Appearance

When you click Appearance in the navigation menu, a drop-down list opens,
displaying the following links:
✦ Themes: Opens the Manage Themes page, where you can manage the
themes available on your blog. Check out Book VI, Chapter 2 to find out
about using themes on your WordPress blog and managing themes on
this page.
✦ Widgets: Opens the Widgets page, where you can add, delete, edit, and
manage the widgets that you use on your blog.
✦ Menus: Opens the Menus page, where you can build navigation menus
that will appear on your site. Book VI, Chapter 1 provides information
on creating menus by using this feature.
✦ Background: Opens the Custom Background page, where you can
upload an image to use as the background of your WordPress blog
design. Like the Custom Header option (discussed in the next bullet),
the Custom Background option exists in the Appearances menu only
if you have a theme that has activated the custom background feature

✦ Header: Opens the Your Header Image page, where you can upload an
image to use in the header (or top) of your WordPress blog; however,
this menu item and page exist only if you are using a theme that has acti-
vated the custom header feature (covered in Book VI). The Twenty Ten
theme is activated by default on all new WordPress blogs, which is why
we include this menu item in this list. Not all WordPress themes use the
Customize Header feature, so you don’t see this menu item if your theme
doesn’t take advantage of that feature.
✦ Editor: Opens the Theme Editor page, where you can edit your theme
templates. Book VI has extensive information on themes and templates.
Uploading custom header and background images helps you individualize
the visual design of your blog or Web site. You can find more information
on tweaking and customizing your WordPress theme in Book VI, as well as
a great deal of information about how to use WordPress themes (includ-
ing where to find, install, and activate them in your WordPress blog) and
detailed information about using WordPress widgets to display the content
you want.
The previous posts provides information about WordPress themes and templates. You
can dig deep into WordPress template tags and tweak an existing WordPress
theme by using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to customize your theme a bit
more to your liking.

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Comments

Comments in the navigation menu don’t have a drop-down list of links. You simply click Comments to open the Comments page, where WordPress gives you the options to view
✦ All: Shows all comments that currently exist on your blog, including
approved, pending, and spam comments
✦ Pending: Shows comments that you haven’t yet approved but are
pending in the moderation queue
✦ Approved: Shows all comments that you previously approved ✦ Spam: Shows all the comments that are marked as spam
✦ Trash: Shows comments that you marked as Trash but haven’t deleted
permanently from your blog
In Book III, Chapter 5, we give you details on how to use the Comments section of your WordPress Dashboard.

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Pages

People use this feature to create pages on their sites such as an About Me or Contact Me page. Flip to Book IV, Chapter 2 for more information on pages. Click Pages to reveal the drop-down list:
✦ Pages: Opens the Pages page, where you can search, view, edit, and
delete pages in your WordPress blog.
✦ Add New: Opens the Add New Page page, where you can compose, save,
and publish a new page on your blog. Book IV, Chapter 2 describes the
difference between a post and a page — it’s subtle, but posts and pages
are very different from one another!
You can also get to the Add New Page page by clicking the Add New button on the Pages page.

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Links

The next item in the navigation menu is Links. Expand the Links drop-down list by clicking the down arrow to the right of Links:

✦ Links: Opens the Links page, where you can view, search, edit, and
delete existing links in your WordPress blog. Book III, Chapter 6 gives you detailed information about links, link lists, and blogrolls.
✦ Add New: Opens the Add New Link page, where you can add new links
to your link lists. (You can find more information about creating and
managing link lists in Book III, Chapter 6.)
You can also get to the Add New Link page by clicking the Links menu.
✦ Link Categories: Opens the Link Categories page, where you can add
new and view, edit, and delete existing link categories

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Media

Click Media to expand the drop-down list of links for this section:

✦ Library: Opens the Media Library page. On this page, you can view,
search, and manage all the media files you’ve ever uploaded to your
WordPress blog.

✦ Add New: Opens the Upload New Media page, where you can use the
built-in uploader to transfer media files from your computer to the
media directory in WordPress. Book IV, Chapters 3 and 4 take you
through the details of how to upload images, videos, and audio files
by using the WordPress upload feature.
You can also get to the Upload New Media page by clicking Add New button on the Media Library page.

