At the very bottom of the navigation menu, you can find the Settings option. Click Settings, and a menu list opens that contains the following links, which we discuss in the sections that follow:
After you install the WordPress software and log in, you can put a personal stamp on your blog by giving it a title and description, setting your contact e-mail address, and identifying yourself as the author of the blog. You take care of these and other settings on the General Settings page.
To begin personalizing your blog, start with your general settings by following these steps:
The General Settings page appears (see Figure 3-1).
The title you enter here is the one that you gave your blog to identify it as your own. In Figure 3-1, Lisa gave the new blog the title WordPress All-In-One For Dummies, which appears on the blog, as well as in the title bar of the viewer's Web browser.
Give your blog an interesting and identifiable name. You can use Fried Green Tomatoes, for example, if you're blogging about the topic, the book, or the movie, or even anything remotely related to the lovely Southern dish.
Figure 3-1 shows that the tagline is by Lisa Sabin-Wilson. Therefore, this blog displays the blog title, followed by the tagline: WordPress All-in-One For Dummies by Lisa Sabin-Wilson.
The general Internet-surfing public can view your blog title and tagline, which various search engines (such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN) grab for indexing, so choose your words with this fact in mind. (You can find more information about search engine optimization, or SEO, in Book V.)
Be sure to include the http:// portion of the URL and the entire path to your WordPress installation — for example, http://yourdomain.com. If you installed WordPress in a folder in your directory — in a folder called wordpress, for example — you need to make sure to include it here. If we installed WordPress in a folder called wordpress, the WordPress address would be http://yourdomain.com/wordpress (where yourdomain.com is your domain name).
Typically, what you enter here is the same as your domain name (http://yourdomain.com). If you install WordPress in a subdirectory of your site, the WordPress installation URL is different from the blog URL. If you install WordPress at http://yourdomain.com/wordpress/ (WordPress URL), you need to tell WordPress that you want the blog to appear at http://yourdomain.com (the blog URL).
WordPress sends messages about the details of your blog to this e-mail address. When a new user registers for your blog, for example, WordPress sends you an e-mail alert.
Select the Anyone Can Register check box if you want to keep registration on your blog open to anyone. Keep the check box unchecked if you'd rather not have open registration on your blog.
You need to understand the differences among the user roles because each user role is assigned a different level of access to your blog, as follows:
This setting refers to the number of hours that your local time differs from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). This setting ensures that all the blog posts and comments left on your blog are time-stamped with the correct time. If you're lucky enough, like Lisa, to live on the frozen tundra of Wisconsin, which is in the Central Standard Time (CST) Zone, you choose – from the drop-down list because that time zone is 6 hours off UTC.
If you're unsure what your UTC time is, you can find it at the Greenwich Mean Time (http://wwp.greenwichmeantime.com) Web site. GMT is essentially the same thing as UTC. WordPress also lists some major cities in the Timezone drop-down list so that you can more easily choose your time zone if you don't know it.
This setting determines the style of the date display. The default format displays time like this: January 1, 2011.
Select a different format by clicking the radio button to the left of the option you want. You can also customize the date display by selecting the Custom option and entering your preferred format in the text box provided. If you're feeling adventurous, you can find out how to customize the date format at http://codex.wordpress.org/Formatting_Date_and_Time.
This setting is the style of the time display. The default format displays time like this: 12:00 a.m.
Select a different format by clicking the radio button to the left of the option you want. You can also customize the date display by selecting the Custom option and entering your preferred format in the text box provided; find out how at http://codex.wordpress.org/Formatting_Date_and_Time.
You can format the time and date in several ways. Go to http://us3.php.net/date to find potential formats at the PHP Web site.
Displaying the calendar in the sidebar of your blog is optional. If you choose to display the calendar, you can select the day of the week on which you want your calendar to start.
Click the Save Changes button at the bottom of any page where you set new options. If you don't click Save Changes, your settings aren't saved, and WordPress reverts to the preceding options. Each time you click the Save Changes button, WordPress reloads the current page, displaying the new options that you just set.
