The Following is an in-depth user manual to make WordPress user-friendly.
Links work both internally and externally (referring to WordPress's own site) to give a
thorough explanation of the basic processes that are used by our blog.
| Dashboard | Write | Manage | Comments | Blogroll |
| Presentation | Plugins | Users | Options |
The Dashboard tells you about recent activity both at your site and in the WordPress community at large.
If there is a more recent version of WordPress available, just below the menu tabs, a message will say "A new version of WordPress is available! Please update now." Click on the provided link to download the latest version. Remember to follow the Upgrading WordPress instructions.
The Latest Activity box presents a concise summary and convenient links regarding current events at your blog. Displayed are:
The Dashboard lists "the latest news from the official WordPress development blog." Here you can find out what the WordPress developers have been up to recently and keep up with the latest WordPress related news. In addition to software developments such as version announcements and security notices, news about the WordPress community in general is sometimes posted here.
Titles of posts and links to other blogs related to the the WordPress community.
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SubPanels
Write
Post
Write
Page
You login to your admin panel, and by default, WordPress opens up with various links. For our format, to write a post you can select "Write Post" from the 'Write' option on the dashboard toolbar or selecet "Write a post" from the options menu. This panel allows you to populate your site with actual information! It handles the creation of new Posts and Pages, and the editing of old Posts and Pages. You'll be spending most of your administration time here, so you should spend a bit of time familiarizing yourself with it.
Upon entering the Administration Panels, WordPress defaults to the Write > Post SubPanel. This is the SubPanel you will use to write new posts and edit existing ones.
Pages are like posts but live outside of the normal blog chronology. This means they will not be displayed with the rest of your posts; they can only be displayed individually. The Write > Page SubPanel allows you to create new Pages and edit existing ones.
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All of the actual content of your site can be managed through this admin panel. From here you can see lists of all your Posts, Pages, and Categories and edit or view anything in those lists. On this page you can also edit your Templates and other files used by your blog, Import content from various sources, and Export you blog.
Upon visiting the Manage Panel, WordPress defaults to the Manage Posts SubPanel. On this SubPanel you can edit and delete existing posts.
Pages are like posts but "live outside of the normal blog chronology" as you are reminded when you visit the Manage Pages SubPanel. Most everything here at the Manage Pages SubPanel is essentially the same as at the Manage Posts SubPanel. But there are a few noteworthy differences. So go check it out.
Using the Upload Administration Panel, users can edit information and delete uploads that were previously uploaded via the Upload option when writing Posts and Pages. Note that the Miscellaneous Options SubPanel, Uploading, describes the location and structure of the upload directory.
Each Post and Link in WordPress is filed under one or more categories. This aids in navigation and allows Posts and Links to be grouped with others of similar nature.
Each category may be assigned to a Category Parent so that you may set up a hierarchy within the category structure. In creating categories, recognize that each category name must be unique. Thus, even if two categories have two different parents, they must still have different names.
Links to your categories are, by default, shown in two different places on your weblog (assuming you are using the default Kubrick theme). First, WordPress lists these category links in your sidebar. Second, WordPress shows all the categories to which a given post belongs under that of that post. When someone viewing your weblog clicks on one of these category links, a page with all the posts belonging to that category will be displayed.
The Manage Categories SubPanel allows you to create new categories, edit or delete existing ones, and organize your categories hierarchically.
There are many user editable files in a standard WordPress installation. Examples include your theme templates, .htaccess, and my-hacks.php. In the Manage Files SubPanel, these files can be accessed and modified to suit your needs.
WordPress currently supports importing data in the form of posts (articles) and most of the details or features supported by the existing software, from the following content publishing platforms. The details on importing are described in Importing Content.
WordPress Export will create an XML file for you to save to your computer. The format, which is called a WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR file, will contain your posts, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags.
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SubPanels
Comments Awaiting Moderation
Comments are a feature of blogs which allow readers to respond to posts. Typically readers simply provide their own thoughts regarding the content of the post, but users may also provide links to other resources, generate discussion, or simply compliment the author for a well-written post.
Comments can be controlled and regulated through the use of filters for language and content, and often times can be queued for approval before they are visible on the web site. This is useful in dealing with comment spam.
In the Comments SubPanel you can modify or delete content found in comments to your posts. Defining rules about who can write comments and how comments are moderated is done elsewhere. See Discussion SubPanel.
The Awaiting Moderation SubPanel handles comments which have been marked for moderation. These are those which WordPress has decided might be spam (to define how WordPress decides this, see Discussion SubPanel). Such comments are not displayed on your site until you approve them (or until another user with the authority does so).
The menu tab for this SubPanel tells you how many comment WordPress has marked for moderation. So if the menu tab reads "Awaiting Moderation (0)", you don't even have to visit this SubPanel.
When the "0" changes to some other number, you'll need to go to this SubPanel and moderate the comments you find here. Each comment in the Awaiting Moderation SubPanel can be approved, or deleted.
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SubPanels
Manage Blogroll
Add Link
Import
Links
Categories
So now you have a beautifully designed, content rich site on the web. Your only problem is that your site is a dead end; it never references all those other weblogs, humor sites, search engines, sports teams, or chicken cacciatore recipies, that you love so much, not to mention your gramma's "Punk Rock for the Octogenarian in us all" site. You go to these sites all the time, and they need to be presented to your reading public so all can enjoy.
You're in luck. WordPress has a well developed system for managing and displaying all those links.
