluehost is a web hosting company. So one of the recommended hosting companies I would recommend is Bluehost. And you can go to that link and you see more that you can use for hosting. This is a WordPress website where you can go and see some of the recommended website hosting that they have recommended for you. So for you to, now since I've dealt with some few theory, theoretic things that you need to know about WordPress. And you know the introduction to WordPress and a few requirements that you need. I want us to try and install a WordPress website. I'm just going to run through the processes. Then we can try and see if we can install a WordPress website. It takes about five minutes to install a WordPress website. So you need, so by this time, by the time you want to install WordPress, you already have a hosting company. You already have a domain name, and that is the place to start. So if you want to download WordPress, you go to wordpress.org. WordPress downloads, you'll be able to download WordPress. If you're using shared server, just download the first version. Don't download the TAR.GZ, that is more common on Linux. If you're using shared server, just download the first version. Then after downloading the first version, you need to log in to a C-Panel. A C-Panel is the backend that a web hosting company gives you. And this is how it looks like. So you log into the C-Panel. The C-Panel looks like, I don't know if you can see very well, but that's how it looks like. So you go to the file manager and you'll go and see a folder called public HTML. And make sure you upload there inside that folder. Then you need to create a database and create a user. I think it's better if you can try this practically and see. So we are trying to install WordPress right here. So for this purpose, I've created a subdomain. A subdomain is a subdomain. So I don't know how to explain a subdomain. Anybody who can help me to do that? What is a subdomain? Somebody who want to help me do that, yes? Good, now that is exactly it. Now I'm using WordCamp, WC, Nairobi.lanhack.com. So that's where I want to install WordPress. And here is my C-Panel. I want to go to File Manager. And I have created a folder called WC Nairobi. And I already installed WordPress, so I want to delete this. The thing you need to do is to come to your domain and start installing WordPress. So when you go to your domain, it will give you that that link to set up your mini. It will ask you for the database name, the database password, host, and that. Since you have created a database, that is not a problem. So the database name was... So the database host, you can leave it as localhost. Unless you're using a database from another provider or another domain, that's when you can change that to the IP address of that provider. But for now, you're going to leave it as localhost. Table prefix, I'm going to leave it as that. And everything seems okay. And I'll call my site WC 2018. And I'll have a username 2018 and password. So with a few steps, you have already installed our first WordPress. And now we are able to log into the backend of WordPress. So that is the site I was creating. And that's how it looks like. At this point, it has the default theme. It has default plugins. It has a default text editor. And that is how simple it is to install WordPress. And here's the backend of the WordPress. You need to log in. So this is how WordPress backend looks like by default.