Access Menus. Go into Appearance and then click on the Menu tab.
Create a Menu. Under the Menu Name heading enter what you want your main menu to be called. Click “create menu.” In the Pages box on the left hand side click on any pages that you want to be included in your menu. Click “Add to menu.” To rearrange the order that the pages appear in drag the pages up and down. Click “Save menu.”
Publish a Menu. In the Theme Locations box in the top left corner choose your new menu as your primary menu from the drop-down. Click “Save.”
Your menu will be updated and you can go to the visit site tab to see how your site looks to visitors. Note: Different themes support different numbers of menus, some only allow for one menu.
It may be desirable to add images to a blog post or page to emphasize a talking point, enhance instructions, or just to make things easier to read. Here are some instructions on how to insert images into WordPress posts or pages.
Note: These instructions do not cover embedding YouTube, Vimeo, or other videos in a blog post/page. To embed video, use the WordPress Video Plugin.
Everything you encounter in WordPress, from the documentation to the code itself, was created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project; there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. As a result, there are several ways to find support within WordPress:
1. Context-sensitive help
At the top right of your site’s administrative pages, an expandable Help option provides links to WordPress documentation and user forums. Click this link to view help that pertains to the area you are currently viewing.
2. The WordPress Codex
Visit the WordPress Codex, http://codex.wordpress.org, which is a wiki-style online manual for WordPress information and documentation. Useful titles include
If you do not find what you need in the WordPress documentation or Codex, try the user forums available at http://wordpress.org/support/.
4. WordPress.tv
WordPress.tv (http://wordpress.tv/) is a visual resource for all things WordPress. View how-to videos or visit WordCampTV to watch experts explain social media strategy and other related topics.
5. Help with themes and plugins
Miami’s themes and plugins are authored by several different individuals and development groups. To find help for a particular WordPress theme or plugin, try searching WordPress.org or the Internet.
Additional help for themes: A few theme development sites are listed here. These sites tend to focus on highly-technical issues and may not be useful for beginners:
WooThemes Support (BlogTheme, Bueno, Irresistible, Meta-Morphosis, Original Premium News, Snapshot, The Morning After): http://www.woothemes.com/support/
Additional help for plugins: Visit your blog site’s dashboard and expand the Plugins menu to view available plugins. Many plugins provide links to their development sites, which may offer user forums.
You can export a file of your site’s content to import it into another installation or platform. The export file will be an XML file format called WXR. Posts, pages, comments, custom fields, categories, and tags can be included. You can choose for the WXR file to include only certain posts or pages by setting the dropdown filters to limit the export by category, author, date range by month, or publishing status. Continue reading →
The Users screen lists all the existing users for your site. When you add new users, you can define roles and options from this screen. Continue reading →
Each blog site offers a series of user levels that determine what tasks can be completed. This document outlines the specific role levels and capabilities for each role. Continue reading →
Plugins extend and expand the functionality of WordPress. You may activate or deactivate them here.
Most of the time, plugins play nicely with the core of WordPress and with other plugins. However, if your site starts doing strange things, try deactivating all your plugins and re-activating them in various combinations until you determine if one of them caused the issue.
2. Access available plugins. From the menu on the left side of the Dashboard, click Plugins.
3. Activate plugins. From the list of available plugins, click the Activate link located below the desired plugin.
4. Edit plugin settings. Depending on the plugin in question, there may be specific configuration options that need to set before the plugin can be used. If this is the case, locate and click on the necessary menu item on the left side of the Dashboard.
Plugin settings and support
Due to the number of plugins and possible settings, posts regarding specific plugin use are not offered. For questions regarding the use of a plugin, consult the plugin developer and available forums. Plugin developer websites can usually be found in the Plugin section of the Dashboard.
From the Settings screen you can choose settings that define your blog as a whole: settings which determine how your site behaves, how you interact with your site, and how the rest of the world interacts with your site.
2. Access the Settings menu. From the left side menu in the Dashboard, locate the Settings menu. If the menu is not already expanded, click the Settings header.
3. Change desired settings. From the expanded menu, click the desired subheadings to make necessary changes.
Important! Always click Save Changes to apply settings.
Formatting: Accept defaults or make changes to convert emoticons to graphics or correct invalidly nested XHTML.
Default post category: Default is “Uncategorized.” When no selections are made to change the category of a new post, this category will be used.
Default Post Format: Default is “Standard.” Other options may be available.
Default Link Category: Default is “Blogroll.”
Press This: Press This is a little app that runs in your browser and lets you grab bits of the web to save or publish to a post or your site.
