WordPress Absolute Beginner’s Guide, Slides of Computer Science

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WordPress

Tris Hussey

800 East 96th Street,

Indianapolis, Indiana 46240

Mr Oddo

Contents at a Glance

vi WORDPRESS^ ABSOLUTE BEGINNER’S GUIDE

• Introduction...........................................................................................
• 1 How Websites Work .............................................................................
• 2 What WordPress Is and How It Works ................................................
• 3 Installing WordPress ...........................................................................
• 4 Installing WordPress Plugins ...............................................................
• 5 Installing WordPress Themes ..............................................................
• 6 Setting Up Your WordPress Site Right the First Time ........................
• 7 Setting Up Your WordPress Site the Right Way: .............................
• 8 All About Jetpack Settings ............................................................... SEO, Social Media, and More
• 9 How WordPress Themes Work .........................................................
• 10 Tweaking, Tuning, and Customizing Your WordPress Site ..............
• 11 Using WordPress: Content................................................................
• 12 Using WordPress: Images, Videos, and Other Media ......................
• 13 WordPress and Mobile Users............................................................
• 14 All About WordPress.com.................................................................
• 15 Maintaining WordPress Sites ............................................................
• 16 Customizations Without (Much) Coding ...........................................
• 17 Advanced WordPress Settings and Uses ..........................................
• 18 Troubleshooting Common WordPress Problems .............................
  • Index .................................................................................................
• INTRODUCTION............................................................................................................... Table of Contents
  • Who This Book Is For
  • How This Book Is Organized
  • The Only Constant Is Change…and WordPress Updates
  • A Note About Browsers and Such...........................................................................
  • Conventions Used in This Book
• 1 How Websites Work
  • All About Domain Names and DNS
  • Choosing a Good Domain Name
  • Choosing a Web Host.............................................................................................
  • Conclusion
• 2 What WordPress Is and How It Works
  • What Is WordPress?
  • How WordPress Works
  • WordPress.org Versus WordPress.com
  • Which WordPress Is Right for You?
  • Conclusion
• 3 Installing WordPress
  • Using One-Click or Easy Installs
  • Installing WordPress Manually
    • Before You Get Started
    • Manual WordPress Install
  • Quick Look at the WordPress Dashboard
  • WordPress Directory Structure
  • A Note About Users
  • Conclusion
• 4 Installing WordPress Plugins................................................................................ v
  • Choosing WordPress Plugins
    • Finding Plugins
  • Installing WordPress Plugins
    • Easy Install
    • Two-Step Install
    • Manual Install
  • Plugin Tips
  • Recommended Starter Plugins
  • Commercial Plugins.................................................................................................
  • Conclusion
• 5 Installing WordPress Themes...............................................................................
  • Your Website............................................................................................................ Choosing the Right WordPress Theme for
  • Installing Themes on Your Blog
    • Easy Install
    • Two-Step Install
    • Manual Install
  • Recommended Starter Themes
  • Commercial/Premium Themes
  • Advanced Tip: How Do I Find What Theme a Website Is Using?
  • Conclusion
• 6 Setting Up Your WordPress Site Right the First Time
  • Basic WordPress Settings
    • General Settings
    • Writing Settings
    • Reading Settings
    • Discussion Settings.............................................................................................
    • Media Settings
    • Permalinks
  • Akismet
  • Setting the Right User Roles
  • Conclusion
    • and More............................................................................................................ 7 Setting Up Your WordPress Site the Right Way: SEO, Social Media,
  • Doing WordPress SEO the Right Way - Settings - Writing - Categories and Tags - Plugins
  • Using Social Media Sharing Tools - Posting to Your Social Network - Helping Visitors Post to Their Networks
  • Finding Out How Many People Visit Your Site
  • Helping WordPress and Your Site Run Faster - Caching - Optimizing Your Theme - Optimizing Your Graphics
  • Backups and Security
  • Conclusion
• 8 All About Jetpack Settings
  • WordPress.com Stats
  • Publicize and Sharing
  • Subscriptions
  • Likes
  • Spelling and Grammar
  • Contact Form
  • WP.me Shortlinks...................................................................................................
  • Shortcodes
  • Custom CSS
  • Extra Sidebar Widgets
  • Photon
  • Conclusion
• 9 How WordPress Themes Work......................................................................... CONTENTS vii
  • WordPress Themes Explained