All link management, including creation, editing, organizing, and importing, is handled through this administration panel.
Links in WordPress don't have to just be simple little links pointing to some other website. WordPress links can be organized by category, have internal references about your relationship to their destinations, be automatically associated with images, and can even be rated on a scale from zero to nine.
Some of these features may sound complicated, but all are easily managed in the following SubPanels. And, for the faint of heart, most of them are optional.
The Manage Blogroll SubPanel is the main SubPanel for link administration. Here you can view all your links, or just the links from a particular category. Upon clicking the Edit button, this pages transforms into a view of just that one link, and you are able to change all of the options for that link.
As you might expect from its name, the Add Link SubPanel handles the creation of new links.
If you have a bunch of links you want to import, the Import Links SubPanel is your solution. Here you can import links from other blogs, via various websites or aggregators.
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SubPanels
Plugins
Plugin Editor
Plugins allow you to add new features to your WordPress blog that don't come standard with the default installation. There are a rich variety of Available Plugins for WordPress, and with the following SubPanels, plugin installation and management is a snap.
The Plugins SubPanel allows you to view the plugins you've downloaded and choose which plugins you want activated on your site. For information on downloading and installing plugins, see Managing Plugins.
Using the Plugin Editor SubPanel, you can modify the source code of all your plugins. This SubPanel behaves precisely like the Manage Files SubPanel. As with editing files from the Manage Files SubPanel, you should probably only use this built-in editor if you don't have any other option.
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SubPanels
Authors & Users
Your
Profile
Every blog probably has at least two users: admin, the account initially set up by WordPress, and the user account you, as the author/owner of the blog, use to write posts. But maybe you want more; perhaps you want several authors for your blog. If you want a person to be able to post to your blog, that person must have access to a user account; typically, every person will have her or his own user account.
At the Users Administration Panel, you can set up all of the user accounts you need. An important administrative feature here is the Roles feature. Depending on their Role, different users have different Capabilities. Briefly, a user can be assigned the following Roles: Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor, or Subscriber.
You can also specify your and others' personal information such as name, e-mail, etc. from the User Administration Panel.
You can create new users and manage the accounts of all your site's users at the Authors and Users SubPanel.
The Your Profile SubPanel is the default SubPanel for the User Administration Panel. Here you can specify your name and how it will be displayed on your site, your e-mail address (for administrative purposes) and other personal information.
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SubPanels
General
Writing
Reading
Discussion
Privacy
Permalinks
Miscellaneous
You might think, "All these other things I've been doing so far at the Administration Panels have involved 'Options'. Are these 'Options' any different?" The answer would be, "Yes." All the settings you've encountered in the other Administration Panels have dealt with very specific parts of your site, or have been of limited scope (only applying to one Category, for example). In the Options Administration Panel are all of the settings that define your weblog as a whole: settings which determine how your site behaves, how you interact with your site, and how the rest of the world interacts with your site.
The following SubPanels control these settings.
The General Options SubPanel is the default SubPanel in the Options Administration Panel and controls some of the most basic configuration settings for your site: your site's title and location, who may register an account at your blog, and how dates and times are calculated and displayed.
Using the Writing Options SubPanel, you can control the interface with which you write new posts. These settings control both WordPress' included Write Post SubPanel and the optional Writing by e-mail feature.
The options in the Reading Options SubPanel are few in number, but still important. You can decide if you want posts, or a "static" Page, displayed as your blog's front (main) page. You can also adjust how many posts are displayed on that main page. In addition, you can adjust syndication feed features to determine how the information from your site is sent to a reader's web browser or other applications.
The Discussion Options SubPanel allows you to set options concerning incoming and outgoing comments, pingbacks and trackbacks. You can also control from this SubPanel the circumstances under which your blog sends you e-mail notifying you about the goings on at your site.
The Privacy Options SubPanel control your blog visibility to search engines such as Google and Technorati. You can decide if you would like your blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers. If you don't want your blog available to the search engines you can block search engines, but allow normal visitors to see your site.
For a nice introduction to Permalinks, check out the Pretty Permalinks section of Introduction to Blogging. But briefly, and to quote the Permalinks Options SubPanel itself:
By default WordPress uses web URIs which have question marks and lots of numbers in them, however WordPress offers you the ability to create a custom URI structure for your permalinks and archives. This can improve the aesthetics, usability, and longevity of your links.
This SubPanel controls how that custom URI structure is defined. For a more in depth description of the way this structure is specified, see the Using Permalinks page.
WordPress has so many features, that some of them defy categorization. Features like file uploads, link tracking and support for custom "hacks" can be controlled from the Miscellaneous Options SubPanel.
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The Sign Out link is found at the top right corner in the Administration Panels. It is simply a link that will log you out from your WordPress blog.
When you sign-in (login) to your blog, WordPress stores a so called "cookie" in your web browser. This cookie allows WordPress to remember who you are; if you leave your blog's site for a while but come back to it later, WordPress will see the cookie and not require you to login again.
However, the cookie cannot tell WordPress who is using the WordPress; in other words, WordPress has no way of looking back at you through your monitor to determine if you are really you. If you have a WordPress cookie set in your web browser, anyone using your computer can access the Administration Panels of your blog. If you don't want this to happen (perhaps you are using a public computer or a computer which other people use), you can click this Sign Out link, and WordPress will delete the cookie from your web browser.
You can, of course, log back in at some later time.
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