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Setting Your Blog’s Format

In addition to setting your personal settings in the Dashboard, you can
manage the day-to-day maintenance of your blog. The following sections take
you through the links to these pages in the Dashboard navigation menus.
Posts
Click the down arrow to the right of Pages in the navigation menu to open a drop-down list with four links: Posts, Add New, Tags, and Categories. Each link gives you the tools you need to publish content to your blog:
✦ Posts: Opens the Posts page, where a listing appears of all the saved posts
you’ve written on your blog. On this page, you can search for posts by
date, category, or keyword. You can view all posts, only posts that have
been published, or just posts that you’ve saved but haven’t published
(drafts). You can also edit and delete posts from this page. Check out
Book IV, Chapter 1 for more information on editing posts on your blog.
✦ Add New: Opens the Add New Post page, where you can compose your
blog posts, set the options for each post (such as assigning a post to a
category, or making it a private or public post), and publish the post to
your blog. You can find more information on posts, post options, and
You can also get to the Add New Post page by clicking the Add New button on the Posts page.
✦ Categories: Opens the Categories page, where you can view, edit, add,
and delete categories on your blog. Find more information on creating
categories in Book III, Chapter 7.
✦ Post Tags: Opens the Post Tags page in your WordPress Dashboard,
where you can view, add, edit, and delete tags on your blog. Book III,
Chapter 7 provides you with more information about tags and using them on your blog.

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Creating Your Personal Profile

To personalize your blog, visit your Profile page in your WordPress Dashboard.

To access your Profile page, click the down arrow to the right of Users to open the Users menu list, and then click the Your Profile link. The Profile page appears, as shown in Figure 3-10.

Here are the settings on this page:

✦ Personal Options: In the Personal Options section, you can set three
preferences for your blog:
• Visual Editor: Select this check box to indicate that you want to use
the Visual Editor when writing your posts. The Visual Editor refers
to the formatting options you find in the Write Post page (discussed
in detail in Book IV, Chapter 1). By default, the check box is selected,
which means that the Visual Editor is on. To turn it off, clear the
check box.

 

• Admin Color Scheme: These options set the colors in your

Dashboard. The default is the Gray color scheme. If you’ve been
using WordPress since before March 2007, the Blue color scheme
will be familiar to you because previous versions of the Dashboard
used those colors.
• Keyboard Shortcuts: Enables you to use keyboard shortcuts for com-
ment moderation. To find out more about keyboard shortcuts, click
the More Information link; you’re taken to the Keyboard Shortcuts
page (http://codex.wordpress.org/Keyboard_Shortcuts) in
the WordPress Codex, which offers some helpful information.
• Show Admin Bar: Allows you to control where the admin bar (see
Book III, Chapter 1) is shown on your site. By default, the admin bar
displays on the top of every page of your site when you are viewing
it in your browser. You can also set it to display on the top of every
Dashboard page by checking the In Dashboard check box. You can
completely disable the admin bar by removing the checks in the
check boxes.

✦ Name: Input personal information, such as your first name, last name,
and nickname, and specify how you want your name to appear publicly.
Fill in the text boxes with the requested information.
✦ Contact Info: Provide your e-mail address and other contact information
to tell your visitors who you are and where they can contact you. Aside
from e-mail, you can provide your username for various Internet chat
programs such as Yahoo! IM, AIM (AOL Instant Messenger), and Jabber/
Google Talk.
Your e-mail address is the only required entry in this section. This
address is the one WordPress uses to notify you when you have new comments or new user registrations on your blog. Make sure to use a real e-mail address so that you get these notifications.
✦ About Yourself: Provide a little bio for yourself and change the
password for your blog, if you want, including
• Biographical Info: Type a short bio in the Biographical Info text box.
This information can appear publicly if you’re using a theme that
displays your bio, so be creative!
• New Password: When you want to change the password for your blog,
type your new password in the first text box in the New Password
section. To confirm your new password, type it again in the second
text box.