Click Writing in the Settings menu list; the Writing Settings page opens (see Figure 3-2).
This page lets you set some basic options for writing your posts. Table 3-1 gives you some information on choosing how your posts look and how WordPress handles some specific conditions.
After you set your options, be sure to click the Save Changes button; otherwise, the changes won't take effect.
Go to http://codex.wordpress.org/Update_Services for comprehensive information on update services.
The third item in the Settings drop-down list is Reading. Click the Reading link to open the Reading Settings page (see Figure 3-3).
You can set the following options in the Reading Settings page:
Be sure to click the Save Changes button after you set all your options in the Reading Settings page to make the changes take effect.
Discussion is the fourth item in the Settings menu list; click it to open the Discussion Settings page (see Figure 3-4). The sections on this tab let you set options for handling comments and publishing posts to your blog.
The following sections cover the options available to you in the Discussion Settings page, which deals mainly with how comments and trackbacks are handled in your blog.
With the Default Article Settings options, you can tell WordPress how to handle post notifications. Here are your options:
The Other Comment Settings section tells WordPress how to handle comments:
Many bloggers use this very effective anti-spam technique to keep the comment and trackback spam on their blog down.
The two options in the E-Mail Me Whenever section are enabled by default:
The two options in the Before a Comment Appears section tell WordPress how you want WordPress to handle comments before they appear in your blog:
In the Comment Moderation section, you can set options to specify what types of comments are held in the moderation queue to await your approval.
To prevent spammers from spamming your blog with a ton of links, enter a number in the Hold a Comment in the Queue If It Contains X or More Links text box. The default number of links allowed is two. Try that setting, and if you find that you're getting a lot of spam comments that contain links, consider dropping that number down to 1, or even 0, to prevent those comments from being published on your blog. Sometimes, legitimate commenters will include a link or two in the body of their comment; after a commenter is marked as approved, she is no longer affected by this method of spam protection.
The large text box in the Comment Moderation section lets you type keywords, URLs, e-mail addresses, and IP addresses so that if they appear in comments, you want to hold those comments in the moderation queue for your approval.
In this section, type a list of words, URLs, e-mail addresses, and/or IP addresses that you want to flat-out ban from your blog. Items placed here don't even make it into your comment moderation queue; the WordPress system filters them as spam. We'd give examples of blacklist words, but the words we've placed in our blacklists aren't family-friendly and have no place in a nice book like this one.
What are avatars, and how do they relate to WordPress?
An avatar is an online graphical representation of an individual. It's a small graphic icon that people use to visually represent themselves on the Web in areas they participate in conversations, such as discussion forums and blog comments. Gravatars are globally recognized avatars; they are avatars that you can take with you wherever you go. They appear alongside blog comments, blog posts, and discussion forums as long as the site you're interacting with is Gravatar-enabled. In October 2007, Automattic, the core group behind the WordPress platform, purchased the Gravatar service and integrated it into WordPress so that all could enjoy and benefit from the service. Gravatars are not automatic; you need to sign up for an account with Gravatar so that you can receive an avatar, via your e-mail address. Find out more about Gravatar by visiting http://gravatar.com.
The final section of the Discussion Settings page is Avatars. (See the nearby sidebar, “What are avatars, and how do they relate to WordPress?,” for information about avatars.) In this section, you can select different settings for the use and display of avatars on your site:
You have two options:
This feature works much like the American movie-rating system. You can select G, PG, R, and X ratings for the avatars that appear on your site, as shown in Figure 3-5. If your site is family-friendly, you probably don't want it to display R- or X-rated avatars, so select G or PG.
Avatars appear in a couple of places:
To enable the display of avatars in comments on your blog, the Comments template (comments.php) in your active theme has to contain the code to display them. Hop on over to Book VI to find information about themes and templates, including template tags that allow you to display avatars in your comment list.
Click the Save Changes button after you set all your options on the Discussion Settings page to make the changes take effect.
