WordPress Basics (Everyone is a Newbie Once)
28.10.2009
Uncategorized
WordPress is fundamentally a blogging platform. There are a few core concepts in WordPress, they are:
Posts
A Post is a time stamped piece of content. Posts are what a blog is made of and appear on the homepage in sequential order. They can also be categorized and tagged, have an author, a date and comments attached. Posts are the building block of WordPress.
Pages
WordPress Pages are for high level content that is more permanent and static. Things like about and contact pages are usually made with a Page. Pages don’t have a timestamp and appear separate from Posts. An example would be an “About Us” or a “Contact Us” page.
Comments
Comments are small messages left on a blog by users or the public. Comments are comprised of a name, email address, URL and comment message. Comments have an approval system that by default lets through comments from any registered user and from anyone who has previously had a comment approved. First time commenters will have their comments held for approval. You will need to log in and check through the list to sort the spam from the legitimate
A very well-known plugin that will make your comment approval life much easier is Akismet. Akismet is made by Automattic and is a very good spam filter. WordPress comes installed with Akismet by default, although you need to get a (free) key from WordPress.com.
WP-Admin
When you install WordPress there is the front-end of the site which everyone sees and an admin area for managing and updating the site called WP-Admin, or sometimes referred to as the Dashboard, or the admin area. If you have a blog at www.example.com, then the admin will be at www.example.com/wp-admin.
Users
A WordPress install can have multiple registered users who each have different roles. The first user will always be the admin account having the role of Administrator. Other possible roles are: User, Contributor, Author, Editor, Administrator. Depending on a user’s role, they will be able to do different things like post, edit, and approve comments.
Users can be created in WP-Admin or if you make it possible, from the front end. So for example you could choose to make a blog such that anyone wishing to comment would need to register. You might also then hire an author or two and create user accounts for them set to Author. Finally you might hire a WordPress developer to fix a bug and give them Administrator access.