The popularity of WordPress has grown beyond anybodies, especially Matt Mullenweg’s, imagination. But to make the most of this blogging platform/CMS it can take a little getting used to, especially if you are new to it. Here’s a list of the best practices to get yourself up and running with WordPress as quick as possible.
Set It, And Forget It
The first thing you want to do after you install WordPress is to head on over to the “Settings” tab. There you will see 7 sub tabs that control almost everything on your blog, except for the design and the widgets.
- General - Here you can set your blog title and any tag line if you want to include it. If you are going to be the only author on the blog then de-select the “Anyone can register” box, otherwise you may set up the role that you want to assign to any new registrants. I suggest to set them to Subscriber status. The rest of the settings are time related but worth customizing because it will help you in case you want to write first and publish later.
- Writing - The first option you see is the default size of the posting area you want to have. I like to set it at 25, feel free to try out different sizes to see what is comfortable for you. If you like smilies go ahead and select that option under formatting. You may or may not want to select the next option to correctly nest XHTML - this more or less depends on your theme. If you are using a custom theme then you will probably not need this. If you are using a free theme and notice some out of place elements on your blog then select this option to see if it rectifies it. Next, set your default posting categories and link categories, make sure you set up your categories before doing this step to see all your options. The next two options are advanced options but worth taking the time to learn if you want to post via email. Most web based email provider will provide you with an outgoing server so enter that information and try it out. If you run into some bumps use the WordPress forums for help.
- Reading - For me personally, this is one of the most important settings. Showing a high number of posts on your home page can affect load times, so set it with that in mind. I usually set it at 5 posts, and set the number of posts in my RSS feed anywhere from 10 - 15. Your choices may differ. I also recommend showing Full RSS feeds - there have already been many discussions about this on the web and full feeds generally are more popular with readers. You can leave the character encoding as it is. Tip: The number of posts you set up to show on your home page also propagates to your category page, search results page and archives page.
- Discussion - Under this tab you will see that you have a host of options around the comments that take place on your blog. Under “Default article settings” I would leave the first option deselected and select the next two. Below that, you can choose to get emailed every time someone posts a comment, which I don’t suggest. Leave the next one selected, just in case you don’t happen to check the moderation queue ever too often. On the “Before a comment appears” area you can select all or none. It’s really up to you. I usually just select the middle one and move on. The next two options can be left as is as they have always worked well for me. Just make sure you install Akismet before you do so. If your theme does not support Gravatars you should turn this option off, if you would like to support Gravatars then simply place this code <?php echo get_avatar( $comment, 32 ); ?> into your comments.php file, somewhere in your comment area. It’s best to seek professional help for this, or visit the forums if you get stuck.
- Privacy - This is pretty self explanatory and depends on whether you want to be indexed by the search engines or not. Most everybody does so I would suggest, Yes.
- Permalinks - This is where you set up how you want your URL’s to look. I usually go with the custom option and have it show “/%postname%/”. This is best because having the date as part of your permalink just makes it look longer and ugly, plus it’s not that great for search engines. Showing the numeric option is also not suggested. The next options area are probably overlooked by majority of the bloggers but I think you should take some time to go over it. Basically instead of showing your category archices as “www.myblog.com/category/mywritings/” you can have it say “www.myblog.com/topic/mywritings/”. Simply enter “topic”, or anything else, in the field provided and you’re set. The same goes for the tags field.
- Miscellaneous - Here you can set where you want your images to be uploaded. WordPress already assigns a default folder, you can change it if you like. New to WordPress 2.5 is the ability to set the default size for thumbnails and medium size images in your blog. If your theme supports a wider post area than you can set a bigger height and width for your images.
Have fun configuring your WordPress settings. Remember help is only a click away on their forums.
With WordPress 2.5 the team behind one of the best blog/CMS platforms out there implemented the option to add a “Gallery”. You can now add basic gallery functionality to your theme without needing any extra plugins.
But, if you are writing your blogs posts for someone else, other than on your own blog, make sure that you have the proper privileges to do so. Otherwise you may not be able to “add” a gallery, as I have been unable to show you a working example here.
However, you can see an example here of how this would otherwise normally look once inserted into your blog post.
The procedure is simple. When you go to write a new post, or page, you will see “Add Media” right below the “Title” field. Next to it you will find four icons, one for adding an image, one for adding video, one for adding audio and the last one for adding media.
