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.