The next menu item in the Settings menu list is Media; click the Media link to make the Media Settings page open (see Figure 3-7).
On the Media Settings page, you can configure the options for how your image files (graphics and photos) are resized for use in your blog.
The first set of options on the Media Settings page deals with images. WordPress automatically resizes your images for you in three different sizes. The dimensions are referenced in pixels by width, and then height. (For example, 150 x 150 means 150 pixels in width by 150 pixels in height.)
In Book VI, we go into detail about WordPress themes and templates, including how you can add image sizes other than just these three. You can use these additional images sizes in and around your Web site, as well as a feature called Featured Image for your posts and articles.
The second set of options on the Media Settings page deals with embedded links and files, such as video and audio files. Select the check box that says Attempt to Automatically Embed All Plain Text URLs if you want your WordPress blog to automatically attach a hyperlink to a text-based URL that you type into your posts or pages. Activating this option means that you don't have to copy and paste the full code given to you by services such as YouTube — instead, you simply paste the hyperlink to the video, and WordPress automatically does the video embedding for you.
Next, set the width and height for the maximum size you want embedded files to be within your post and pages. Embedded items include video players and audio players that appear within your post or page.
Finally, the last set of options on the Media Settings page is the Uploading Files section. Here, you can tell WordPress where to store your uploaded media files:
This check box is selected by default; uncheck it if you don't want WordPress to organize your files by month and year.
Be sure to click the Save Changes button to save your configurations!
In Book IV, Chapter 3, we detail how to insert images in your WordPress posts and pages.
The next Settings menu item list is Privacy; click it to display the Privacy Settings page, as shown in Figure 3-8.
This page contains only two options, both of which concern visibility on your blog:
Generally, you want search engines to be able to find your blog. However, if you have special circumstances, you may want to enforce your privacy settings. For example, we blocked search engines for the site we're using to create the figures in this book because we don't want search engines to find it. At the top of the site, to the right of the site title, a note says Search Engines Blocked. This note exists only when you have your privacy settings set to block search engines. When you have privacy enabled, search engines and other content bots can't find your Web site.
Be sure to click the Save Changes button after you set all your options on the Privacy Settings page to make the changes take effect.
The next link on the Settings menu list is Permalinks; click the Permalinks link to view the Permalink Settings page, as shown in Figure 3-9.
Each WordPress blog post is assigned its own Web page, and the address (or URL) of that page is called a permalink. Posts that you see in WordPress blogs usually have the post permalink in four typical areas:
Permalinks are meant to be permanent links to your blog posts (which is where the perma part of that word comes from, in case you're wondering). Other bloggers can use a post permalink to refer to that particular blog post. Ideally, the permalink of a post never changes. WordPress creates the permalink automatically when you publish a new post.
By default, a blog post permalink in WordPress looks like this:
http://yourdomain.com/?p=100/
The p stands for post, and 100 is the ID assigned to the individual post. You can leave the permalinks in this format, if you don't mind letting WordPress associate each post with an ID number.
WordPress, however, lets you take your permalinks to the beauty salon for a bit of makeover so that you can create pretty permalinks. You probably didn't know that permalinks could be pretty, did you?
Pretty permalinks are links that are more pleasing to the eye than standard links and, ultimately, more pleasing to search-engine spiders. (See Book V for an explanation of why search engines like pretty permalinks.) Pretty permalinks look something like this:
http://yourdomain.com/2011/01/01/pretty-permalinks
Break down that URL, and you see the date when the post was made, in year/month/day format. You also see the topic of the post.
To choose how your permalinks look, click Permalinks in the Settings drop-down list. The Permalink Settings page opens (refer to Figure 3-9).
In this page, you can find several options for creating permalinks:
To create the pretty-permalink structure, select the Day and Name radio button; then click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.
A custom permalink structure is one that lets you define which variables you want to see in your permalinks by using the tags in Table 3-2.