Uploading Images
You can choose either the “Add Image” or “Add Media” button and proceed to upload your images. The best improvement I feel has been done here. You no longer need to upload one image after another, instead you can do a batch upload. So select all the files you want to place in your gallery, once the window opens to select the images from your system, and click OK.
Your image files should now start uploading, and you can watch the progress as it happens. Another nice improvement by the WordPress team. The upload interface will have three tabs - “Choose File”, “Gallery” and “Media Library”. You should see the “Gallery” showing the number of files you have uploaded. So if you uploaded 6 images, it would say “Gallery (6)”.
Go ahead and click on that tab, and you will see all of your images.
Inserting Gallery Into Post
You can now edit each property of each image like the Title, Caption and Description. Once you are done with it you can then just click on the “Insert gallery into post” option and that should do it.
You will now see something like this in your post area “[ gallery ]”. Go ahead and preview your post now and it should you your gallery in all its glory.
Clicking on each of the images you will see that all of your images now have their own post pages, and people can leave comments too if they like. Make sure that you give proper titles to your images, it may or may not help in getting extra search engine traffic. But since this feature is so new we will not know till it is widely adopted.
Gallery Options
By default the gallery will divide itself into 3 columns. You can however change them by adding a class option like so - “[ gallery columns=”4″ ]”. Now it will be divided into 4 columns.
For more options visit this page to see what else you can do to customize your gallery. Have fun inserting galleries into your posts.
* No scripts to install.
* No ftp to access.
* No files to download or upload.
* No MySql to set up.
* Install 1 or 1,000 blogs all at the same time.
All of this is now made possible by a single Wordpress plugin called the WP Auto-Installer!
In fact it’s the only plugin that installs Wordpress blogs.
Watch as it installs 50 blogs across 2 separate servers, in under 5 minutes: http://wpautoinstaller.com
What about upgrading existing blogs?
Well that’s been covered as well.
How would you like to be notified via email when a new version of wordpress is available, then have ALL of your blogs upgraded automatically… all at the same time?
No problemo! Check out the auto-upgrade plugin video here as well.
Here’s a quick demo of my upcoming Wordpress Auto-Installer plugin.
This plugin actually allows you to create an unlimited number of Wordpress blogs on any number of remote servers with just a few steps!
In this demo, I’m only creating a single blog on another server. It takes about 10 seconds: http://wpautoinstaller.com
In the next video, I will show you how it can save you time by creating multiple blogs across multiple servers!
Please sign up for my FeedBurner Email Updates (in the sidebar) to receive an alert notification when this plugin is released!
I’m about to release my next great plugin called the WP Auto-Installer. I’m sure you can guess what it does 
This plugin allows you to install any number of Wordpress blogs on any number of websites or servers in just 4 simple steps!
Check out this screenshot.
Install this plugin once, and it will go out and install an unlimited number of Wordpress blogs on any other website or server that you have access to. It does not matter if it’s on the same domain or not!
Now once you get the blogs installed, all you have to do is set them up.
Of course you can do this manually, BUT what I do is use my WP Cloner plugin OR my upcoming BASIC SET-UP plugin (which will AUTOMATICALLY configure multiple blogs with the optimal settings and essential plugins.) Sweet!
Stay tuned for more info later this week!
I have just released my latest Wordpress plugin called the Synonymizer. This plugin automatically modifies articles and RSS feeds to make them more unique when posting them to your blog!
If you create blogs that use auto-posted content from PLR articles or RSS feeds, this plugin is essential. It makes your blog stand out above the rest.
Learn more here: http://synonymize.com
While playing around with BlogRush, I came across this post that struck a big nerve.
The author make the comment:
“Get rid of those RIDICULOUS social media links at the bottom of every post. The only people who have the power to get any of your posts ranking well in Social Media Networks don’t need the little buttons to do it. If they think you’re worthy, they’ll submit regardless.”
Wow, did he hit the nail on the head here. In fact, I will go even further to say that I have tested blogs with and without those annoying little “bookmark me” icons and I have found that they make absolutely NO DIFFERENCE whatsoever in your traffic.
Fact is, people will never use them, and they only serve to clutter up your blog. Remove them… please.
