WordPress Relief

The Basics of Writing Posts and Pages in WordPress

Putting content into WordPress is very intuitive.  You login, and navigate to the Write tab, type out what you want and press publish.  However, there are tons of options that you can use to push the limits of WordPress to your benefits.

The difference between posts and pages

A post and page are basically the same thing in WordPress.  WordPress even stores them in the same place, but they have different uses and options.

A page is:

Pages, on the other hand, are for content such as “About Me,” “Contact Me,” etc. Pages live outside of the normal blog chronology, and are often used to present information about yourself or your site that is somehow timeless — information that is always applicable. You can use Pages to organize and manage any amount of content. (from: WordPress Pages)

A post is:

Posts are the entries that display in reverse chronological order on your home page. In contrast to pages, posts usually have comments fields beneath them and are included in your site’s RSS feed. (from: WordPress: Writing Posts)

So, you make posts for things that come up over time.  Things like news articles, things you want to talk about, business updates, etc.  Whereas, pages you would use for content that doesn’t change often.

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Sphere: Related Content

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Installing and Changing Your WordPress Themes

When you get your site set up, or you have your site set up and you have found a theme you like and that fits your website’s purpose, you need to install it.

Just about the only way to install your theme is to use an FTP program to push it to your server into the /wp-content/themes directory.  So, if your theme comes in a directory called “MyTheme”, you will push that entire directory up to the server.  You will now look in the themes directory and see “MyTheme” as a directory there.

Once the files are all up on the server, login to wordpress and choose the Design Tab.

You should see something similar to this:

As you can see on this screenshot, the default “Kubrick” theme is chosen for my blog because it is at the top left corner under the “Current Theme” header.  Also, you can see that there are two other themese available to me.  The “WordPress Classic” theme, and the “SilverLight” theme.  I have uploaded the silver light theme to my server just the way I talked about previously in this article.

WordPress is smart enough, and the designs are built to specification, so that you can see a preview of the theme from this page.  More importantly, you can click the preview to make that theme the current theme on your site. This is particularly handy, when you are a picky person about the themes you use and can’t make up your mind until you see it on your own site.

My suggestion for you is to open one tab of your browser to the Design page on your wordpress admin and open a second tab to the front page of your WordPress site.  (If your browser doesn’t have tabs, download firefox - you will be blown away at what you were missing).  This way, when you change the them from the Design picker, you can go to your live site and refresh the page to see what it looks like.  If you like the one you are looking at, you are done picking your theme.

Next Article: Writing Posts and Pages

———–  Happy 4th of July!! ———

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Choosing Your Theme (template)

When you first install WordPress you will find that the theme is, well, bare.  While some famous blogs like XKCD (also one of my favorite webcomics) choose to leave their blogs with the original theme, this sort of thing only works for people who already have TONS of traffic coming to their site.

The theme is the first thing that people are going to see of your site, besides the header text.  The reason is that for the most part colors jump out of the page faster for the eye than the text, except for the unfortunate minority of people who are either completely or partially colorblind (I am sincerely sorry about this, but this is the reality of the world).

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Permalinks

From Wordpress:

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to link to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hence permalink. (From Wordpress Permalinks)

This is enough of a reason to make sure that you are using permalinks and not wordpress’s default linking structure (yourdomain.com/?p=100 — which means post 100).  Another really good reason to make sure that you use permalinks is for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes.  Any bit of information that can be used to rank your site will be, including your url.  If you url can include information about the page, in this case the post title, it will help your page rank for those keywords.

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Blog Settings

The title of your blog is the first thing that your users are going to see.It will more than likely be the  most prominent thing at the top of any page on your site. Think of this as how you are branding your site.

The biggest and most prominent things on a Coke canis the bright red color and the silver lettering. Most people can tell you someone is holding a coke can from 100 yards away, just by the distinctive red color. You need this sort of branding for your site as well.

Some people have a logo, some people just have text. It is possible to have both!

