A Beginner’s Guide To Wordpress

Audience

Recently, inspyre had the opportunity to introduce the concept of a blog to one of our clients. After everyone’s excitement about the ability to publish and categorize information at any time, we realized it was time to teach our client how blogging is done.

We’re a big fan of Wordpress and believe they describe themselves better than we can:

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

What follows is a tutorial written from a Wordpress user’s perspective covering the basic tasks of writing a blog post, publishing it, creating categories, moderating comments, and so forth. From the developer’s perspective, it’s important to note that we set up our clients as “editor’s”, a feature of Wordpress that tailors the actions available to a user based on her role.

Logging In

1. Go to the login page
   • Normally you’ll go to: http://www.yourwebsite.com/directory-your-blog-is-in/wp-admin
2. Enter username and password
   • Usernames are case-sensative
3. Login >>

*TIP* Bookmark this page so you don’t have to remember the address.

Dashboard - your homebase

After you’ve logged in, you’ll be welcomed by the Dashboard–your portal that displays
information about recent activity on the blog and gives you a list of common tasks. Along
the top is the main navigation that breaks up the tasks you can perform by
category: Dashboard, Write, Manage, Comments .

From the dashboard you can:

1. Write a Post
2. Update your profile and change your password (which you should do right away!)
3. Add a link to your blogroll (You can ignore this. It’s not a feature we’ll use)
4. See recent activity on the blog. The box on the right hand side shows you
   the newest comments people have made, the most recent posts written, and
   some general statistics.

Write - writing posts, saving drafts, and publishing

There are two ways to write a post. When you login and see the Dashboard, you
can click the “Write a Post” link, or you can click on the ‘Write’ button in
the main navigation across the top–both will take you to the same place. The
Write page is where you will craft your blog posts. Follow these steps:

Write Post

1. Give your post a title
2. Start writing your post in the main text box
   • Use the tools to justify text, bold, italicize, and underline words, and
     even spellcheck
   • *TIP* You can also drag the bottom right corner of the box to make it
     bigger.
3. You might want to add an image
   • If the image is already online, click the icon that looks like a picture of a tree in the toolbox.
     1. Next, give the image URL (e.g. http://somewebsite.com/someimage.jpg), a description, and title
     2. Click insert and continue typing
   • If the image is on your computer, look below the typing area where it says ‘Upload’
     1. Click the ‘Browse’ button next to the line that says File and find the image on your computer
     2. Give the image a title and description
     3. Press “Upload >>”
     4. Once the file is uploaded, you’ll be looking at a small thumbnail under the tab named “Browse”. This is where you can browse through the pictures you’ve uploaded for this post. To place the image in the typing area, choose your options (the size of the image and “Link” which decides if the picture is just a picture or something people can click to go to a different page.

     *TIP* Most of the time you’ll want the “size” to be full-size and “link” to be none

   • Once the image is in the text area, you can click on it to move it around or change it’s size. You’ll see small rectangles on the corners, drag these to change the size.
4. Categorize the post
   • One of the most helpful features in organizing your blog posts is giving
     them meaningful categories. The top right of the “Write” page has a list
     of your currently defined categories. Select as many categories that
     your current post relates to. If you need to add a category, type
     one in and press add. It will automatically be checked.
   • Don’t use too many categories. Try and use the categories
     as larger collections of ideas and articles. You don’t need a specific
     category for everything you write. You just want the user to be able to
     differentiate between large themes like cosmetic dentistry and some news
     like hours changing.
5. Save or Publish the post

• If you’re not finished writing the post, or even if you’ve finished but
  aren’t ready for the world to read it, you can save a draft by clicking
  “Save” at the bottom of the typing area. When you come back to the
  “Write” screen (see the intro to the Write section in this tutorial to
  get there), you’ll see a list of drafts at the top of the page. Click on
  your draft to continue writing.
• If you’re finished with a new post or a saved post you click “Publish”
  at the bottom of the typing area to publish it to the website.

Manage - search, edit, and view your posts and categories

The ‘Manage tab’ is where you can look at posts that arecurrently live on the website.

Posts

There is a second row of navigation near the top that reads
“Posts, Pages, Uploads, Categories” Let’s take a look at posts.

1. Find a post you’re looking for.
   • Using the search tools on the page you can view old posts by date,
     category, or even search their contents. This may be helpful if you’re
     trying to find an old post you wrote or if you decide to change a post
     that’s currently on the website.
2. View, Edit, or Delete a post
   • Once you find the post you’re looking for you can use the options on the
     right hand side of each row “View”, “Edit”, or “Delete”.

Categories

Click on the “Categories” button in the second navigation
near the top in the list “Posts, Pages, Uploads, Categories”. This is where
you can update your categories for your posts.

1. Edit or Delete a category
   • Find the category you want to edit or delete in the list. Click thebutton on the right side of the row.
2. Add a new category
   • Scroll down the page and you’ll see a place to add a new category
     1. Name the Category
     2. Ignore the Category slug
     3. Choose the Categories parent if you want to have a sub-category ( e.g. You could make “Teeth Whitening” a sub-category of “Cosmetic Dentistry”)

Comments - manage old comments and moderate new ones

The ‘Comment tab’ allows you to search your comments much like
the ‘Manage tab’ allows you to search your posts. Users reading your blog will
have the option at the end of each post to leave a comment. When the user
submits a comment, it will need to get moderated (essentially approved) by
someone from DCD before it shows up on the site.

You’ll receive notification of a new comment in a few different ways. First,
you’ll receive an automated email showing you the comment someone would like
to submit. From this email, you’ll be given options to delete the comment or
allow it. This is the easiest way to handle comments. However, if you have
many comments to moderate or just want to see which comments are waiting to be
moderated, you can log into Wordpress (see logging in
above). Once at the Dashboard (the first page when you login), you’ll see a
comments section under ‘Recent Activity’ that shows you the most recent
comments including ones that need to be moderated. Clicking ‘Comments in
Moderation’ will take you to the “Awaiting Moderation” section of the Comments
tab. Common tasks that you can perform under the subsections of the Comments
tab are explained below:

Comments

• Use the search box to find old comments
• Once you’ve found a comment, you can delete it by clicking delete.

Awaiting Moderation

• To moderate a comment click on the “Awaiting Moderation” link in the secondary navigation “Comments, Awaiting Moderation, Akismet Spam”
• For each comment select approve, spam, delete, or defer until later.

Akismet Spam

• In much the same way you receive spam emails, some people will try to
  post irrelevant comments to your blog. Luckily, there’s a built in spam
  filter and this section lets you see what spam messages have been
  caught. Also, if a comment slips through that’s really spam, when you
  mark it as spam in the ‘Awaiting Moderation’ section, it will get moved
  here.

Well, I hope that covers the main tasks you’ll need to perform with your blog Almost anything you’ll
normally want to do with Wordpress should be easy, so
if you’re spending a lot of time trying to figure something out, take a look at wordpress.org where there’s an extensive knowledge base and active community!

Good luck and have fun. You’re bloggers now!