Permalink Tag | Results |
%year% | Four-digit year (such as 2007) |
%monthnum% | Two-digit month (such as 02 for February) |
%day% | Two-digit day (such as 30) |
%hour% | Two-digit hour of the day (such as 15 for 3 p.m.) |
%minute% | Two-digit minute (such as 45) |
%second% | Two-digit second (such as 10) |
%postname% | Text — usually, the post name — separated by hyphens (such as making-pretty-permalinks) |
%post_id% | The unique numerical ID of the post (such as 344) |
%category% | The text of the category name in which you filed the post (such as books-i-read) |
%author% | The text of the post author's name (such as lisa-sabin-wilson) |
If you want your permalink to show the year, month, day, category, and post name, select the Custom Structure radio button in the Customize Permalink Structure page and type the following tags in the Custom Structure text box:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%category%/%postname%/
By using this permalink format, the link for a post made on February 1, 2011, called WordPress All in One For Dummies and filed in the Books I Read category, would look like this:
http://yourdomain.com/2011/02/01/books-i-read/wordpress-all-in-one-for-dummies/
Be sure to include the slashes before tags, between tags, and at the very end of the string of tags. This format ensures that WordPress creates correct, working permalinks by using the correct re_write rules located in the .htaccess file for your site. (See the following section for more information on re_write rules and .htaccess files.)
Changing the structure of your permalinks in the future affects the permalinks for all the posts on your blog ... new and old. Keep this fact in mind if you ever decide to change the permalink structure. An especially important reason: Search engines (such as Google and Yahoo!) index the posts on your site by their permalinks, so changing the permalink structure makes all those indexed links obsolete.
Don't forget to click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the Customize Permalink Structure page; otherwise, your permalink changes aren't saved!
After you set the format for the permalinks for your site by using any options other than the default, WordPress writes specific rules, or directives, to the .htaccess file on your Web server. The .htaccess file in turn communicates to your Web server how it should serve up the permalinks, according to the permalink structure you chose to use.
To use an .htaccess file, you need to know the answers to two questions:
If you don't know the answers, contact your hosting provider to find out.
If the answer to both questions is yes, proceed to the following section. If the answer is no, check out the “Working with servers that don't use Apache mod_rewrite” sidebar, in this chapter.
You and WordPress work together in glorious harmony to create the .htaccess file that lets you use a pretty permalink structure in your blog. Follow these steps to create an .htaccess file on your Web server and create a new permalink structure:
If .htaccess already exists, you can find it in the root of your directory on your Web server — that is, the same directory where you find your wp-config.php file. If you don't see it in the root directory, try changing the options of your FTP client to show hidden files. (Because the .htaccess file starts with a period [.], it may not be visible until you configure your FTP client to show hidden files.)
WordPress inserts into the .htaccess file the specific rules necessary for making the permalink structure functional in your blog.
If you follow the preceding steps correctly, you have an .htaccess file on your Web server that has the correct permissions set so that WordPress can write the correct rules to it. Your pretty permalink structure works flawlessly. Kudos!
If you open the .htaccess file and look at it now, you see that it's no longer blank. It should have a set of code in it called rewrite rules, which looks something like this:
# BEGIN WordPress <IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d RewriteRule . /index.php [L] </IfModule> # END WordPress
Working with servers that don't use Apache mod_rewrite
Using permalink structures requires that your Web-hosting provider has a specific Apache module option called mod_rewrite activated on its servers. If your Web-hosting provider doesn't have this item activated on its servers, or if you're hosting your site on a Windows server, the custom permalinks work only if you type index.php in front of any custom permalink tags.
For example, create the custom permalink tags like this:
/index.php/%year%/%month%/%date%/%postname%/
This format creates a permalink like this:
http://yourdomain.com/index.php/2008/02/01/wordpress-all-in-one-for-dummies
You don't need an .htaccess file to use this permalink structure.
We could delve deeply into .htaccess and all the things you can do with this file, but we're restricting this chapter to how it applies to WordPress permalink structures. If you want to unlock more mysteries about .htaccess, check out “Comprehensive Guide to .htaccess” at http://javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess.shtml.