When your profile is published to your Web site, not only can anyone view
it, but also search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, can pick it up. Always be careful with the information in your profile. Think hard about the information you want to share with the rest of the world!
Directly below the two New Password text boxes is a little password helper. WordPress helps you create a secure password. It alerts you if the password you chose is too short or not secure enough by telling you that it’s Bad.
When creating a new password, use a combination of letters, numbers, and symbols to make it hard for anyone to guess (for example, aty89!#4j).
When you create a password that WordPress thinks is a good one, it lets you know by saying that the password is Strong.

Change your password frequently. We can’t recommend this practice
strongly enough. Some people on the Internet make it their business to
attempt to hijack blogs for their own malicious purposes. If you change your password monthly, you lower your risk by keeping hackers guessing.
When you finish setting all the options on the Profile page, don’t forget to click the Update Profile button to save your changes.

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Creating ht access files

You and WordPress work together in glorious harmony to create the
.htaccess file that lets you use a pretty permalink structure in your blog. Follow these steps to create an .htaccess file on your Web server and create a new permalink structure:
1. Using a plain-text editor (such as Notepad for Windows or TextEdit for
a Mac), create a blank file; name it htaccess.txt and upload it to
your Web server via FTP. (See Book II, Chapter 2 for more information
about FTP.)
2. After the file is uploaded to your Web server, rename the file
.htaccess (notice the period at the beginning), and make sure that it is writable by the server by changing permissions to either 755 or 777. (See Book II, Chapter 2 for information on changing permissions on server files.)
If .htaccess already exists, you can find it in the root of your directory on your Web server — that is, the same directory where you find your wp-config.php file. If you don’t see it in the root directory, try changing the options of your FTP client to show hidden files. (Because the .htaccess file starts with a period [.], it may not be visible until you configure your FTP client to show hidden files.)
3. Create the permalink structure in the Customize Permalink Structure Book III
page in your WordPress Dashboard. Chapter 3
4. Click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the Customize
Permalink Structure page.
WordPress inserts into the .htaccess file the specific rules necessary for making the permalink structure functional in your blog.
If you follow the preceding steps correctly, you have an .htaccess file on
your Web server that has the correct permissions set so that WordPress
can write the correct rules to it. Your pretty permalink structure works
flawlessly. Kudos!
If you open the .htaccess file and look at it now, you see that it’s no longer blank. It should have a set of code in it called rewrite rules, which looks
something like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c> RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

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Making sure that your permalinks work with your server

After you set the format for the permalinks for your site by using any options other than the default, WordPress writes specific rules, or directives, to the .htaccess file on your Web server. The .htaccess file in turn communicates to your Web server how it should serve up the permalinks, according to the permalink structure you chose to use.

To use an .htaccess file, you need to know the answers to two questions:

✦ Does your Web server configuration use and give you access to
the .htaccess file?
✦ Does your Web server run Apache with the mod_rewrite module?
If you don’t know the answers, contact your hosting provider to find out.
If the answer to both questions is yes, proceed to the following section. If
the answer is no, check out the “Working with servers that don’t use Apache mod_rewrite” sidebar, in this chapter.

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Configuring the Settings

If you want your permalink to show the year, month, day, category, and post

name, select the Custom Structure radio button in the Customize Permalink
Structure page and type the following tags in the Custom Structure text box:

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

By using this permalink format, the link for a post made on February 1, 2011, called WordPress All in One For Dummies and filed in the Books I Read
category, would look like this:

http://yourdomain.com/2011/02/01/books-i-read/wordpress-all-in-one-for-dummies/

Be sure to include the slashes before tags, between tags, and at the very end of the string of tags. This format ensures that WordPress creates correct, working permalinks by using the correct re_write rules located in the .htaccess file for your site. (See the following section for more information on re_write rules and .htaccess files.)
Changing the structure of your permalinks in the future affects the perma-
links for all the posts on your blog . . . new and old. Keep this fact in mind if
you ever decide to change the permalink structure. An especially important
reason: Search engines (such as Google and Yahoo!) index the posts on
your site by their permalinks, so changing the permalink structure makes
all those indexed links obsolete.
Don’t forget to click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the Customize
Permalink Structure page; otherwise, your permalink changes aren’t saved!

