The Dashboard

Once logged in, you’re presented with the WordPress Dashboard (see Figure 12-8) and a nice getting started message. This message is a relatively recent addition to WordPress, but it is super helpful because a lot of the links listed here walk you through exactly what you’ll need to do for the site. Let’s start in the left column by clicking the Select your tagline and timezone link.

You may recall that in earlier chapters we used “This Summer’s Most Smashing Event” as the site’s tagline. Let’s put that in here. Select your timezone and set any date and time formatting options you want. Click the Save Changes button when you’re done and head back to the Dashboard. Next, click the Turn comments on or off link.

This screen is largely about customizing blog-type settings. If you don’t plan on running a blog (or using the blog functionality for a “news” section on your website), then you can safely skip over this section. If you are going to use WordPress’ blogging abilities, then it’s worthwhile to take a couple of seconds to set up how you’d like to deal with comments.

Most of the settings on this page are pretty self-explanatory. You can be as easy going or as strict as you’d like with who can post a comment on your site. The top section, Default article settings, requires a little explanation. This section will allow WordPress to automatically “notify” websites (usually other blogs) that you’ve linked to them. Also, it will automatically create a link on the other weblog leading back to your particular post (it’s a bit like magic). This can be great for generating inbound traffic from other websites; however, it is also a mechanism that can be used to spam your website with links to other websites (just a heads up). The basic rule of online communities is that, if you’re going to have one (i.e., allowing folks to comment on your site is implicitly taking steps to build a community), then you have to participate and moderate it.

Tweak any other settings you like, and then head back to the Dashboard! Your next step is to create a few pages for your website, and then change your home page over to something other than the default.

1. Click the Pages link in the sidebar, and then click the Add New button. WordPress provides some basic editing tools to put together your page.
2. You’re not going to bother authoring anything too wonderful at this stage, so just enter “Summer Smash Home” as your page title and leave the body blank for the time being.
3. If you left comments on in the previous step, you’ll probably want to turn them off for this page (who wants to have a bunch of anonymous comments on her home page?). Click the Screen Options link in the upper-right corner and put a check in the box next to Discussion.
4. Uncheck the Allow comments and Allow trackbacks & pingbacks options. All of the other settings on the page can be left as-is, so click Publish. You should receive a confirmation that the page is published, as shown in Figure 12-9.
5. Click the All Pages link in the sidebar.

You’ve now got two pages on your website, the sample page that was created by default by WordPress, and the home page you just created. Hover over the sample page and click the Trash link (you won’t be needing that page). At the top of the screen, you can see that the page was moved to the trash and that you can undo that last action (that’s reassuring, just in case you delete something you’d rather keep).

You are going to use WordPress’ blog functionality; you just don’t want it to be your home page. To that end, you want to create a second page called “Summer Smash News” that you can use for posting updates (see if you can create the page yourself!).

Next up is another Settings page: the Reading Settings page. Click Settings and then Reading in the sidebar. Under the Front Page Displays section, select the second option, and then assign your Home page as the home page and set your News page to handle posts. Remember to click the Save Changes button!

Let’s pause for a second and take a quick look at what you’ve got. Click the words “Summer Smash 2012” in the bar at the top of the page, and you’ll be taken to a preview of what your website looks like. You’ll see a masthead graphic with a navigation menu below it (it currently contains two links: Home and Summer Smash News). Things are coming along, but you’ve got a few more things you need to do.

Extending WordPress

WordPress gets used in a lot of places for a lot of different things. The built-in functionality is pretty great, but when you need to take things a step further, you’ll need to call in a little help. The following features can really help you get the most out of WordPress:

• Plugins : These allow you to add additional functionality to your website (e.g., a members’ area, a discussion forum, or a registration form).
• Themes : These are pre-packaged styles for WordPress websites that allow you to completely change the look of your site with just a few clicks.

