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.

The basics of using the editor toolbar

I suggest that you make a post or a page, and then try all of these options to see what they do.  Also, you will want to “preview” the post on your actual site, to see what these options look like when they are rendered with your style sheet.

A good example of this for me, is that some templates I have found have forgotten to add CSS elements for bolding, italics, and/or blockquotes.  It is nice to know your limitations, or at least what you will have to go in and add when you get your site going.  On this site, the original template had no size difference between different types of headers.  The h1, h2, and h3 headers were all the same size. This was severely limiting to the organization of the page, so I have updated the stylesheet.

When you go to write your posts and page content, you have many options for formatting your content.  You will notice that the buttons look a lot like your typical word editor.  The options that are shown by default (from left to right):

First Row:

Add an Image - gives you a dialog for uploading a images.  You can choose multiple files from your computer, or an individual item from a website to upload.  Once they are uploaded, you will have many options for how to show the image on your site.  If you don’t want your images to be inline with the text, but to just show the thumbnails for your images, you can use the gallery tag.

Add video - gives you a dialog for uploading a video.  Once you have the file uploaded, you get options for how you want the video to be placed in your content. This includes options like the player to use.

Add Audio - gives you a dialog for uploading audio.  Works very similar to the video player.

Add Media - gives you a dialog for uploading media. I am convinced that this is a catch-all uploader, for anything else that you would like to upload to the page.

Visual Editor Tab - Show the word editor interface with the options that are shown in the above picture.

HTML Editor Tab - Show the HTML editor interface.  On this screen, you will see all the HTML tags that the visual editor produces around your text when you use the options from above.  There are options here for editing the text, but it is limited.

Second Row:

Bold - makes text bold

Italic - makes text italic

Strikethrough - makes text have strikethroughs

• Bullets

1. Ordered List

Blockquote

Left Justify Left Justify Left Justify Left Justify

Centered Centered Centered Centered

Right Justify Right Justify Right Justify Right Justify

Link

Break a Link - removes the HTML for a link from previously linked text

Insert an image - Puts an image directly into the text, from a URL. This is much less functional from the Add an Image uploader functionality that I talked about above.

More tag - Puts a break in your page so your whole post doesn’t show on the homepage of your website.  Use this for long posts to keep your homepage from being very cluttered.

Check Spelling - Check the spelling in your post. (I should use this more…We all should)

Toggle Full Screen - Makes the visual editor go to full-screen mode, or back to normal.

Show/Hide Kitchen Sink - This will show and hide the extra options for editing.  I will discuss this in a future article called Advanced Posting In WordPress.

Next Article: More WordPress Posting Basics

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!! ———

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).

You can seriously turn away people from your site if you have a theme that either has colors that clash, that is poorly implemented in XHTML & CSS, or that is just plain ugly.  I am one of those people that is picky about a site based on how ugly it is, or how poor the interface is.  My friend even has a site to feature some of the “worst of the worst” in web design that we come across: Who did this Crappy Website. (You don’t want to end up there, even if you just chose a theme from a list…)

When you are choosing your theme there are a couple things you have to think about (I will explain each later):

1. How proficient am I with XHTML/CSS?
2. What are my company’s colors?  What are my colors?
3. How do I want my page to be laid out?  Does the layout I chose make sense for my project?
4. What do I want my site to “say” to a user who is just seeing my site at a glance?
5. Is the template I chose readable?
6. Does the template work in all browsers that I expect my visitors to use?

Questions To Ask Yourself - answered

How Proficient am I with PHP/XHTML/CSS?

• First, the reason why I asked this question: If you like a template but want the color changed, or something moved, you need to know at the very least some CSS.  If you want something to be moved, you might have to know XHTML (if you are lucky) or PHP.

What are my company’s colors? What are my colors?

• I know that second question sounds silly, but really think about it.  You may LOVE the way a theme does its layout, but the colors are hideous.  Are you willing to deal with the ugly colors?
• Also, if you don’t like a certain color scheme, you should be pretty confident that there are other people who don’t like it either.

How do I want my page to be laid out? Does the layout I chose make sense for my project?

• This is important, because you want the most important information available to your visitors to be “above the fold”.  This means, that when the page loads, the important information should be available without scrolling. Think about it this way: when you search Google for a specific keyword, how likely are you to click one of the first 4 links on the page?  How likely are you to scroll?  How likely are you to go to the second page?