  • Working with WordPress Themes........................................................................
  • Theme Settings
  • Default WordPress Themes Explained
    • Twenty Twelve
    • Twenty Thirteen
    • Twenty Fourteen
  • Conclusion
• 10 Tweaking, Tuning, and Customizing Your WordPress Site.........................
  • Using Custom Headers
  • Using Custom Backgrounds
  • Using WordPress Menus
  • Using WordPress Widgets
    • Adding a Widget to a Widget Area
    • Moving Widgets Around in Widget Areas
    • Removing Widgets from Widget Areas
    • Text Widget: The Most Powerful of Them All
    • Custom Menu Widgets
    • Cautions
  • Conclusion
• 11 Using WordPress: Content
  • Posts, Pages, Custom Post Types, and Post Formats Explained
    • Posts: Also Known as the Blog Post, But More
    • Pages: Standing Alone with Purpose
    • Custom Post Types: Pulling Posts Out of the Blog Stream
    • Post Formats: Styling Posts in New Ways
  • The Post and Page Editor Explained
  • Writing and Posting Content
    • Creating Links
    • Inserting Images
    • Headings and Paragraph Styles
    • Blockquotes
    • Editing Published Posts
    • Autosaving: Save Your Work and Your Sanity viii WORDPRESS ABSOLUTE BEGINNER’S GUIDE
    • Scheduling Posts and Pages
    • Post/Page Status
    • Controlling Who Sees Your Content
    • Visual Versus Text Views..................................................................................
  • More About Posts..................................................................................................
    • Post Formats
    • How to Use Categories....................................................................................
    • What Are Tags?
  • Taking Advantage of Pages
    • Parent-Child Pages
    • Page Order
    • Page Templates
  • Using Revisions
  • Managing Posts and Pages
  • Importing and Exporting Content
  • Managing Comments
  • Conclusion
• 12 Using WordPress: Images, Videos, and Other Media..................................
  • Managing Media
  • Working with Images
    • Using Featured Images
    • Using Galleries and Slideshows
    • Using the Image Editor....................................................................................
    • Optimizing Images
  • Video and Audio Files...........................................................................................
    • Embedding Content in Posts and Pages
  • Other Files
  • Conclusion
• 13 WordPress and Mobile Users
  • Making Your WordPress Site Mobile Ready
    • Themes
    • Plugins
    • How to Decide What’s Right for You
  • Writing, Posting, and Managing Your Site from a Mobile Device CONTENTS ix
    • WordPress Mobile App
    • Adding Your Sites
    • Posting Through the Mobile App...................................................................
    • Managing Comments
    • Administering Your Site
  • Conclusion
• 14 All About WordPress.com
  • Creating a WordPress.com Account
  • Creating More Sites on WordPress.com.............................................................
  • What’s the Same....................................................................................................
  • What’s Different
  • Key Built-in Features
    • Omnisearch
    • Polls....................................................................................................................
    • Ratings
    • Feedbacks/Contact Forms
  • Users and Making a Private Site
  • Managing Blogs.....................................................................................................
    • Hiding Blogs
    • Changing a Blog’s Address
    • Transferring a Blog to Another User
    • Deleting Blogs
  • Premium Add-ons..................................................................................................
    • Domains
    • Premium Themes..............................................................................................
    • Custom Design
    • More Space
    • VideoPress.........................................................................................................
    • Site Redirect
    • Guided Transfer
    • No Ads...............................................................................................................
    • Professional Package Bundles.........................................................................
  • Conclusion
• 15 Maintaining WordPress Sites x WORDPRESS ABSOLUTE BEGINNER’S GUIDE
  • Updating WordPress
  • Updating Plugins
  • Updating Themes
  • Managing Your WordPress Database
  • Backing Up Your Site
  • What About the Rest of the WordPress Files?
  • Conclusion
• 16 Customizations Without (Much) Coding
  • Easy WordPress Theme Customizations Without Much Coding
  • Widget Locations...................................................................................................
  • Editing Your Theme’s Style with CSS
  • Using Google Fonts
  • Icon Menus with Font Awesome
  • Custom Post Types
  • Conclusion
• 17 Advanced WordPress Settings and Uses
  • Using WordPress as a Website
  • Making a Private WordPress Site
  • WordPress for Communication and Collaboration with P2
  • Setting Up Forums in WordPress.........................................................................
  • Running WordPress on Your Computer
  • Moving a WordPress Site
  • Conclusion
• 18 Troubleshooting Common WordPress Problems CONTENTS xi
  • Fixing Problem Plugins
  • Untangling WordPress Theme Issues
  • Fixing a Damaged Database
  • When WordPress Doesn’t Work
  • Help! I’ve Been Hacked!
  • Conclusion
  • Index

