Creating and Editing Databases with WordPress and phpMyAdmin

  • Working on my first website, funnyfoolish.com. We have hosting through godaddy. So far I’ve added features strictly through plug-ins via install and activate buttons, but now I want to get more in depth.

    According to this and this page, I should have an option to create a new database between MySQL connection collation and Show MySQL runtime information. However that option simply does not exist on my phpMyAdmin home page nor on the databases menu. I am using the login and password information given by godaddy, so I assume I should have those permissions. How can I go about gaining permissions to create the database?

    Those articles and a few others also mention editing the files from your computer and uploading them as another way to edit. If that is the case, then I need to make sure that I have the right files and how to edit them. On my desktop I have a wordpress-4.2.2 zipped folder. Opening it shows a wordpress folder with wp-admin, wp-content and wp-includes folders, plus a bunch of other files with indexes and readmes etc.

    If I open any of these files, since I have dreamweaver installed and it is my default, it opens up in there automatically and as a read only. I can make writable but I decided not to do so yet. I believe I can just make notepad the default program correct? However those files are only the initial files from downloading wordpress and don’t contain the changes I have made thus far. Am I correct in saying that exporting my database will give me similar files as mentioned earlier, but with my updated content, and then I would be able to edit those files and import them?

    Thank you for your assistance.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • A lot (most) hosts don’t allow you to create a new database through phpMyAdmin, so you need to do that through your hosting control panel. Godaddy will be able to help you with that if you get stuck.

    As far as editing the files, set up a new site in Dreamweavers, then set up the remote server using your sites FTP access. That way you can work on the sites locally and then upload them very easily. I have it set up here so that saving the file automatically uploads it (it’s a setting on the server connection), and that makes life a lot easier.

    Exporting the database won’t give you “files” in the way that you’re thinking of. You’ll get one big SQL file that contains all of the sites data. There’s no HTML files anywhere for any of the posts or pages. These are all generated dynamically from the data in the database and the template files from your theme.

    @ksbaker1989 – In addition to what catacaustic has mentioned:

    It sounds as though you may not be completely familiar with how a WordPress powered website ‘works’. ??

    1. There is no need to do anything with any other databases; your site’s database is set up and running just fine because you site us up and running. During ‘normal operations’ there is no need to go into the database via phpMyAdmin. If and when you do, the most common reason is to reset the administrator’s password.

    2. There is no need for you to have any WordPress files on your own computer; everything is done via the WordPress Dashboard on your site. Again, in ‘normal ops’ one does not edit any file anywhere. Period. ?? That said, you can make a copy of your live site and download and run it from your own computer, but that is solely for testing plugins, themes, etc. There is NO synchronization between the local site and the live site. See the codex or Google for “Installing WordPress locally”.

    To summarize, for the majority of cases, everything is done via the Dashboard. If you do want to “get more in depth”, you can make edits to the various WP files via the File editor in the Dashboard, but beware, that in doing so, any changes made there can have ‘disastrous’ results if you don’t know what you are doing in addition to potentially having the changes wiped out during the next WP update. Not for the ‘faint-hearted’ ??

    Cheers!
    Lyle

    Thread Starter ksbaker1989

    (@ksbaker1989)

    It sounds as though you may not be completely familiar with how a WordPress powered website ‘works’. ??

    Yes that is exactly true. As I get more familiar I can see I have more control than I initially thought through the dashboard, but I have a few follow up questions.

    Let’s say I want custom buttons in wordpress using This plugin. The installation tab, like for most plugins, says “upload plugin-name.php to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory.” But I don’t have to worry about that because hitting the install and activate buttons under add new widget does those things for me, as I understand it. And it seems to me that that plugin is supposed to make doing the things taught on this page easier to do, as I would not necessarily have to know quite as much code going through the plugin as I would have to using TinyMCE directly.

    This more or less applies to all plugins, right? Am I on the right track or am I completely off base? I can see that part of my problem is not knowing the right questions to ask since I don’t have quite the foundation I need to “know what it is I don’t know.”

    Regards,
    ksbaker1989

    You’re on the right track! ??

    However, the two items you linked to happen to be fairly unique.

    The first, for some reason, does not display the standard method of adding a ‘regular’ plugin, that is, a plugin from the WP plugin repository or downloaded from another source. That standard method is via the Plugins > Add New in the Dashboard. One generally only resorts to the manual method, described in that plugin’s installation instructions, if the other method fails for some reason.

    The second item is not a ‘regular’ plugin, but rather an addition to the core text editor, which is named TinyMCE. If you’ll note the first line of the second paragraph …

    This article assumes that you are already familiar with the basics of Writing a Plugin and the Plugin API of hooks and filters.

    … probably not ‘new to WordPress’ territory ??

    Keep on track by adding your site functionality via the Dashboard’s Plugins > Add New and Appearance > Themes > Add New and you will be able to build pretty much whatever you want/need ??

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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