First Steps to Learning WordPress

I have created my blogs and made several postings to this one. I’ve read through the features and have looked at some of the special features in detail. Now I am reading First Steps With WordPress. This page does a great job of holding your hand as you look at the different elements of the blog. The first part is a great lesson in how to surf a blog.

The second part goes behind the curtain and walks you through the WordPress administration area that they call “The Dashboard.”

Add a second user so your user name is not admin

I opened the Dashboard then clicked on “users,” then on “admin.” I tried to change my display name but it would not let me do that as admin. I added myself as a new user so I would show up as my user name rather than “admin.” In the default theme the authors name does not appear. But if you change it to the Classic theme, you can see the authors name. If you want your name to appear but you are the admin, you will need to add yourself as another admin but your nickname can then be whatever you want. I will do this for all of my blogs.

I was pleased to just learn that WordPress has pages for static content. Besides using them for “about us” and “contact us” pages, I can see using one as a link page for the most popular posts.

I need to spend more time on the template and comment sections. I read their page on Comment Spam and am excited that WordPress designed to mitigate spam.

About 3/4 down the page they talk about using plugins. These are code written most of the time by third party developers. They suggest installing the “Codex and Forum Searcher Plugin” which searches the WordPress Support Forum. I already have the forum as a link so I don’t think I need it to open inside of the dashboard. I tried to open the link anyway and guess what, it is no longer there. I guess someone else thought this was too much. I am looking forward to plugins but I want to be very careful which ones I choose. BTW, there are currently 2,426 plugins.