Customizing
Customizing your Word press Installation
Here is a video on how to get your hosting account set up. If you want to download the videos files to watch offline here is a small app to help you watch them. Download Here
Use the download link to download the video.
Just make sure popups are enabled for this site as most of our training is in this format.
Once you have loaded WordPress it is important to go through and clean up the installation so it is a skeleton ready for you to add your own material. For customizing we only need to go to a few tabs. We will discuss the rest later. The main ones we need to edit are Manage, Comments, and Options.
Presentation, plugins etc will be dealt with in their own workshop.
Lets go through this step by step.
Dashboard
When you first login you will be taken to the dashboard. You don’t need to do anything here but have a look through as there is some interesting material. Especially look to the right to see the current status and as you get more popular it will show some nice stats.
Manage
The write tab will allow you to write pages and posts which we will go into later. To manage all your content we use the manage tab.The main thing here is to delete the hello world post. On the right of the file name you will see view, edit, delete. Just click on the delete next to hello world.
Now click on pages and if you want to keep the about click on edit and enter any information you want. We will show you how to make pages later in another tutorial.
In the Categories you will see that the default categories is called uncategorized. It is a good idea to change this with the edit to something more related to your blog. You can also add more categories as you like. These are basically where the system stores all your different posts for easy access.
For example if you were doing a blog on books you might set up some categories for fiction, non fiction etc.
Also under manage you will see a link called blogroll. If you want to change its name click on the edit and rename it to links or what ever you want. This is a feature that lets you add links to other sites. You could enter in your other websites or affiliate links. We will show later in this workshop.
Comments
In many of the installs you will find a default comment so go ahead and delete it.
Blogroll
Blogroll is where you can add links to other external webpages. When someone clicks on the link in your blog a new window is opened. This is great for affiliate links, your other webpages etc.
Again there are some defaults in here so just choose to delete or click on edit and add your own links to over ride the defaults. You could add one for your affiliate link to the blogging empires program.
Users
In this section you can add users which I guess is pretty obvious. If you wanted to give access to others to post or do different functions then you can add them here.
Options
Options is probably the place where most people get confused. There are a number of things we want to do in here.
In the general tab you can configure the name of your blog and description. Its all fairly self explanatory. With certain templates this will be displayed in the header however we can also enter nothing and create a header with the information in it so it is up to you.
The only other section in here you may want to look at id the users section.
If you want to let people register to your blog and post comments etc then tick the appropriate bnox and use the default role to assign what you want them to be able to do.
If you change anything make sure you click on the Update options button before continuing on.
Writing
In this section you can choose where your post will go by default. Obviously when you write a post you can choose something else. On a first install this will be called uncategorized. I usually leave them at the default.
Under this is a section if you want to use posting by email. To post to WordPress by e-mail you must set up a secret e-mail account with POP3 access. Any mail received at this address will be posted, so it’s a good idea to keep this address very secret. Here are three random strings you could use: ba4f9, 0c2d5, 9d1a6.
Reading
In this section you can choose the layout for your readers. This is what appears when you write posts.
- Front Page - is where you can either use the standard format or change the blog into a Content Management System like Blogging Empires. If you want it to be a standard blog where your posts are shown on the front page leave as Front Page displays your latest posts. If you want to set it up as a content management system them create a category called home and one called posts and select the ” A Static Page” and choose the home category for the front page and the posts category for all your posts. You can name them whatever. You could make a category called blog for your posts.
- Blog Pages - this tells the software how many posts you want on the page before they go into the archives. No they don’t disappear they just get filed under the category you assigned them to and you and your readers can access them anytime by clicking on the appropriate category on the front page.
- Syndication Feeds – is what people see if they request your feed. We will go into this later but my suggestion is that you leave it in the default settings. Especially make sure full text is ticked.
Discussion
Here are the best settings to have for this section. We will be adding in a plugin later to take care of any spam comments. If you want to moderate the discussion then choose the appropriate setting however it is best to let anyone post as long as they include their email.
Permalinks
This is the last section for customizing. Permalinks are the way your blog presents the url and it is important to change this not only so it looks nicer but also for the search engines. I personally just like the post name for the url. Makes it easy to navigate and just looks nice.
Well that’s it for customizing. We are now ready to goo add some themes and plugins to add more functionality.