How to use your blog
The Basics of your Blogging Software
Blogging is quite simple if you want to use it straight off the shelf. There are some great tutorials on the wordpress site to have an in depth look at the basics however we will cover them below as a summary.
http://codex.wordpress.org/First_Steps_With_WordPress
We will go through and look at the different options you can use in your admin panel which is where you do all the work. Administration panels
(located at http://your-wordpress-url/wp-admin/)
are where you control the behind-the-scenes operations of your site. Common to all of the panels is a heading which shows the name of your blog, a link to your blog’s main page, a link to Sign Out, and a link to your profile (My Profile}.
We go into much more detail in the workshops.
First Steps - The Dashboard
When you first log into your WordPress site you will see this menu at the top of the screen.
The Dashboard tells you about recent activity both at your site and in the WordPress community at large.
Latest Activity
The Latest Activity box presents a concise summary and convenient links regarding current events at your blog. Displayed are:
- Incoming Links
- Links to sites referring to your blog
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- Comments
- Comments in moderations and links to most recent comments* Comments in moderation - How many comments have been held for Comment Moderation, and a link to moderate those comments.
(see also the Administration > Options > Discussion).
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- * Recent comments - Five recent comments with a link to each comment on their respective post pages, and a link to edit each comment.
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Posts- The titles of the five most recent posts, and links to edit them.
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- Scheduled Entries
- The titles of all future dated posts, when those posts will go live, and links to edit them.
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- Blog Stats
- Some statistics on your blog: the number of posts, the number of comments, and the number of categories.
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Write Post
You will be presented with two options here. To either write a post which goes in the content section of your blog or
Pages
Pages are like posts but live outside of the normal blog chronology. This means they will not be displayed with the rest of your posts; they can only be displayed individually. What you are reading now is a page and is usually static.
Manage
After you have written a page or a post you can go here to either view, edit or delete. You can also create new pages in this section. You can edit your categories and create new ones.
Categories are the directories you put your posts in. When you create a post you can assign to a category. For example: If you were creating a number of posts on Internet Marketing you can create a category for Internet Marketing so your visitors can just look in this category for all your information on this topic.
You can look at the files but we rarely use this and import from another blog if you have one. You can export an xml file of all your posts and comments.
Comments
This section allows you to administer any comments posted to your site. It will depend on the setup you choose as to whether you have to approve them or not. Once your blog starts getting a lot of comments this may be very timne consuming so we have a plugin to administer a lot of this for you.
Blogroll - Putting the Inter in the Internet
So now you have a beautifully designed, content rich site on the web. Your only problem is that your site is a dead end; it never references all those other weblogs, humor sites, search engines, sports teams, or chicken cacciatore recipies, that you love so much, not to mention your gramma’s “Punk Rock for the Octogenarian in us all” site. You go to these sites all the time, and they need to be presented to your reading public so all can enjoy.
You’re in luck. WordPress has a well developed system for managing and displaying all those links.
All link management, including creation, editing, organizing, and importing, is handled through this administration panel.
Links in WordPress don’t have to just be simple little links pointing to some other website. WordPress links can be organized by category, have internal references about your relationship to their destinations, be automatically associated with images, and can even be rated on a scale from zero to nine.
Some of these features may sound complicated, but all are easily managed in the following SubPanels. And, for the faint of heart, most of them are optional. You can change the name in Categories menu to something more relevant like Links or products.
Presentation - Change the Look of your Blog
From the Presentation Administration Panel you can control how the content of your weblog is displayed. WordPress allows you to easily style your site with Themes.
Themes
From the Themes SubPanel you can choose which of the Themes you have already downloaded will be used for your site. See Using Themes for information on downloading and activating Themes.
Widgets
From the Widgets SubPanel you can add, delete, and configure, Widgets for your sidebar (or sidebars). The Widgets SubPanel details the information on managing your Widgets.
Theme Editor
The Theme Editor SubPanel is used to edit the source code of the various files associated with your Themes. It behaves precisely like the Manage Files SubPanel with the addition of:
- Select theme to edit
- Use this dropdown to select the theme whose source code you wish to edit.
- Select
- After clicking this button, the files associated with the theme you selected from the dropdown will be listed to the right of the large text editing box. You can then select a file from that list for editing.
As with editing files from the Manage Files SubPanel, you should probably only use this built-in editor if you don’t have any other option.
For more information about the source code used for Themes, see Theme Development, Templates and the page on Template Tags.
Header Image and Color
The Header Image and Color Options allows you to manage the look and feels of a Theme’s header. This option will only be present if certain Themes are active. The Header Image and Color SubPanel describes the details of this feature.
