WordPress: The Beginning

Although there are many beginner guides out there, WordPress can still seem very daunting for new users. Most beginner guides to WordPress will show you how to install it, but then leave you hanging after that. By the end of this article your WordPress installation should be all set-up and you should know how to set the basic preferences for it.

WordPress Requirements

PHP version 4.2 or greater
MySQL version 3.23.23 or greater

To check for these things you can either send an e-mail to your web host asking about it, check to see if your site’s control panel lists it, or you can create a phpinfo file. To create a phpinfo file open up your favorite text edit and copy “” into it (without the quotes).

Then save the file as a regular text file and name it something that ends in .php like phpinfo.php. Open up your FTP editor and upload the file to your site’s root directory then goto http://your-domain/phpinfo.php

If the text “” appears on the screen then your host does not support PHP. If you see any other error warnings please contact your host and ask them about it. If all went well you should see the PHP logo and a bunch of data.

Make sure the PHP Version listed on the top is equal to or higher than version 4.2. Scroll down to the “MySQL” section, which is about 2/3 of the way down, and make the the “Client API version” is equal to or higher than 3.23.23.

If you have a version lower than any of those listed above then you may want to contact your web host and ask them to upgrade.

You can now remove the phpinfo.php file from your site.

The Install

The WordPress team has put together an excellent guide for the install procedure. You can even have the install4free group install it for you. The rest of this guide assumes your install went successfully.

The Administration Menu

Now it is time to log into your administration control panel for WordPress. When you are finished installing it should have given you a link to it, but in case it didn’t the path to the admin tools is /wordpress-install-path/wp-admin/.

One thing I love about WordPress is that it labels all of the main administration menus perfectly. Most of the menus are pretty self explanatory, but just in case you get confused I wrote up a list of what each section is for:

• Dashboard

  The Dashboard gives you an overview of your blog such as recent posts and comments. It even gets recent incoming links to your blog (thanks to Technorati). The Dashboard also gives you the recent WordPress news.

  

  Oh yes, and lets not forget it provides you with some quick stats for your blog as well.

• Write
  The write menu lets you well… write stuff. By default there are only two sub-menus for this, “Write Post” and “Write Page”. You will generally be using the write post function most of the time, but WordPress also lets you create little web-pages that are separate from your blog (but are still stored in the database). An example of a page would be the “About This Site” page on my Big Tech Blog.
• Manage

  The manage menu is where you can delete, edit, and view existing posts and pages, as well as create, edit, and delete your blog’s categories, comments, and files. You will probably be spending a ton of time in this section, so you should have a look around to see what you can do.

• Links

  One great thing about blogs is that they link to each other like crazy. This inherently makes them perfect for good search engine rankings as well as high traffic volume. The links section of the administration panel lets you manage your blog’s blogroll. You can even import a blogroll from another blog system. One thing to remember is to only link to good web sites, and not bad ones. If a search engine such as Google sees that your blog is linking to a bunch of spam sites it will greatly lower your search engine ratings.

• Presentation

  The presentation menu is where you can manage your blog’s themes. By default WordPress comes with two themes, but you can find themes all over the Internet. Heck, you can even make your own if you are knowledgeable with HTML (and PHP, but that is not as important).

• Plugins
  Most modern day content management systems allow user-created plugins, and WordPress is no exception. You can find all sorts of plugins that can make your life, as a blogger, much much easier. I think the best plugins are the spam prevention ones. before I installed one this blog was getting 20 comment spams a day (darn Viagra), but now I get zero. Plugins are truly a godsend.

  The Plugins section lets you activate, deactivate, and edit your installed plugins.

• Users

  The Users section is where you can edit your profile settings, such as your display name, as well as manage other users. WordPress lets you create several editors, authors, and administrators to help you manage your blog. However, by default it does NOT let you have multiple blogs.

  There is a version of WordPress called Multi-User WordPress that may interest you if you would like to allow users to have their own blogs. That is the same version that is used by WordPress.com.

• Options
  You can set all of your blog’s preferences in the Options section. The preferences range from being as simple as your blog’s title all the way up to setting how your users interact with each other.
• Import

  And last but not least is the Import section. Its purpose is very simple, it allows you to import existing blog data from another system such as Blogger and LiveJournal. If you are coming from one of the systems listed on the page then you will probably want to import your data. I am sure there are plugins somewhere online that let you transfer data from an even wider range of blog systems.

Setting The Basic Options

The first thing I always do to a fresh WordPress install is to set my profile settings, to do this click on the Users tab. Here you can set your email address, your display name (which is what will display on your blog, my display name is Jeremy), your AIM username…etc. Make sure you click Save!

Next you should probably take a look at the general options for WordPress (under the Options section) and make sure that basic stuff such as your time and date format are set correctly.

While in the options sections you should probably also change the Permalinks settings as well. Permalinks are, in a nutshell, permanent links to your posts. They are what other sites can link to if they are discussing one of your posts. I’d highly recommend using the Date and Name or the Numeric permalink structure. The default structure can hurt you with search engine rankings and such.

Notice how the other structures don’t have the “?p=” in them. This is because the other ones basically “trick” all web browsers, search engines…etc into thinking your post is a static page on your web server, but in reality it is inside a database. This is important because some search engines can’t read your pages correctly if they are in the default permalink format.

The final thing I usually do to fresh installs is to delete the default post. Go into the Manage section and click the “delete” link for the default post.

Well that is it for now, but there is lots more to come.

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