 

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Custom Permalinks

Custom Permalinks

Permalink Tag       Results

%year%                  Four-digit year (such as 2007)

%monthnum%      Two-digit month (such as 02 for February)

%day%                   Two-digit day (such as 30)

%hour%                  Two-digit hour of the day (such as 15 for 3 p.m.)

%minute%              Two-digit minute (such as 45)

%second%              Two-digit second (such as 10)

%postname%        Text — usually, the post name — separated by hyphens

(such as making-pretty-permalinks)

%post_id%             The unique numerical ID of the post (such as 344)

%category%           The text of the category name in which you filed the post

(such as books-i-read)

%author%              The text of the post author’s name

(such as lisa-sabin-wilson)

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Permalinks

 

Each WordPress blog post is assigned its own Web page, and the address

(or URL) of that page is called a permalink. Posts that you see in WordPress blogs usually have the post permalink in four typical areas:

✦ The title of the blog post
✦ The Comments link below the post
✦ A Permalink link that appears (in most themes) below the post ✦ The titles of posts appearing in a Recent Posts sidebar
Permalinks are meant to be permanent links to your blog posts (which is where the perma part of that word comes from, in case you’re wondering). Other bloggers can use a post permalink to refer to that particular blog post. Ideally, the permalink of a post never changes. WordPress creates the permalink automatically when you publish a new post.

By default, a blog post permalink in WordPress looks like this:

http://yourdomain.com/?p=100/

The p stands for post, and 100 is the ID assigned to the individual post. You can leave the permalinks in this format, if you don’t mind letting WordPress associate each post with an ID number.
WordPress, however, lets you take your permalinks to the beauty salon for a bit of makeover so that you can create pretty permalinks. You probably didn’t know that permalinks could be pretty, did you?

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Privacy

The next Settings menu item list is Privacy; click it to display the Privacy Settings page.
This page contains only two options, both of which concern visibility on
your blog:

✦ I Would Like My Blog to Be Visible to Everyone, Including Search
Engines (Like Google, Bing, Technorati) and Archivers: This option is the default setting; you’re freely allowing search engines to visit your blog and list you in their search results, and letting your site be indexed in blog archive services, such as Technorati.
✦ I Would Like to Block Search Engines, but Allow Normal Visitors: If
you are one of those rare bloggers who doesn’t want that type of expo-
sure for your blog, but you do want to let normal visitors (read: no
search engines) see your blog, select this option.

Generally, you want search engines to be able to find your blog. However, if you have special circumstances, you may want to enforce your privacy settings. For example, we blocked search engines for the site we’re using to

create the figures in this book because we don’t want search engines to find it. At the top of the site, to the right of the site title, a note says Search
Engines Blocked. This note exists only when you have your privacy settings set to block search engines. When you have privacy enabled, search engines and other content bots can’t find your Web site.
Be sure to click the Save Changes button after you set all your options on the Privacy Settings page to make the changes take effect.

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Media

The next menu item in the Settings menu list is Media; click the Media link to make the Media Settings page open (see Figure 3-7).
On the Media Settings page, you can configure the options for how your image files (graphics and photos) are resized for use in your blog.

The first set of options on the Media Settings page deals with images.
WordPress automatically resizes your images for you in three different sizes.
The dimensions are referenced in pixels by width, and then height. (For
example, 150 x 150 means 150 pixels in width by 150 pixels in height.)

✦ Thumbnail Size: The default is 150 x 150; enter the width and height of
your choice. Select the Crop Thumbnail to Exact Dimensions check box to
resize the thumbnail exactly to the width and height you specify. Deselect
this check box to make WordPress resize the image proportionally.
✦ Medium Size: The default is 300 x 300; enter the width and height
numbers of your choice.
✦ Large Size: The default is 1024 x 1024; enter the width and height
numbers of your choice.

In Book VI, we go into detail about WordPress themes and templates, including how you can add image sizes other than just these three. You can use these additional images sizes in and around your Web site, as well as a feature called Featured Image for your posts and articles.

