blackleafmedia

Welcome back to my series about getting started with WordPress. I hope you have enjoyed the series so far. The first part of the tutorial goes over how to install WordPress. In this part of the tutorial, we will go over the general settings of WordPress.  Some of the options pages I will completely ignore as they are very self explanatory.

At first, WordPress seems to have a lot of options and not a whole of help. I can assure you that nothing could be further from the truth. The WordPress community is a vast resource. Use it to your advantage! Here are just some of the different places you can rely on:

• WordPress.org Forums
• WordPress Documentation

I will keep adding to this list as time goes on; and always feel free to contact me.

General Settings

Most of the general settings are pretty self explanatory. There are however a few things you want to pay attention to. Underneath the Membership heading you will see a few different options.

The Anyone Can Register checkbox controls whether or not users of your site can register with your site. It really depends on what you are doing. If you are going to have multiple authors on the same weblog, you want this checked. Otherwise, you probably will not have a use for this. The next option is Users must be logged in to comment. If you have it so that they do not have to register, it makes it easier for people to comment on your blog. That sort of setup will probably help out in growing your readership. However, you will probably receive quite a bit more spam. There are things you can do though to help fight spam, notably Akismet. We will cover that in a lot more detail in a later tutorial as something like that deserve plenty of time on its own.

The last few fields control the date and time formatting. As stated in the link on the General settings page, the WordPress Documentation can help you with formatting the date and time.

Reading Settings

Next we will move on to the reading settings. The Front Page Displays option lets you specify whether you want your blog (which would be the Latest Posts option) or one of your static pages. If you are using WordPress as more of a content management system, you would probably want to select one of your Static pages (like your About or Contact Us pages). In that case, you would probably just create a static front page and use that.

The next part that might need some attention is the Syndication Feeds show the most recent textbox. This is if someone subscribes to your RSS feed. You can also specify if you want the full text of the post or just a summary of each post to show in your RSS feed.

What is RSS you ask? It’s something that more people should be using for a lot of reasons. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Basically you can take an RSS feed and pipe it into something else. I use a start page called Netvibes and with that I then can plug in RSS feeds so they appear on my Netvibes page. The feed will then show the past few blog posts from that feed, usually with a short description of the post. It is great because it allows you to give a cursory scan of whats going on with your favorite sites without having to visit that site. If you are a power user, this is a complete lifesaver. I have about 60 feeds that I can keep an eye on to see if there is anything new without having to visit 60 different sites. Once you get used to it, you will wonder how you got along without it.

Keep an eye out for the next lesson as we will wrap up the general settings. Please make sure you comment and also do not forget to contact me and let me know how you like the series so far!

This entry was posted on June 13, 2008. It is Filed under: Blogging, Tutorials, WordPress Help

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