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the Absolute Beginner’s Guide to WordPress. Before we dive

into the book, I want to make sure we’re all on the same page about who

the book is for, how it’s organized, and how I deal with the inevitable

updates to WordPress after this book goes to press.

INTRODUCTION 3

approach here that I did with Using WordPress , which is to write and cover all the

features and facets of WordPress as version agnostic as I can. There are some

things that I don’t expect to change in WordPress anytime soon, and some things I

know will be changing in coming versions. By the time you read this book, chances

are that there will be new versions of WordPress available, so screenshots, steps,

and features may look different here versus what you’re seeing in real life. Don’t

sweat it. Between the built-in help within WordPress, this book, and updates that

I’ll post on my own website (http://trishussey.com), you should be good to go.

Now that those details are out of the way, let’s talk about what this book is really

about: Freedom.

This book is all about learning to use one of the best (and easiest) website and

blogging platforms around. About 20% of the world’s websites run WordPress,

and a good number of the biggest websites in the world (like CNN and The New

York Times) use WordPress, making this free, open source tool a great choice for

sites large and small. Most importantly, to me, WordPress represents the ability

for regular people to be able to install, manage, and customize their own blogs

and websites without needing professionals to help them. WordPress is about the

freedom to create, build, compose, and publish to the world. You can start out

completely free on WordPress.com and move all the way up to a completely cus-

tomized website like the big players have, all using the same tools and software.

Throughout this book, there are tips, tricks, interesting facts, techniques, and tools

to help you get the most out of your WordPress-powered website.

A Note About Browsers and Such

I’m a Mac guy, so all the screenshots in the book use Chrome (or Safari) for Mac

and Chrome or Safari for iOS (for iPad- and iPhone-related discussions). This

doesn’t mean that I’m ignoring all the Windows (or Linux) users out there; it just

means that this is what I use, so that’s what I have for examples. Great pains have

been taken to double (and triple) check that what you see on a Mac screen is

pretty darn close to what you see on a PC screen. Does this mean that there aren’t

going to be slight differences? Nope. Buttons and menus might look a little differ-

ent, but that’s going to be about it. Because WordPress is designed to work within

a web browser, it doesn’t matter what operating system (OS) you use. Whether it’s

on Mac, PC, or Linux, WordPress itself works the same in all three. As I mentioned

previously, I’ve written the book to be as “future proof” as possible. The goal is

that the book won’t be worthless to you in six months or a year. I’ve written this

book so that you can get years of use out of it before you think, “Wow, things are

really different now.”

