Well, you have posted and categorized, uploaded and configured, but you haven’t yet created a page. Why would you? What is a page to a blog, which is, after all, a chronological series of entries—practically a journal?

One type of useful page is loaded by default in the system: to look at it, click on “Manage” and then “Pages” and you will find a listing for “About”. Click on “Edit” and you’ll find that the same interface you have been using to write posts comes up. There’s some nice introductory text about the page which you might very well change. So far, so good, but I still haven’t answered the “Why?”, have I? Read on.
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Organizing or managing your blog is an important ongoing task and is something you should master before long. As you’ve probably noticed with the few elements we have looked at so far, WordPress is an adaptable and straightforward application to use, and its management is no more difficult. We’ll begin with one of the most important navigational elements of your blog, Revision—or…

Editorial Control

We’ve all done it… You save a post and as you click “Publish”, you see a silly typo. Oops. Well, you need to go back to the post and correct the error. How?
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A “Fine Art” you ask? Well, not necessarily. It is actually fairly straightforward. WordPress 2.1 provides a much-improved interface for uploading files — you may have already noticed it beneath the main post window. Take a look at it now: a tab titled “Upload” with “File”, “Title” and “Description” fields below. There’s also a button labeled “Browse” and a further tab labeled “Browse All” (…and don’t worry if this doesn’t make sense yet; all of this browsing will become clear in the very near future).

Preparation

We need to prepare our files for upload. WordPress is set up to deal with .jpgs and .gifs as well as any other filetype you might want people to download rather than display within their browsers. Uploading a bunch of photos straight from your camera is not a good idea. Even 3 megapixel cameras produce images of 1.5MB and this is really too big, especially when you consider that images with large dimensions will “break” your page layout. So, use your favorite photo-editing software and resize the pictures you want to upload, trying for a width of 500 pixels maximum at 72dpi (or screen resolution) and save them as .jpg.

Tip: When you are saving your compressed and resized images, try to ensure you use numbers, dashes, underscores and letters only. In particular, don’t include spaces or overlong names, and ensure you use the three letter suffix, like .jpg or .doc — these tell the application what to do with the file.

Browsing, Tagging and Uploading

Click on the browse button and you’ll find yourself viewing your own computer’s hard drive. Find the file you want to upload and select it. Next give the file a title: make it descriptive while keeping in mind those friendly neighborhood search engines — they’ll pick up on this text as well as your blog entries. With the description you can go to town on the keywords. When you are happy, click “Upload”.

The page will refresh, and when it does you’ll find a new tab has inserted and highlighted itself between the “Upload” and “Browse All” tabs. Called simply “Browse” (to add to our flourishing collection of “browses”) this area gives you several options:

1. Show
   Literally, what is it you want to show in your post, be it the full-size picture, a thumbnail of the same or the title only. The latter might be very useful if you have a great number of pictures to link to on a particular page — and is the only option when you have uploaded a file which is not an image (e.g. a Word document or a PDF).
2. Link
   Again you have three choices here:
   1. “File” will link you to the .jpg itself, so that when the link is clicked the full-size picture appears
   2. “Page” is a post with the picture/file, its title and description, as well as the opportunity for visitors to the site to comment upon it.
   3. “None”

When you have selected the options you are happy with click on “Send to the Editor”. This will send the link to the post itself.

Formatting

The picture or file will have been inserted wherever the cursor was left, and will act like another piece of text which is fine for a simple link. To ensure text flows around the picture properly, select it (when it’s selected, small squares appear at the corners and midway along each side of the picutre) and then use the text tools in the “Visual” bar above the “Post” box to shift it left or right or to center it.

Editing

The title and description of a picture or file can be edited at any time. In the case of our newly uploaded picture, simply click on “Edit” to the right of the picture’s title and another nifty piece of AJAX javascript later, we have the familiar information ready for further honing. The changes you make here will not only affect the picture/file as it is displayed in the post you have just entered it into, but also the picture/files’s own page.

And Finally … Browse All

After a while you’ll build up a whole library of files, and will often re-use files across several posts. You can access previously uploaded pictures and files in this tab — the interface is exactly the same as the one used for newly uploaded files.

Next, Becoming Part of the Management.

In the default installation of WordPress the blog creates one post, “Hello World!”. Now, we can either delete this or edit it, but to do either, we need to find it in the back-end. Assuming you have moved on straight from our last tutorial, “Freshly Pressed WordPress“, and that you are logged into the admin end, all you need do is click on “Manage” (below the blog title and between “Write” and “Comments”).

The page will refresh and you will find that admin displays a short table with the details of the “Hello World” post. This page will be where you administer your posts and becomes a center of operations as you create more and more content.

Note: In this management area you’ll also find links for “Pages”, “Uploads” and “Categories” among others, and like posts, this is where you will administer them. If you do feel adventurous and want to go off-post, you can always return to what we are doing here later. As I said before, there is very little damage that can be done to WordPress by tinkering around.

So, click on “Edit” and the page will refresh again.

You are still in the “Posts” tab of the “Manage” section (as long as you have installed v2.1 or ‘Ella’), but the content has changed into an interface that will become very familiar. This is the post editor, the place where you’ll be spending all your creative energy, whether you are editing posts like now or writing original ones.

Edit
We’ll start with the title, “Hello World!”. Select the text and type in something less banal, more focussed on your subject matter, like “Blue is the New Black for Pandas”. While we’re at it, let’s change the post content. Put in a couple of paragraphs, maybe play with the formatting tools (use a bit of bold, or italics, or even a numbered list). When you are happy with this you can save the post by … clicking “Save” BUT if you’d like to continue editing (which we do) click — can you guess!? — “Save and Continue Editing” (these WordPress people make it so intuitive, don’t they?).