Plugins - Add Functionality to your Blog
Plugins allow you to add new features to your WordPress blog that don’t come standard with the default installation. There are a rich variety of Available Plugins for WordPress, and with the following SubPanels, plugin installation and management is a snap.
Plugins
The Plugins SubPanel allows you to view the plugins you’ve downloaded and choose which plugins you want activated on your site. For information on downloading and installing plugins, see Managing Plugins.
Plugin Editor
Using the Plugin Editor SubPanel, you can modify the source code of all your plugins. This SubPanel behaves precisely like the Manage Files SubPanel. As with editing files from the Manage Files SubPanel, you should probably only use this built-in editor if you don’t have any other option.
Users - Your Blogging Family
Every blog probably has at least two users: admin, the account initially set up by WordPress, and the user account you, as the author/owner of the blog, use to write posts. But maybe you want more; perhaps you want several authors for your blog. If you want a person to be able to post to your blog, that person must have access to a user account; typically, every person will have her or his own user account.
At the Users Administration Panel, you can set up all of the user accounts you need. An important administrative feature here is the Roles feature. Depending on their Role, different users have different Capabilities. Briefly, a user can be assigned the following Roles: Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor, or Subscriber.
You can also specify your and others’ personal information such as name, e-mail, etc. from the User Administration Panel.
Authors & Users
You can create new users and manage the accounts of all your site’s users at the Authors and Users SubPanel.
Your Profile
The Your Profile SubPanel is the default SubPanel for the User Administration Panel. Here you can specify your name and how it will be displayed on your site, your e-mail address (for administrative purposes) and other personal information.
Options - Configuration Settings
You might think, “All these other things I’ve been doing so far at the Administration Panels have involved ‘Options’. Are these ‘Options’ any different?” The answer would be, “Yes.” All the settings you’ve encountered in the other Administration Panels have dealt with very specific parts of your site, or have been of limited scope (only applying to one Category, for example). In the Options Administration Panel are all of the settings that define your weblog as a whole: settings which determine how your site behaves, how you interact with your site, and how the rest of the world interacts with your site.
The following SubPanels control these settings.
General
The General Options SubPanel is the default SubPanel in the Options Administration Panel and controls some of the most basic configuration settings for your site: your site’s title and location, who may register an account at your blog, and how dates and times are calculated and displayed.
Writing
Using the Writing Options SubPanel, you can control the interface with which you write new posts. These settings control both WordPress’ included Write Post SubPanel and the optional Writing by e-mail feature.
Reading
The options in the Reading Options SubPanel are few in number, but still important. You can decide if you want posts, or a “static” Page, displayed as your blog’s front (main) page. You can also adjust how many posts are displayed on that main page. In addition, you can adjust syndication feed features to determine how the information from your site is sent to a reader’s web browser or other applications.
Discussion
The Discussion Options SubPanel allows you to set options concerning incoming and outgoing comments, pingbacks and trackbacks. You can also control from this SubPanel the circumstances under which your blog sends you e-mail notifying you about the goings on at your site.
Privacy
The Privacy Options SubPanel control your blog visibility to search engines such as Google and Technorati. You can decide if you would like your blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers. If you don’t want your blog available to the search engines you can block search engines, but allow normal visitors to see your site.
Permalinks
For a nice introduction to Permalinks, check out the Pretty Permalinks section of Introduction to Blogging. But briefly, and to quote the Permalinks Options SubPanel itself:
By default WordPress uses web URIs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them, however WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URI structure for your permalinks and archives. This can improve the aesthetics, usability, and longevity of your links.
This SubPanel controls how that custom URI structure is defined. For a more in depth description of the way this structure is specified, see the Using Permalinks page.
Miscellaneous
WordPress has so many features, that some of them defy categorization. Features like file uploads, link tracking and support for custom “hacks” can be controlled from the Miscellaneous Options SubPanel.
Sign Out
The Sign Out link is found at the top right corner in the Administration Panels. It is simply a link that will log you out from your WordPress blog.
When you sign-in (login) to your blog, WordPress stores a so called “cookie” in your web browser. This cookie allows WordPress to remember who you are; if you leave your blog’s site for a while but come back to it later, WordPress will see the cookie and not require you to login again.
However, the cookie cannot tell WordPress who is using the WordPress; in other words, WordPress has no way of looking back at you through your monitor to determine if you are really you. If you have a WordPress cookie set in your web browser, anyone using your computer can access the Administration Panels of your blog. If you don’t want this to happen (perhaps you are using a public computer or a computer which other people use), you can click this Sign Out link, and WordPress will delete the cookie from your web browser.
You can, of course, log back in at some later time.