4 WORDPRESS^ ABSOLUTE BEGINNER’S GUIDE

Conventions Used in This Book

The Absolute Beginner’s Guide to WordPress uses a number of conventions to

provide you with special information. These include the following elements:

TIPS offer suggestions for making things easier or provide alternative ways to perform a particular task. NOTES provide additional, more detailed information about a specific WordPress feature. CAUTIONS warn you about potential problems that might occur and offer advice on how to avoid these problems.

Sidebars interspersed throughout the chapters cover things that are related to the

topic at hand, but go into more detail than the flow of the chapter allows for.

208 WORDPRESS^ ABSOLUTE BEGINNER’S GUIDE

Posts, Pages, Custom Post Types, and Post Formats Explained

There are two basic types of content in WordPress: Posts and Pages. All other

kinds of content are derived from one of those two types (generally Posts). So

what are Posts and Pages (and why do I keep capitalizing them!)? Let’s start with

Posts.

Posts: Also Known as the Blog Post, But More

When WordPress first came out, the only content type was a Post. That was the

way a lot of blogging tools worked back in 2003 when WordPress 0.75 came out.

A post was, essentially, a blog post. A piece of content that was intended to be

a part of a much larger whole—a blog. It’s that sense of connectedness that is

essential to understand posts. Posts are always connected to each other. All posts

are connected to each other by time, and we can see this through the time-based

archives within WordPress (day, month, year). You can go back and page through

all the posts you’ve written (and published), based on when they were published.

Posts are also connected by author, category, and tag. However, if more than one

person is writing on a site, each post could have different authors, categories, or

tags from any other post; you can’t say that all posts are connected to each other

this way. Just to make things a little more confusing, all posts must be in at least

one category. Remember in Chapter 6, “Setting Up your WordPress Site Right the

First Time,” that when we looked at the Writing settings, there was the Default

Category, and it was set to Uncategorized. That’s it. If you don’t assign a post to

a category when you publish it, it will be assigned to the default category. This is,

by the way, why we’ll edit the name of the default category to something (any-

thing) other than Uncategorized. If you forget to assign a post to a category, the

default category should at least be something meaningful.

Okay, let’s recap. Posts are content that are connected to each other through

time (all posts), category, tags, and author. That’s the key. Posts are pieces of

content that have a relationship to other pieces of content. You can always look

at the “Archive” page for an author, category, tag, or date and see all the Posts

that match those conditions. “Archive” is in quotes because it isn’t so much an

“archive” as storage as it is “archive” as a list. Being able to list all the posts of

one particular type is very, very powerful and allows you to do some very clever

things with your content. Later in the chapter, I’ll talk about these clever ways to

organize your content using posts and pages (and other content types). This is

very important to think about if you’re using WordPress to build a website. Now

let’s talk about pages.

CHAPTER 11 USING WORDPRESS: CONTENT 209

Pages: Standing Alone with Purpose

Pages are what people tend to think of as “regular web pages.” They are

intended to be (relatively) static and can stand alone and still have context and

meaning. The best examples of pages are the About Me and Contact pages. If

you get to those pages on a site, they make sense all on their own. They don’t

need any other pieces of content for context or to make sense. Pages can’t be

assigned to a category or tag, and although pages do have published dates and

authors, you can’t look at all pages in a list (easily) using either of those. Pages

aren’t just boring old content, though. They have tricks of their own—page tem-

plates. Page templates are used to do things like have content without sidebars,

have a Page that displays Posts, and many other cool things we’ll see through-

out this chapter and book. The catch is that Page templates are defined by the

theme you’re using. Some themes have lots of Page templates; others only one

(the default one). Pages were developed as a response to WordPress users who

wanted content that could stand alone outside of the stream of blog posts and

maintain a place in the site. We all wanted Contact and About pages that we

could keep outside of the flow of posts and be used for content that didn’t match

up nicely with what a blog post was or is. Pages were also the first things to be

pulled into the early ways we handled menus. The reasoning is that we wanted

people to read our posts, but the pages were the extra information (About,

Contact, Downloads, Hiring) that visitors wanted to know as well. Then people

wanted to use WordPress to make “traditional websites” and things got really

interesting, but that’s a story for Chapter 17, “Advanced WordPress Settings and

Uses.” Now what if you’d like content that looks, works, and behaves like a post,

but not in the stream of blog posts? Content that is contextually linked, but as

you create more content, it doesn’t clutter up your stream of carefully crafted blog

posts? That is why and how Custom Post Types were developed and added to

W ordPress.