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I am looking for Plugins to review

Give us plugins that you know/love in the categories below.  We will install them, test them, do a write up on them, and then compare them to other plugins in the category.  Yes, I will be looking for plugins in the WordPress Plugin Repository.  I will also list the plugins with their category below as they come in, or I find them.

These are the plugin types/categories we are looking for:

SEO Plugins

Category Plugins

Tag Plugins

Post Plugins in the genre of “Most Recent”

Post Plugins in the genre of “Related Posts”

Post Plugins in the genre of “Last Viewed”

Contact Form Plugins

Post your entries with a link in the comments, or send them to wordpresshelp@gmail.com.  I will compile the lists, and begin to do installations and testing ASAP.

Also, I will post a link to and description of your WP site in a special “Thank you for your submission post” if you submit a plugin we haven’t found yet. (Yes, free link to your site!!)

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Changing Your Password and Updating Your Profile

In order to change your password, you must log into WordPress. Once you are logged in you will see an entire header section to the page:

For now, look to the right side. You will see a link in the top right corner (in my picture it is in grey text) that says “Welcome admin!”, where “admin” will be your user name. If you have not already made configuration changes to your site, it will still say “admin”.

If you click that link, you will be taken to the User profile editing page for your own account.

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WordPress 2.6 Beta 1 is available

There is a lot of talk going around about the new Beta 1 version of WordPress 2.6.
You can see articles here:

• http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/wordpress_26_beta_1_is_now_ava.php
• http://mdawaffe.wordpress.com/2008/05/22/post-revisions-in-wordpress-26/

And you can download the beta here: http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.6-beta1.zip

I would NOT suggest that you download this and upgrade your LIVE blog/website with this version.  This is simply due to the fact that it is in Beta, which means that the developers do not believe it is ready for active release yet.

As of WordPress 2.5, your WordPress Admin will tell you when a new release is available and that you should update.  As a rule of thumb, I would go by this and not install anything in Beta.

However, if you want to install it somewhere and play around with it, and find bugs, HAVE FUN!  Just remember to use a different database than the one your site currently employs.

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Logging Into WordPress

In order to log into WordPress, you can always go to http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/.  This of course is where “yourdomain” is the domain name you run your site from.

If your blog is installed to another directory than the root directory for your website, say /blog/, you would go to http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/wp-admin/.

Enter your username and password, and if you entered the right information you will be taken to the Dashboard.

If you forget your password, click the “Forgot Password” link, and follow the instructions.

Next Article: Changing Your Password and Updating Your Profile

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Installing WordPress to Your Server

Preface

This article assumes that you already have a domain name, DNS settings, and host set up to house your website.

If you do not have these things, try:

• Bust A Name - for finding your ideal domain name (this is what you would type in to get to your site)
• 1and1 for registering your domain name that you found at Bust A Name
  • I have been with these guys for a long time, they have an easy to use interface for managing your domains, and .com domains are only $6.99/year with automatic renewal. This means you don’t have to worry about someone stealing your domain if you forget to renew it.
• Dreamhost for hosting your website/blog/etc
  • The beauty of Dreamhost is that they are extremely affordable and provide a quality product, especially for people who are just starting out.  If at some point you outgrow all 500GB of storage and the 5 TB of monthly bandwidth for between $5.95 and  $9.99 per month, then get a new host and just transfer your whole site.
  • Also, if you use the code “WPRELIEF” (without the quotes) you will get $25.00 off of the first installment of a package deal with them.

The reason I suggest doing it this way, is that you get the the most flexibility from each of the services, and you save the most money possible.  Other registrars and hosts can and will jack up their prices.  1and1 and Dreamhost have stayed at the same price or gotten cheaper for over 2 years.

Downloading WordPress

If you do not have a “1-click install” option available to you through your host, you will need to go to http://www.wordpress.org to download the wordpress system files to your computer.  Typically, the easiest to download is the .zip file.

Moving Files to the server

Unpack the zip file you downloaded from the WordPress website to a location you can easily find on your computer.

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