The second set of options on the Media Settings page deals with embed-
ded links and files, such as video and audio files. Select the check box that
says Attempt to Automatically Embed All Plain Text URLs if you want your
WordPress blog to automatically attach a hyperlink to a text-based URL that
you type into your posts or pages. Activating this option means that you
don’t have to copy and paste the full code given to you by services such
as YouTube — instead, you simply paste the hyperlink to the video, and
WordPress automatically does the video embedding for you.
Next, set the width and height for the maximum size you want embedded files to be within your post and pages. Embedded items include video players and audio players that appear within your post or page.
Finally, the last set of options on the Media Settings page is the Uploading
Files section. Here, you can tell WordPress where to store your uploaded
media files:

✦ Store Uploads in This Folder: Type the server path to the folder on your

Web server where you want your file uploads to be stored. The default is wp-content/uploads. You can specify any folder you want. Just be sure that the folder you specify has permissions (chmod) set to 755 so that it’s writable. (See Book II, Chapter 2 for more information on setting file permissions.)
✦ Full URL Path to Files (Optional): You can also type the full URL path
to the Uploads folder as an optional setting. (The full URL path is some-
thing like http://yourdomain.com/wp-content/uploads.)
✦ Organize My Files into Month and Year-Based Folders: Select this
check box to have WordPress organize your uploaded files in folders by
month and by year. Files you upload in September 2010, for example, would be in the following folder: /wp-content/uploads/2010/09/. Likewise, files you upload in October 2010, would be in /wp-content/ uploads/2010/10/.
This check box is selected by default; uncheck it if you don’t want WordPress to organize your files by month and year.

Be sure to click the Save Changes button to save your configurations!

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Avatars

The final section of the Discussion Settings page is Avatars. (See the nearby sidebar, “What are avatars, and how do they relate to WordPress?,” for information about avatars.) In this section, you can select different settings for the use and display of avatars on your site:
1. In the Avatar Display section (see Figure 3-5), decide how to display
avatars on your site.
You have two options:
• Don’t Show Avatars: Select this radio button if you don’t want
your blog to display avatars.
• Show Avatars: Select this radio button to have your blog
display avatars.
2. In the Maximum Rating section, select the radio button for the maxi-
mum avatar rating you want to allow for the avatars that do appear on
your site.
This feature works much like the American movie-rating system. You
can select G, PG, R, and X ratings for the avatars that appear on your
site, as shown in Figure 3-5. If your site is family-friendly, you probably
don’t want it to display R- or X-rated avatars, so select G or PG.
3. Select the radio button for a default avatar in the Default Avatar
section (see Figure 3-5).
4. Click the Save Changes button.
Avatars appear in a couple of places:
✦ The Comments page in the Dashboard: In Figure 3-6, the first two com-
ments display either the commenter’s avatar or the default avatar if the
commenter hasn’t created his or her own.
✦ The comments on individual blog posts in your blog: Figure 3-7 shows
a list of comments on a blog post. If the user doesn’t have an avatar
assigned from http://gravatar.com, the default avatar appears.
To enable the display of avatars in comments on your blog, the Comments
template (comments.php) in your active theme has to contain the code to
display them. Hop on over to Book VI to find information about themes and
templates, including template tags that allow you to display avatars in your
comment list.
Click the Save Changes button after you set all your options on the Discussion Settings page to make the changes take effect.

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Comment Blacklist

In this section, type a list of words, URLs, e-mail addresses, and/or IP
addresses that you want to flat-out ban from your blog. Items placed here

don’t even make it into your comment moderation queue; the WordPress
system filters them as spam. We’d give examples of blacklist words, but the
words we’ve placed in our blacklists aren’t family-friendly and have no place in a nice book like this one.

What are avatars, and how do
they relate to WordPress?

An avatar is an online graphical representa-
tion of an individual. It’s a small graphic icon
that people use to visually represent them-
selves on the Web in areas they participate in
conversations, such as discussion forums and
blog comments. Gravatars are globally recog-
nized avatars; they are avatars that you can
take with you wherever you go. They appear
alongside blog comments, blog posts, and
discussion forums as long as the site you’re

interacting with is Gravatar-enabled. In October
2007, Automattic, the core group behind the
WordPress platform, purchased the Gravatar
service and integrated it into WordPress so
that all could enjoy and benefit from the service.
Gravatars are not automatic; you need to sign
up for an account with Gravatar so that you can
receive an avatar, via your e-mail address. Find
out more about Gravatar by visiting http://
gravatar.com.