If you want the benefit of social bookmarking I suggest you look into an automated bookmarking solution like the Auto Social Poster plugin (shameless plug). Anyway, back to my rant…
Another thing you need to remove is unnecessary, out-dated plugins!
On a daily basis I get administrative access to a lot of Wordpress blogs. Not just my own, but dozens and dozens of blogs run by others.
After seeing thousands of blogs, you start to see some patterns emerge. One pattern is the use of plugins that are just not needed. Not only are many not needed, they can interfere with the functioning of your blog!
So I’m going to go further and list 5 plugins that you simply do not need!
1. sociable
This plugin adds those little icons at the end of your posts. There are many plugins that do this as well, but this is by far the most popular. As I stated earlier, they are simply not needed. They serve absolutely no purpose., and may turn many visitors off. Clean up your blog and dump these types of plugins!
2. wp-cache
This plugin caches your web pages enabling your server to display more pages faster when you get huge spikes in traffic. The key phrase being “WHEN YOU GET HUGE SPIKES IN TRAFFIC”.
Basically, if you need this plugin, then your blog is smoking. If your blog is new or if you get a few hundred visitors a day YOU DO NOT NEED IT! If you don’t have the traffic, don’t use it!
You should also know that this plugin interferes with many, MANY other plugins that you may actually want to use… Unless you are perezhilton.com, dump it.
3. no ping wait
The purpose of this plugin was to speed up the pinging process and prevent your post page from timing out when pinging large numbers of ping servers. It modified the ping function so that Wordpress didn’t require each ping to be complete before the post was added.
Back in the days of WP 1.5 when bloggers were pinging hundreds of ping servers, this plugin had it’s place. But now, it’s not needed for several reasons.
First, you will never want to ping a huge number of ping servers. It’s just spammy and you will receive no long term benefit. NONE.
Second, current versions of Wordpress do not have this time out issue. Pinging is very fast in Wp 2.1+, so the plugin actually does nothing. Dump it!
4. smart update pinger
This plugin was created to stop the default Wordpress behavior of pinging a post when it is edited. It worked well, but current versions of Wordpress do not support it’s function so it doesn’t work. That’s right, if you have this plugin active, it’s not doing anything! Dump it!
Wordpress will still ping edited posts, but who cares? This is not a critical issue unless you are editing your post 20-30 times, lol.
5. wp-cron
The purpose of this plugin was to automate tasks from within Wordpress. For example, if you need to check your Wordpress database every hour. You can set this up using wp-cron. Now this plugin still works with older versions of Wordpress, but it’s not needed in Wordpress 2.1+ or higher. New versions of Wordpress already have a cron feature built-in.
The only reason to install and activate wp-cron is if you have an old plugin that requires wp-cron in order to function. In that case get the developer to update their plugin!
That Wasn’t So Bad…
OK, that’s #5. Of course there’s plenty more that could be dumped as well, however these are the ones I come across most often. If someone is still recommending these plugins, tell them to wake up and update their recommendations!
The biggest and baddest version of the Auto Social Poster plugin is now available. If you have been thinking about purchasing this fantastic bookmarking plugin now’s the time…
We removed 7 dying bookmarking sites and added 16 new ones.
Add these to the 18 existing sites and ASP version 3.0 now gives you the ability to post your bookmarks on 34+ bookmarking sites. No bookmarking plugin gives you as much automation as ASP and now NO ONE even comes close to giving you the number of automated sites you can post to.
Learn more at http://autosocialposter.com
A lot of people have been wondering how to quickly install the BlogRush code onto your Wordpress blog. This can be done easily with a text widget, however if you are like me and want to keep things organized, I needed a dedicated widget for this.
So I whipped one up. It’s very simple.
1. First get a BlogRush account. Click here to sign up. It’s free.
2. Next, download file here: BlogRush Widget.
3. Unzip and upload the file to your /wp-content/plugins/widgets/ folder.
4. Log into your blog, go to the plugins page and activate the BlogRush Widget
5. Go to your widgets page. Usually located at Presentation–>Sidebar Widgets.
6. Select the BlogRush Widget and drag to sidebar area.
7. Click on the widget to open and enter your feed ID.
8. Close the widget and Save Changes.
That’s it, all done.
If you are like me and have dozens of text widgets on a blog it can get confusing. Having a dedicated widget just for BlogRush helps to keep things organized.
Enjoy!