What do I want my site to “say” to a user who is just seeing my site at a glance?

• When someone sees a screen shot of your site, or they have a browser window open, or if they are searching for a specific thing on the internet they are going to scan your site quickly.  It is important to take this into consideration.  When someone visits your site, and they leave after viewing one page, this is called a bounce.  You want to prevent people from bouncing off your site.  The more they bounce, the less they read and the less money you can make with your site (if you have monitized your site).
• You want to figure out what the “feeling” is that you want from your site.  It might be serious, fun, exciting, happy, whatever.  You need to consider this feeling when you choose a theme.  When I choose a theme I might pick 10 different themes that I think will work, and then put them on the server.  I will make them active (more on this later), and then decide which one I like when my content is displayed in the theme.  Very rarely do I get it right the first time.

Is the template I chose readable?

• You may have a template that you think is perfect for your mission.  It might be.  But you need to make sure that the widest number of the type of people you will attract can read your site.  If the site uses fonts that are too small, or the background color is too similar or clashes with the text colors you may drive visitors away.  Would you go to a site that was un-readable?

Does the template work in all browsers that I expect my visitors to use?

• Most if not all template sites have a “preview” or “test run” of the templates they have in inventory. Look at your templates in different browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari).  You might find out that a specific browser does not work well with your template.  This gives you two options 1) find a new template or 2) Fix it (requires XHTML/CSS knowledge).

The next thing you need to do is install your theme, and see if it looks right with your content.  If you use a host that does the 1-click installs like Dreamhost, then you will already have a bunch of themes installed fore free.  Keep in mind though, everyone who uses that host has those installed for free as well…individuality is a good thing to have on the web.

Next Article: Installing and Changing your Themes

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.

Breaking Down the Permalink

I’ll break down the permalink structure. The URL for this article that you are reading is:

http://www.wp-relief.com/13/2008/06/23/permalinks/

Base url: http://www.wp-relief.com/ - this is the domain name of this site.

Post ID: /13/ - this is the auto-incremented ID that Wordpress gives to posts, as they are created.

Date of Post: /2008/06/23/ - The publish date of the article

Name of Post: /permalinks/ - The post title changed to all lowercase, with spaces replaced with “_”.  Another example of this is /installing-wordpress-to-your-server/.

How to set up your permalinks

If you login to wordpress, and go to “Settings”, then “Permalinks” you will see options for managing your permalinks. It should look similar to this:

The first section on this page will allow you to choose how you want your permalinks to be created.  Once you make your decision and hit the update button, your permalinks will be recreated.  My suggestion is to make the decision as to how you want your permalinks to be created as soon as possible in your blog’s life.  The reason is that search engines will have the original link and the content on that page associated with your keywords.  If you change the link, you are effectively removing that page from the search engines.  The other problem you could have, is that if a search engine pulls up the page using the new permalink before the old one is de-listed, then you could get in trouble for having duplicate content.  Search Engines are smart, but they don’t know that you changed your permalink structure, so they assume that every new URL they come across from your site is a new page.

Custom Settings: You can customize the links for posts on your site by choosing one of the pre-defined settings, or a custom built setting.

The tags that you can use to formulate your permalinks are:

%year%

The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004

%monthnum%

Month of the year, for example 05

%day%

Day of the month, for example 28

%hour%

Hour of the day, for example 15

%minute%

Minute of the hour, for example 43

%second%

Second of the minute, for example 33

%postname%

A sanitized version of the title of the post (post slug field on Edit Post/Page panel). So “This Is A Great Post!” becomes this-is-a-great-post in the URI (see Using only %postname%)

%post_id%

The unique ID # of the post, for example 423

%category%

A sanitized version of the category name (category slug field on New/Edit Category panel). Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI.

%author%

A sanitized version of the author name.

This information comes from WordPress’ Permalinks Page.

The main idea that you HAVE to make sure you remember about a custom permalink structure is that you want every post URL to be different.  This is easily accomplished by making sure that you:

end your structure with either %post_id% or %postname% (e.g. /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/) so that each permalink points to an individual post.

This information comes from WordPress’ Permalinks Page.

Optional: This area lets you customize the base “folder” that will be in your links to categories and tags.  There is a good example on the admin page for how to use this feature:

If you like, you may enter custom structures for your category and tag URLs here. For example, using /topics/ as your category base would make your category links like http://example.org/topics/uncategorized/. If you leave these blank the defaults will be used.

