BLOGGING FOR FREEDOM |
BLOGGING WITH WORDPRESS |
Several tabs relate to setting up the blog to receive entries and comments. It’s not essential to complete every possible bit of setup before posting. In fact, it’s not essential to complete any of it. Skip down to the “Finally Writing a WordPress Entry” section if you’re irrepressibly eager to get started. This section covers the setup functions that I consider essential to a young blog. The next section covers less important blog setup.
The first piece of business is to establish your own identity in WordPress and in your blog. If you skip this step, your entries will be “signed” by the blog’s default identity: Administrator. Sounds like a bureaucratic version of a
Schwarzenegger character. (“I’ll be back . . . with office supplies.”) Follow these steps to escape from your WordPress .When you update your profile, the change of identity immediately ripples through the entire site.
If you had posted entries before establishing your author name, the signatures of all those entries change to your new name.
Adding a registered user You can add authors to your blog with varying levels of administrative control. These added individuals might post entries or perform other administrative chores.
So, what powers do the control levels confer? It would take a few pages to fully describe each level. Following is a brief rundown of the administrative panels and the lowest level required to control them. Some of these administrative features are covered later in this chapter, and you might not be familiar with them now:The Manage panel provides editing tools for posts, pages, comments, and categories. Level 2 users can use these tools for editing everything except pages. This panel is where alternate themes are stored and activated, changing the appearance of the site. Level 8 is required. Plugins: This panel stores available plugins that have been downloaded and added to the WordPress server space. Level 8 users can activate and deactivate plugins.Users: Here, users modify their profiles and add new users. Any user,
even a level 0, can modify his or her own profile. Level 5 is required to add a new user. Options: The Options panel is a power-packed set of tools that affect thesetup and function of the blog, including its title and tagline.
Before too many people see your new blog, you probably want to give it a title and make a few other basic setting choices. You can revisit these settings at any time, change them, and have those changes propagate throughout the blog:
Note that only some themes use an archive calendar.Note that in the preceding steps, I omitted mention of the WordPress Address (URI) and Blog Address (URI) boxes. In most cases, those settings should be left alone. The default setting has the same address (the Web address of your blog’s index page) in both boxes. That setup changes only in specialized installations where the blog is an embedded portion of a larger site.