Installation of Blogless is easy and done in a few steps.
Uploading to your webserver
Upload the content of the Blogless zip file to the root of your PHP enabled webspace. That's it.
Using Blogless
Go to your webbrowser and call http://your.domain.xx/admin/
- First a basic check is run, if all requirements are met
- After that you will have to set an initial password to secure your website. If you forget it or want to change it later, just delete password.php. It will be generated from skretch next time when using Blogless.
- Then you need to do some basic settings, read the following section for more information
Basic Settings
Then you are asked to make some basic settings. The paths für your directory structure and URL are guessed automatically and you should give your site at least a name. Some other settings or changes to them can be done later.
Attention: Blogless is delivered with a .htaccess file in the main directory, so that you do not need to address your webpages in the subdirectory "articles/", but can call them from the root directly (except for the admin subdir with the application files). But if you change the name of your "articles/" directory, you must adapt the .htaccess file accordingly!!!
Articles
Now you are ready to write and manage your articles:
- If not yet done Login with your initially set username and password
- First press Settings to set some article Defaults and decide if you would like to generate an RSS feed, a sitemap.xml (good for Google) and if you would like to show a list of articles at the bottom of your sites homepage
- Press New Article to write a new article
- Press 🔧 (Edit) to edit an article or change this website's homepage index.html
- Press 🔎 (View) to read an article or your website's homepage
- Press ✖ (Delete) to delete an article
- Logout
Default Settings
It is best to first go to the settings page and provide some defaults for your articles, like the default author for new articles, his web profile and some other settings. You can always make individual settings for each article later, for example for guest articles. If the twitter id is set, your articles will appear as a nice "Twitter Cards" (of type summary), if referenced in a tweet.
Also check, if the automatically guessed base url is right (it should be - you could change it to the real site's url, if you are generating your articles offline and load them up).
Options
Now decide, if you want to have certain functionalities switched on:
- Sitemap - this gives Google and other web crawlers the chance to get an overview of your site. It is good to switch it on, if you would like to get every article you did write found by Google or other search engines.
- RSS Feed - Switch this on if you want to provide a feed for your website. Well, you would make a blog from blogless.
- Article List - At the bottom of your website's index page there will be a list of all articles written ever.
- Pingback - If you switch this on, when saving a newly written article Blogless will inform every other referenced blog, so that automatically comment links will be added for their articles. This means, that you will honor the original authors referenced by you and also, that possibly links to your article will be generated on their side.
Write a new Article
Per default the article name is the actual date in ISO format (YYYY-MM-DD). Keep it, if you like to just write one article a day or less. For me it works pretty well. In the end you are completely free to name your articles how you like. Try to better use just ASCII characters and dashes. It will work with any unicode character, but the url may look a bit crazy in this case, hard to remember.
If you edit the sites index.html file there will be no possibillity to change the filename, it's just index.html, the homepage of your site.
Beware: Before uploading images or attach files to an article, it first needs to be saved the first time.