Save your changes and check the front-side of your blog, you will find that your permalinks have been updated for your posts and categories.

Suggested Permalink Structure

The most basic permalink structure that I suggest you use for a regular blog is:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

This permalink structure will almost guarantee different links for every post unless you post the same name post on the same day.  If this happens, WordPress will automatically append a number to the end of the %postname%.

There are more ideal permalinks for specific instances.  For example: If you are a news site and you want to be included into Google News, you have to use a three digit unique id in every post.  This is easily done with the %post_id% variable from above.  And you can put it anywhere in the permalink, I suggest at the beginning.  So your permalink would look like this:

/%post_id%/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

Next Article: Choosing Your Theme

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!

When I am setting up a WordPress blog in my hosting environment, I admit, I get to skip steps. They have what are called 1-click installs. In reality, there is more than one click involved, but it saves me tons of time when I am setting up WordPress or other Open Source software. When I go through the process, I end up with something similar to what you see in the picture below, a blog with a title and the generic WordPress subtitle “Just another weblog”.

Unless you are “just another weblog”, you probably want to change this text. If you just installed WordPress from scratch, without “cheating” like I do, you will probably see:

Blog

Just another Weblog

This is ok, because we will be making the change for both items in the same place.

The place where we make these changes is in the admin side of the site, where you make posts, and manage users (see Logging Into Wordpress ).  Go to the “Settings” tab on the right side of your admin header:

Settings Page

Blog Title:  This is the title of your blog, in many themes this text is actually displayed in the header of the public side of your blog.

Tagline: Your tagline gives users an idea of what to expect from your blog, at a glance.

Wordpress address (URL):This is the actual address of your blog, it is very important to make sure this is correct.  If it is not correct, you may not be able to log into the admin side of your site.  Also you may run into problems with images and links being incorrect on the site.  I would suggest that you never change this, unless you plan to move your site.

Blog address (URL):This is where you have located your WordPress files, if that is different from where your wordpress address (above) is pointing.  This lets you put all your WordPress files in another directory so that you keep your root directory free from files.

Email address:This is the address that your system will use to notify people, and that it will use to notify you of comments, trackbacks, etc.

Membership:The membership setting can make or break your interaction with your own site.  The reason I say this, is that if you make your commenting open to everyone without registration, you can end up with some very … erm  … interesting comments.

New User Default Role:When a user registers, the system will give them a user type. This determines what their permissions in the system are.

Timezone: Make this match the timezone you are in, don’t worry about your readers. It is important that your timezone matches you.  You can use this chart to match the GMT syntax to your time zone.

Date Format: This is the setting that determines how your dates are displayed on your site.  The letters you can use to format your date can be found here (top of chart): PHP Date Format.

Time Format:This is the setting that determines how your times are displayed on your site.  The letters you can use to format your date can be found here (bottom of chart): PHP Date Format.

Week Starts on:Simple, the day of the week you like your calendar to start on.  Be an individual, start your week on Wednesday.

Next Article: Permalinks

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!!)

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.

From this page, you can do many things:

Visual Editor

This setting will change how you write and edit posts and pages in WordPress. If you have the box checked (this is preferred for most users) you will be able to use an editor that is very similar to your Office writing and editing software.

Turning it off will give you a normal textarea for typing in.

Admin Color Scheme

This will change the color scheme that you see when you are logged into the admin side of your site. Changing this only effects the colors you see, nothing else.

You can get more control, and colors for your admin color scheme using the Easy Admin Color Schemes Plugin.

Name

Username: You cannot change this. The reason is that WordPress uses this as a unique identifier for you. You can however, change how your username is publicly displayed. This is effectively the same as changing your username. (see Display Name Publicly As).

First Name: This is your first name, or the first name you want to use on the site.

Last Name: This is your last name, or the last name you want to use on the site.

NickName: This is the nickname you would like to use on the site.

Display Name Publicly As:This is where you can choose how your name will be displayed to the public. Your name is displayed on every post that you put into WordPress.
Your list of available names to display is based on the information you have in the previous fields. So, if you enter that data and then save your profile, you will get more options for your display name. Pick one, and save.

Contact Info

Email: This is your email address.

Website: This is your website. This field is more for people who comment on your blog or for authors on the blog and not for the main person writing on the blog. For example, if I wanted to

AIM:Your AIM username. I usually don’t ever use this information on my sites, because I do not want random people sending me IMs.