So let’s have a look at the front end for a moment (assuming you have still got it in a tab on your browser — if not, click on “View Site »”). Click refresh and … there it is, your lovely revised post!

Blue Tabs & Categories
There are a couple of things we should do before closing this session, though. The first is to look at a feature called “Categories”. Click back to the admin end and look to the right of the “Post” area. There is a blue tab with that title, and if it isn’t expanded, click on the “+”. You’ll see immediately that the post has been put into the default category “Uncategorized”. Not ideal, so let’s create a relevant category, maybe “News”. Type it into the field and click “Add”. A nice bit of Ajax later (where the yellow fades away) and we have placed your edited post in a new category. Superb! Uncheck “Uncategorized” and then “Save and Continue Editing”.

The second thing to look at are the other tabs, using the “+/-” to toggle between hidden and visible. I often use “Post Timestamp” to reorder posts on our front page or publish them at a later date, and sometimes, if I have a page for a private client or family only, I protect it with a password. Each functionality is fairly straightforward.

Let’s have a quick look at the post in your live tab. Click refresh and you’ll see that the “Uncategorized” category (!) has disappeared and has been replaced by your new category. This is one of those lovely WordPress touches which have been brought about by the development team’s extensive consultation with WordPress’s legion of users: if something ain’t used, it ain’t displayed. Not only is the application intuitive, it is also consistently sensible — let’s rename it: “SensiblePress”! Well, maybe not, but you get the idea.

Next, The Fine Art of Uploading.

So, you have gone ahead and installed WordPress 2.1 on your own Unix server. You have logged into the administration end of WordPress using the url “http://www.yourWordPressblog.com/wp-admin” and you have been confronted with the “Dashboard”. To get you used to the various WordPress features and conventions we should make some preliminary alterations to the default installation.

Just Another WordPress Blog
First, there’s your blog title up there in the left-hand corner, and beside it in brackets a hyperlink saying “View site »”. This handy link is always present and extremely useful if your browser uses tabs. So, right-click (or control-click) on the link and open it in a new tab. When the new tab loads you’ll see your freshly pressed blog. Looks nice, doesn’t it? The blog is using the WordPress default theme which defines the fonts, colors and layout of your blog at the moment. Below the title in the masthead area you’ll see it says “Just another WordPress blog”.

Options
We should change that, shouldn’t we? Make it more personal. Click back to the admin page tab and select “Options” in the light blue horizontal bar. The page will refresh and you’ll see that by default the “General Options” tab displays. You’ll see that “Weblog title” is filled with your original choice of title (you can change this now if you’d like) and the “Tagline” field is displaying the generic description, “Just Another WordPress Blog”. Replace this with something more appropriate.

A tip: the description can be changed whenever you like, just like the title, but its function is to explain the purpose of the blog both to your audience and the search engines. When we are looking at a new description we often jot down a few keywords and try to include as many in the description as possible, while keeping to a maximum of around 10 words altogether — more just looks excessive.

URLs & Emails
You should also do some housekeeping as well while you are here: first check that the “WordPress address” and the “Blog address” are correct. These will only differ from each other if you have installed WordPress in a sub-directory of your server, and for the purposes of this tutorial we will assume you haven’t. So each should read “http://www.yourWordPressblog.com“.

VERY important note: If you do decide to change these address settings, make sure you have easy access to the MySQL database just in case you get it wrong and you get locked out — and if that didn’t make you throw your hands in the air and say, “Never, never … ” I don’t know what will!

Next your email should be yours. Seems an odd thing to say, doesn’t it? But just check that you typed it in correctly during installation because this is the address which your WordPress installation will use to communicate with you. OK, it won’t be discussing existential philosophy, but it will certainly be using this email address to tell you when someone comments on one of your posts, or links to you, or even subscribes to your blog.

And subscribers are dealt with in the next couple of check boxes and pop-up. “Membership” and “New User Default Role” might seem meaningless to you now, but make a mental note of them and when these things become important, revisit them. At first leave these at default because unless you have specific requirements with regard to your user’s input on the blog, they will serve you well.

UTC?
Time and date are used to label all interactions with your blog, and this can be particularly important if your blog is time-critical or using time-specific features. The UTC time (or Zulu Time) is approximately the same as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). You should offset this accordingly using the “Times in the weblog should differ by” field. You’ll probably be aware of the number of hours plus or minus your timezone differs from GMT/UTC but for more information there’s a pretty complete article on wikipedia. If you are hours minus GMT/UTC, then simply enter the relevant negative number (e.g. I’m “-7″).

That’s it. Click on “Update Options” button, bottom right hand side and the page will refresh giving you the lovely Ajax-powered “Options Saved” dialogue at the top of the page.

Congratulations!
Now, we need to check that this has updated your page properly, so return to the other tab and refresh. Your new description should now adorn the masthead. Superb! You have just taken your first step in making your blog your own.

You have also learned about the most important WordPress convention: the admin panel updates your whole site straight-away. This means a mistake can be corrected immediately, an event can be recorded as it happens, or the blog’s appearance can be changed in a few seconds flat (I kid you not). You have also seen how straight-forward the back-end is set out. Mostly, if not all the time, WordPress takes a very unambiguous, user-friendly attitude towards its own administration and is therefore robust and nice to know(!). And that is the final thing: your freshly pressed WordPress is designed to be prodded and poked, mucked about with and turned on its head, so don’t be afraid to experiment; you can’t do much to break it (unless you make a mistake with those addresses of course!).

Next, we’ll be saying goodbye to “Hello World”.