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Comment Moderation

In the Comment Moderation section, you can set options to specify what
types of comments are held in the moderation queue to await your approval.

To prevent spammers from spamming your blog with a ton of links, enter a
number in the Hold a Comment in the Queue If It Contains X or More Links
text box. The default number of links allowed is two. Try that setting, and
if you find that you’re getting a lot of spam comments that contain links,
consider dropping that number down to 1, or even 0, to prevent those
comments from being published on your blog. Sometimes, legitimate com-
menters will include a link or two in the body of their comment; after a com-
menter is marked as approved, she is no longer affected by this method of
spam protection.
The large text box in the Comment Moderation section lets you type key-
words, URLs, e-mail addresses, and IP addresses so that if they appear in
comments, you want to hold those comments in the moderation queue for
your approval.

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Before a Comment Appears

The two options in the Before a Comment Appears section tell WordPress
how you want WordPress to handle comments before they appear in
your blog:
✦ An Administrator Must Always Approve the Comment: Disabled by
default, this option keeps every single comment left on your blog in
the moderation queue until you, the administrator, log in and approve
it. Select this check box to enable this option.
✦ Comment Author Must Have a Previously Approved Comment:
Enabled by default, this option requires comments posted by all first-
time commenters to be sent to the comment moderation queue for
approval by the administrator of the blog. After comment authors have
been approved for the first time, they remain approved for every com-
ment thereafter (this cannot be changed). WordPress stores their e-mail
addresses in the database, and any future comments that match any
stored e-mails are approved automatically. This feature is another mea-
sure that WordPress has built in to combat comment spam.

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E-Mail Me Whenever

The two options in the E-Mail Me Whenever section are enabled by default:

✦ Anyone Posts a Comment: Enabling this option means that you receive

an e-mail notification whenever anyone leaves a comment on your blog.
Deselect the check box if you don’t want to be notified by e-mail about
every new comment.

✦ A Comment Is Held for Moderation: This option lets you receive an

e-mail notification whenever a comment is awaiting your approval in the comment moderation queue. (See Book III, Chapter 5 for more information about the comment moderation queue.) You need to deselect this option if you don’t want to receive this notification.

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Other Comment Settings

The Other Comment Settings section tells WordPress how to handle comments:
✦ Comment Author Must Fill Out Their Name and E-Mail: Enabled by
default, this option requires all commenters on your blog to fill in the
Name and E-Mail fields when leaving comments. This option can really
help you combat comment spam. (See Book III, Chapter 5 for informa-
tion on comment spam.) Deselect this check box to disable this option.
✦ Users Must Be Registered and Logged in to Comment: Not enabled by Book III
default, this option allows you to accept comments on your blog from Chapter 3
only people who are registered and logged in as a user on your blog. If the user isn’t logged in, she sees a message that reads, “You Must Be Logged in in Order to Leave a Comment.”
✦ Automatically Close Comments on Articles Older Than X Days: Select
the check box next to this option to tell WordPress you want comments
on older articles to be automatically closed. Fill in the text box provided
with the number of days you want to wait before WordPress closes
comments on articles.
Many bloggers use this very effective anti-spam technique to keep the comment and trackback spam on their blog down.
✦ Enable Threaded (Nested) Comments X Levels Deep: From the drop-
down list, you can select the level of threaded comments you want to
have on your blog. The default is one; you can choose up to ten levels.
Instead of all comments being displayed on your blog in chronological
order (as they are by default), nesting them allows you and your readers
to reply to comments within the comment itself.

✦ Break Comments into Pages with X Comments Per Page: Fill in the text
box with the number of comments you want to appear on one page. This
setting can really help blogs that receive a large number of comments.
It provides you with the ability to break the long string of comments
into several pages, which makes them easier to read and helps speed
up the load time of your site because the page isn’t loading such a large
number of comments at once.
✦ Comments Should Be Displayed with the Older/Newer Comments at
the Top of Each Page: From the drop-down list, select Older or Newer.
Selecting Older displays the comments on your blog in the order of
oldest to newest. Selecting Newer does the opposite: displays the
comments on your blog in the order of newest to oldest.

 

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