Wordpress Guide
From BuzzWiki
WordPress Startup Pack - Beginners Area
Dashboard
The latest news from the WordPress developer's site are listed and displayed on this interface.
Write
The right place to start writing your articles, posts and comments so that you share them with the rest of the world.
Manage
Manage your site easily and effectively from this section. The list of all your Posts, Pages, Categories and Comments are displayed for you here. You can read and edit them quickly and easily. From this section, you may also export your blog, import various contents or even edit your Templates.
Links
You Want to add the links to your favorite sites? Then here is the place to share them with your visitors. You can even organize them into categories, associate them with images and rate them on a scale from zero to nine.
Presentation
Don’t like the look of your WordPress blog, then add new themes of your choice from the developer’s site and apply them here.
Plugins
Benefit from available plugins in WordPress to take your blog functions a step further. You can also add new plugins that can be downloaded from the plugins directory. All plugins are easy to use as they have there own instructions and descriptions on their functionality.
Users
Control and manage your user's profiles. In this section, you can add new users and delete old ones accordingly.
Options
Fine tuning your blog from this section by changing the configurations and settings. This includes general, writing, reading, discussion, miscellaneous options and customization of permalink structure.
Import
Easily import posts and comments from other systems to your WordPress blog with simple steps.
WordPress Administrative Area
Managing your blog website could be done from within the administrative area. You have the ability to change your website’s theme, manage comments, post your articles, and so on…
To do that, you need to login to the administrative area of WordPress by clicking “Login” hyperlink that can be found under the Meta category or by simply browsing the address:
http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-login.php
Posting in WordPress
One of the main functions of WordPress is writing posts. When writing a post, you will have a Title and the Post box areas. Fill out these areas with the desired ideas and click the “Publish” button to post your notes online..
Creating pages in WordPress
In addition to writing a post in WordPress, you could also create a page. To do that, you simply click on the “Write a page” button from the Write menu.
Managing Categories in WordPress
To better manage your blog, WordPress provides you with the capability of dividing your site into categories.
You can do that from
Manage menu > Categories
Change the category of a post
Several posts will exist in every category and you would like sometimes to move certain posts to from one category to another.
You could do that by going to
Manage > Categories > choosing the desired post and clicking on “Edit”.
This will provide you with a list of categories available to choose from.
Delete a category
Deleting a category in WordPress is somehow special, as it does not delete the posts from that category. It will only set them to “Uncategorized”.
Post Comments in WordPress
In order to have more interaction between you and the visitors of your blog, WordPress gives the visitors the option commenting on your posts.
Moderate comments
One other option in WordPress is the ability to moderate your readers’ comments. This can be done by accessing the Comments section in the administrator side of your blog.
WordPress Startup Pack - Advanced Area
Changing your WordPress Theme
Not satisfied with the look of your WordPress blog? Then change its theme from the administrative panel under the “Presentation” section.
You may choose from several available templates and simply clicking on the theme’s name or the theme’s thumbnail to apply it.
Uploading a new WordPress Theme
You have a specific theme of your choice and would like to use it?
- Download the theme of your choice to your local machine then upload it back to your website under the wp-content/themes directory.
- Extract the uploaded files using File Manager
- After successful upload to the correct directory
Administrative backend > Presentation.
You should be able to see and use the newly updated theme.
You may also want to take a look at the WordPress themes galleryand download free themes from there.
WordPress Plugins
To extend the functionality of your blog, WordPress allows you to install additional Plugins (Add-ons/ Components) to your website.
Plugins are files apart from the WordPress basic installation that you download and install to provide additional functionality to your website.
Installing a plugin to WordPress is easy and simple. All you need to do is to upload the plugin files to your “wp-content/plugins” directory. Once the files are available in that directory, they will be then displayed in the administrative backend. You can then activate/deactivate them accordingly.
Uninstalling a plugin is also easy. Just delete the plugin files from the “wp-content/plugins” directory.
On the other hand, some WordPress plugins require some additional steps than just uploading the files, so bear in mind to refer to the plugin documentation for further instructions.
Including Images in WordPress
Speaking about plugins, WPG2 would be a good example.
WPG2 is a WordPress plugin that enables you to post images or photos within you sidebar and blog entries.
In order to install WPG2 you need to download and install Imageblock and Imageframes modules first.
Once these modules are installed, you can see it included in WordPress Template. Including images in your Sidebar would require some additional steps.
You will need to add the following code to your WordPress Sidebar Template file
cPanel > FileManager
Locate the file named: sidebar.php, open the file for editing and add this line: <?php print g2_sidebarimageblock(); ?> Save and close the file.
Log into WordPress administrative panel
Options > Gallery2 > Sidebar Options
There you can set the pictures of your choice that would be included in the Sidebar.
- Don’t forget to set the Thumbnail Image Size in order to maintain proper image frames
Click Update Options to apply the changes made.
WordPress Recent Comments
Another beneficial plugin for WordPress is: “Recent Comments”. It supports WordPress versions 1.5, 2.0, 2.1 and is easily configurable from within the WordPress administrative interface. This plugin can handle trackbacks and comments in separate lists or in combined ones. You can also set the order of comments by date or by postings. “Recent Comments” plugin has various feature which you can benefit of.
Installing Recent Comments Download the plugin, unzip it on your computer and then upload the file: “get-recent-comments.php” to the following directory:
/public_html/path_to_your_blog/wp-content/plugins
After the upload is successfully completed, login to WordPress admin panel.
Plugins Section > Activate (on the plugin newly uploaded)
If your theme is up-to-date and supports Widgets then just drag and drop “Get Recent Comments” and “Get Recent Trackbacks” into the Sidebar.
In case your theme does not support widgets, you will have to insert the following code
<?php if (function_exists('get_recent_comments')) { ?><li><h2><?php _e('Recent
Comments:'); ?></h2><ul><?php get_recent_comments(); ?></ul></li><?php } ?> <?php
if(function_exists('get_recent_trackbacks')) { ?><li><h2><?php _e('Recent <br />
Trackbacks:'); ?></h2><ul><?php get_recent_trackbacks(); ?></ul></li><?php } ?>
into the Sidebar template
wp-content/themes/<name of theme>/sidebar.php
All in One SEO Pack
All in One SEO (Search Engine Optimization) pack is on of the most popular plugins in WordPress.
The importance of this plugin is that it optimizes your blog for search engines through automatically generating META tags, optimizing your titles. All these factors, along with others, increase the rank of your website in the search engine results pages.
Installing All in One SEO
Download and unzip the plugin files to your desktop, upload the extracted directory to
/wp-content/plugins/
Login to your WordPress administrative backend and Activate the plugin through the "Plugins" Section. Then
Options > All in One SEO