Yahoo IM:Your Yahoo IM name. I usually don’t ever use this information on my sites, because I do not want random people sending me IMs.

Jabber/Google Talk:Your Google Talk name. I usually don’t ever use this information on my sites, because I do not want random people sending me IMs.

About Yourself

Biographical Information: This is a good place to talk about yourself a little bit, especially if you end up making an author page.

Password: Just enter the password of your dreams.

Once you have all the information into the form, click the Update Profile button to save your settings.

Next Article: Blog Settings

• 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.

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

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.

You will need FTP software and an ftp username/password in order to get the files to your server.  If you do not have the software, try FileZilla. FileZilla is both free, and easy to use.  If you do not have an FTP username/password you will need to contact your host for this information.

Add your site, username, and password to the FTP program.  Find the directory where your website will be housed (for example on this site (on Dreamhost) the files for wordpress go into the wp-relief.com/ directory).  Now, you want to highlight and drag all the files that were in the .zip file to the server window in your FTP program.  If, when you unpacked the .zip file, you got a directory called “wordpress”, move all the files INSIDE that directory NOT the “wordpress” folder itself.

When it is all done, you should see three directories and a bunch of files.  Something like this:

Using The Installer

The installer is found when you go with a browser to the location where you have uploaded all of your WordPress files.  The only time you will see these pages are when a WordPress site has not yet been properly installed.

You will know when you are at the installer, because you will not see a blog.  You will see a form asking you to name your blog, among other things.  This is a very quick and painless process to do the most basic settings for your WordPress site.

You can use the installer to do all of the server settings, however you can also manually edit your wp-config.php script.  If you manually set up the wp-config script (see next section), your trip through the installer will be relatively short.  If not, you will just enter the same data into the forms in the installer.

Once you are complete, you will get a username and password.  Typically, the username will be “admin” and the password is autogenerated for you.  YOU MUST KEEP THIS PASSWORD, until you log into the site and change it.  You will either get a link to the login page, or you can just add /wp-admin to the end of your URL to see the login page.

Setting Up Your Config File

You can skip this step by using the installer, go to “Using The Installer”.

As you will find in your directory, and in the picture above, there is a file called “wp-config.php”.  This file tells your WordPress installation where to look for the database that will house all of the information you enter in to the site.

You will need to have a host url (typically this is localhost), a database name, a database username, and a database password.  This information will come from your host.

Your completed wp-config file should look like the following, where you replace the second quoted string in each of the “define” statements with the information from your host.

// ** MySQL settings ** //
 
define('DB_NAME', 'putyourdbnamehere');    // The name of the database
 
define('DB_USER', 'usernamehere');     // Your MySQL username
 
define('DB_PASSWORD', 'yourpasswordhere'); // ...and password
 
define('DB_HOST', 'localhost');    // 99% chance you won't need to change this value
 
define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
 
define('DB_COLLATE', '');
 
// Change SECRET_KEY to a unique phrase.  You won't have to remember it later,
 
// so make it long and complicated.  You can visit http://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.0/
 
// to get a secret key generated for you, or just make something up.
 
define('SECRET_KEY', 'put your unique phrase here'); // Change this to a unique phrase.
 
// You can have multiple installations in one database if you give each a unique prefix
 
$table_prefix  = 'wp_';   // Only numbers, letters, and underscores please!
 
// Change this to localize WordPress.  A corresponding MO file for the
 
// chosen language must be installed to wp-content/languages.
 
// For example, install de.mo to wp-content/languages and set WPLANG to 'de'
 
// to enable German language support.
 
define ('WPLANG', '');
 
/* That's all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */
 
define('ABSPATH', dirname(__FILE__).'/');
 
require_once(ABSPATH.'wp-settings.php');

If you noticed in that file, there are a couple other values that can be changed.  More than likely you will never need to change the lines that contain DB_CHARSET, DB_COLLATE, or $table_prefix = ‘wp_’.  However, it is wise to change the value of the SECRET KEY.  As the comments say, you do not have to remember it. This is used as a security measure to protect your site from hackers. If you create it, or use one from the auto-generator (link in the comments), then it will be distinct for you, making it harder for a hacker to guess it.  Typically, you can ignore all the other lines in that file.

Once you have made the changes, move the newly edited file up to the server.  When your FTP program ass if you want to replace the file, answer yes.  You can now breeze through the installer by going to your WordPress site’s URL with a web browser.

Next Article: How to Log Into Wordpress