WordPress Complete Tutorial 04: WordPress Settings
This is the forth post of my WordPress Complete Tutorial series.
For all tutorials in this series, please visit:
We have our blog created and a nice theme installed. The layout of the blog is basically ready, so we are going to talk about some other settings of WordPress.
General Settings
Let’s go to Admin Panel(http://YourBlog.com/wp-admin), we will take a look at Settings section. The first Item is General settings.
Here are the basic settings of the blog. You can change the name of the blog(Site Title), your slogan(Tagline), timezone and date time format.
Writing Settings
These are the settings for writing and publishing content.
Size of the post box is the size of the editor, 20 lines means you can type 20 lines in text area, there will be a scroll bar when you pass 20.
Formatting is about graphic emotion and XHTML formating. It’s not recommended to check the second option.
Default Post Category and Default Link Category sets which category to used when a post/link is not specified to any category.
Press This is a tool let you easily grab content from other website and post it to your blog, you can try it out following the instruction.
Post by email: there is a detail instruction can be found here.
If you host your own WordPress blog, you’ll see some other settings in this section, like Remote Publishing and Update Services. we’ll leave them to later when we talk about self-installed WordPress blog.
Reading Settings
Reading settings are about what to be showed to readers. You can set how many posts to be displayed on the home page and how many in RSS feed.
Email Settings is only available on WordPress.com, it’s a email sent to your subscribers. You won’t find this in self-hosted WordPress blog.
Discussion Settings
There are a lot of options in this section. They are mostly self-explained. We’ll go through the most useful items.
Default article settings: you should check all three items of this part.
Other comment settings: these are optional and personal, choose what you like. I suggest you to check the first item, ““, this make sure you can communicate with commenters.
The second item, “
E-mail me whenever: it’s better to check “A comment is held for moderation“, it will send a email to you when a comment is held for moderation, you should either approve it or delete it. You should reply to comments as soon as possible. This will make commenters feel like you’re concern about them.
Before a comment appears: check “Comment author must have a previously approved comment“, this means you need to approve the first comment by a commenter, if one has a comment approved before, his comments will be showed automatically, you don’t need to approve them again.
Avatar: is an image that represents you. WordPress uses Gravatar service. This service allows you to use your avatar in different websites/blogs without uploading again. WordPress will recognize your avatar via email. So if you set up your Gravatar with the same email on your blog, you can see your avatar here.
Default avatar is for those who have no Gravatar/Avatar.
Media Settings
Media settings are about images and videos.
You can set default image sizes, there are three types of image size, you will be able to choose them from editor.
Auto-Embeds: will convert video URL into a video. For example, you post a link of a video on YouTube in your post. WordPress will embed the video into the post, so that you can watch it on the blog.
Privacy Settings
There is only one option in privacy settings, it’s about visibility of your blog.
Conclusion
There are some other settings I didn’t talk about, because they are only available on WordPress.com. If you install a blog on your own server, you won’t see them. So that I skipped them, and I guess you can figure them out by your won, if you’ve got any questions, feel free to comment here.
And there is one more important setting, Permalinks, that I didn’t cover, because it’s not available on WordPress.com, I’ll talk about this later in this series.
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