Other writing options may include:
Remote Publishing: Enables posting to WordPress from a desktop blogging client or remote website that uses the Atom Publishing Protocol or one of the XML-RPC publishing interfaces.
Front page displays: Changing this setting allows the blog homepage to be a static page (e.g. a welcome page) rather than the most recent blog posts.
Blog pages show at most…: This setting determines how many posts appear per page on a site.
Syndication feeds show the most recent…:: This setting determines how many items appear in an RSS feed of your site.
For each article in a feed, show…: Allows users to set whether the full article text or a summary of the article appears in an RSS feed. Note that the “summary” option restricts the length to 55 words – this cannot be changed.
Encoding for pages and feeds: Default setting of UTF-8 is recommended. Be careful: changing this field may affect the way information is displayed on your blog.
Default article settings: Pingbacks, trackbacks, and comments are controlled from this area. These settings may be overridden for individual articles.
Other comment settings: This section enables more granular control of comments to reduce spam and to determine when and where comments can appear.
E-mail me whenever…: These two settings give you control of when authors and administrators receive notification that comments have been made, or that comments are held for moderation.
Before a comment appears: These settings offer you even more control over the instances of when and how comments are posted.
Comment Moderation: In this section you can specify options to help you deal with comment spam.
Comment Blacklist: When a comment contains any of these words in its content, name, URL, e-mail, or IP, it will be marked as spam. These words are deleted without warning, so you may want to use this setting as a last resort.
Avatars: An avatar is an image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on avatar enabled sites. Here you can enable the display of avatars for people who comment on your site.
Site visibility: Choose whether or not your site will be crawled by search engines. You can also block search engines, but allow normal visitors to see your site.
Common settings: Create a custom URL structure for your permalinks and archives to improve the aesthetics, usability, and forward-compatibility of your links. Day and name is a popular option.
Optional: If you like, you may enter custom structures for your category and tag URLs here. If you leave these blank, the defaults will be used.
Depending upon the plugins and themes installed, additional settings may be available.
Posts are the entries that display in reverse chronological order on your home page. In contrast to pages, posts usually have comments fields beneath them and are included in your site’s RSS feed.
2. Add New post. On the left side of your screen, click the Posts heading. If this list is not expanded, mouse over the heading and click the downward arrow that appears. Then click Add New.
To add a new page rather than a new post, click the Add New link under the Pages heading instead.
3. Add a title and content. In the appropriate boxes, type the title and content for your post.
Note that both fields accept HTML tags; however, this may impact how your post appears in search engines.
If desired, click the Visual or HTML tabs to switch between the views.
Categories: Categories are used to establish a general hierarchy of the site. On the right side of the screen, under Categories, select the checkbox(es) to file the post by category.
Although you can assign a post to multiple categories, it may hurt the organization of your site. We recommend choosing not more than two categories for each post.
Post tags: While categories establish site hierarchy, post tags are specific keywords that categorize your post. For example, a post on World War I might be categorized under “history” while the post tags might include “war,” “fighting,” “army,” etc.
As you type a tag, it will attempt to auto-complete using the list of previously-used tags from your site as a reference. Reusing post tags can be helpful when users are searching your site, such as using “army” for all posts rather than “army” and “armies.”
Separate all post tags with commas. When you are finished adding post tags in the text box, click the Add button.
6. Assign a featured image. Featured images appear next to your page or next to your post in an archived post. Often, the featured image helps make a post “stand-out” above the others. For more information, see Adding Images to a WordPress Post / Page.
7. Publish or schedule your post /page. Publish the post/page immediately or schedule it to publish in the future. You may also control who can see the post.
Click the Publish button to make your post publicly viewable right away.
Next to Publish immediately, click the Edit link to schedule the post to be made available at a time in the future. Choose a date and time, then click OK.
Next to Visibility, click the Edit link to control the visibility of the post.
Public (default): anyone can see the post.
Private: anyone who is logged in to your blog can see the post.
Password protected: allows the existence of the post to be made public, but only those with the proper password may view the content.
Note: Depending upon the permission level that you have on the blog site, you may need to receive approval before publishing your post or page. If approval is required, the Publish button mentioned above may be replaced with Submit.
Create a Menu. Under the Menu Name heading enter what you want your main menu to be called. Click “create menu.” In the Pages box on the left hand side click on any pages that you want to be included in your menu. Click “Add to menu.” To rearrange the order that the pages appear in drag the pages up and down. Click “Save menu.”
Your menu will be updated and you can go to the visit site tab to see how your site looks to visitors. Note: Different themes support different numbers of menus, some only allow for one menu.