We’re already using a theme in WordPress; by default, WordPress comes with a great, responsive, standards-compliant theme called Twenty Eleven (this changes from time to time, but at the time of writing, Twenty Eleven is the default). You can buy additional themes, install free ones, develop your own, or just tweak/customize an existing theme (this is what you’ll do for Summer Smash).

Go beyond with plugins

Previously, we spent a few chapters designing a great registration form for our event—wouldn’t it be great if we could use that and make it submit somewhere? WordPress itself doesn’t have baked-in support for form handling (aside from letting visitors submit comments on a page, but we don’t want that for our Registration form!). However, let’s see if we can add something to WordPress that will help us out in that department.

The first order of business is to create a page for the Registration form. Follow these steps to do so:

1. Go to the Admin page, click Pages, and then choose Add New. Title this page “Registration” and, as before, turn off comments and trackbacks/pingbacks.
2. Grab the completed markup for the form from Chapter 4 and paste it in. By default, you’ll be looking at the Visual editor, so toggle over to the HTML editor (in the upper-right corner) before pasting. Click Publish.
3. Next, click Plugins. You can see that there are already two plugins installed in WordPress (neither of which is active, though). The Akismet plugin will protect your blog against spammers. If you’re going to be opening up comments or trackbacks on any page of your website, we highly recommend that you take a few moments to configure the Akismet plugin for your site. Hello Dolly is just a test plugin, and you can delete it.
4. Neither of these plugins does what you need in terms of forms processing though, so you need to find something to fill that role. Click Add New under Plugins in the left bar. You’re looking for a form processor, so try doing a search for that. This search returns a lot of results, but after a quick scan of the search results, it looks like a plugin called Filled In might just fit the bill. Click the Install Now link below this plugin, and then click the Activate link.
5. Chances are that you’ll have to do a little configuring before this plugin works, so click Tools and then Filled In in the sidebar. OK, it looks like you will have to create a new form. Call it Registration and click Create. You can also see a pile of other configuration options (feel free to check those out on your own); for now, you’re just going to do the bare minimum to get things working. Click Registration in the list of forms.

You want to accomplish a couple of things with this form:

• You want the results of this form to be e-mailed to you.
• You want the registrant to see a nice “Thank You” message after clicking the Register button.

Follow these steps to set up this form:

1. Under the Post Processors section, select Send as email and click Add. Next, click the link that appears, enter your e-mail address, and click the Save button.
2. Under the Result Processor section, click the Display a ‘thank-you’ message option and click Add. Next, click the link that appears and enter your thank you message.
3. Check the box for “Auto Formatting” and “Replace entire page, and then click the Save button.

OK, it’s great that our form will do all of that, but how do we link this up with the form we put together in previous chapters? The answer lies in the Help pages.

If you click the Help link in the upper-right corner and read over the Filled In Documentation, then you can easily link a form to this form processor just by giving the form an id of (in this case) Registration. Follow these steps to finish linking this new form up with the form we created in previous chapters:

1. Head back to your Registration page (i.e., click Pages and then Registration from the list).
2. If you did a straight copy of the form code, remove the action=… attribute from the form, and replace it with id="Registration".
3. Click the Update button and then look at your form. You’ll notice that the formatting is a bit funny because you haven’t copied over any of the style information from Chapters 5 and 6; however, you can do that in a second. For now try filling it in and then clicking the Register now! button.

You’ll notice a couple of things In Figure 12-12, you can see a nice Confirmation page with your thank you message displayed; it looks as though everything worked properly. However, chances are that you didn’t receive an e-mail message with the registration information. That’s OK; on our desktop computers, we don’t have a mail server set up to handle sending those messages. Once the website is uploaded to a real web host, however, that part will work just fine. In the meantime, how can you be sure that something actually happened?

Now head back to our Admin page, click “Tools” and then the Filled In link. Next to your Registration form, you should see a 1 under the Succeeded column. Click that 1, and you’ll be able to access the entry.