Custom Post Types: Pulling Posts Out of the Blog Stream

WordPress 3.0 (Thelonious) didn’t just bring in menus, new admin interfaces,

and other changes; WordPress 3.0 also introduced Custom Post Types to the

WordPress community. Custom Post Types are pieces of content that work and

behave like posts, but they don’t appear in your “regular” stream of posts. For

example, you want to add testimonials, happy customers gushing about you

and your company, to your site. It makes sense to have those as posts because

you can easily put all testimonials in a Testimonials category and point visitors

to something like http://abgwp.trishusseyc.om/archive/testimontials (or just

/testimonials if you use WordPress SEO and set it up to do that—see Chapter 7,

“Setting Up Your WordPress Site the Right Way: SEO, Social Media, and More”)

CHAPTER 11 USING WORDPRESS: CONTENT 211

thing to understand is that Post Formats are not a separate kind of post, just a

different way to style it. You can even have Post Formats for Custom Post Types!

Remember that Post Formats are just and only that—formatting, style, and layout

for regular posts.

These are the basic types and kinds of content in WordPress. They sound a lot

more complicated than they really are. Just remember: Pages stand alone, posts

are connected, Custom Post Types are a special kind of post separate from

your blog posts, and Post Formats make posts look cool. Now that we have that

straight, let’s look at how content is created: the Editor.

The Post and Page Editor Explained

The first thing to know is that the Post, Page, and Custom Post Type editors are

functionally the same. The only differences between them come down to Posts

and Custom Post Types having sections to add Categories and Tags, whereas

Pages have Page Templates instead (not that the functions are the same). Just like

with Menus in Chapter 10, “Tweaking, Tuning, and Customizing Your WordPress

Site,” checking out the Screen Options is a good idea here, too. Figure 11.

shows the options I like to see. I tend to write for sites that have more than one

author, so I like to be able to switch authors if I need to. I also like to be able

to see the check marks to enable or disable comments or trackbacks on that

post (or page) as well. If these bug you, hide them from view. Many plugins (like

WordPress SEO and All In One SEO Pack) add sections to the Editor as well, so

things can get cluttered at times. Hide the sections you don’t want to see (or don’t

need to see), and you’ll be happier for it. You can also collapse sections by click-

ing the triangle in the corner of the title bar. Heck, you can even move the sec-

tions around to the order you want by clicking and dragging them. The Post and

Page editors are very flexible to match how you like to work.

FIGURE 11.

Screen options for the Editor window.

Now let’s get down to the Editor itself. Regardless of whether you mouse over the

Posts button in the admin area and select Add New, hover over the Pages button

and select Add New, or use the +New menu at the top and select Post or Page

(Figure 11.2), you’ll get to the Editor screen (for Posts or Pages).

212 WORDPRESS^ ABSOLUTE BEGINNER’S GUIDE

FIGURE 11.

+New menu.

Figure 11.3 shows the Post Editor, and Figure 11.4 shows the Page Editor. They

look pretty much the same, don’t they? This is good. You don’t have to learn dif-

ferent editors for the different kinds of WordPress content. Even Custom Post

Types use the same Editor, making learning those easy as well. Besides the top

of the page that says Add New Post/Page, the only difference you’ll see is in

Figure 11.5—the Tags, Categories, and Post Formats on the Post Editor and Page

Templates in the Page Editor.

FIGURE 11.

Post Editor.