Wordpress ‘How To’ Guide

So, as I usually ask near the start of my posts, what’s this post about? I’ve setup a whole bunch of Wordpress blogs in my time. Some have been for personal use, some for friends that need help getting started, some I’ve helped friends with and some have leaned more towards being commercial in nature. All of them, though, have followed a pretty similar process when it comes to the installation and configuration steps required for Wordpress best-practice (in my opinion anyway). This article is going to cover the process I follow when I’m setting a self-hosted Wordpress blog. These steps do not apply to blogs hosted on wordpress.com.

Please feel free to contact me through my contact page if you need clarification on or want to discuss any of the information in this post.

I apologise in advance for the length of this post … I tend to go into a lot of detail when writing posts like this. I hope it all helps someone though.

To begin with, you’ll need a few things before you even get started. Here’s a brief, but not exhaustive, list of things you’ll need.

1. A domain name. The domain registrar you choose is up to you – it would be irresponsible of me to say that any particular registrar is better than any other.
2. A web hosting account. I use ICDSoft – this is one situation where I’m happy to say they’re better than any other Linux host I’ve ever used.
3. A copy of the latest version of Wordpress. As of today, January 16th 2010, this is version 2.9.1 and can be downloaded from http://wordpress.org/.
4. A theme. Wordpress has possibly the best theme support around so this is quite important. Personally I use theme from Elegant Themes. Pick one, download/purchase it and have the files ready for later steps.
5. FTP credentials. You’ll need to know the DNS address or IP address of the FTP site that supports the final, published URL, as well as the username and password to login there. I use the free FTP client, FileZilla – it’s free and works on OS X (Mac), Linux and Windows.
6. MySQL credentials. You’ll need to know the connection address or IP address of the MySQL server that will support your Wordpress installation, as well as the username and password used to connect.
7. An empty database ready for your Wordpress installation. You don’t need to put anything in it – the Wordpress installation scripts will do that for you.

Once you’ve got these things sorted you can start on the actual installation & configuration. Here goes.

1. Follow ‘The Famous 5-Minute Installation’ written by the Wordpress guys. There’s no point reproducing or rewriting this here – these instructions are as good as they come. This will get Wordpress running. During this step I highly recommend editing wp-config.php and changing the $table_prefix to something other than wp_ – if you don’t the security scan plugin coming up will say you should’ve changed it … by then it’s too late without causing yourself some pain.
2. Make sure your Wordpress site works – all you should see at this point is the default ‘Hello World’ post and a single comment on that post.
3. Delete the single existing comment and the ‘Hello World’ post – you don’t need them.
4. Under Settings > Users setup a user account for yourself. Note that this username, depending on your theme choice, will be the author of any posts you write while logged in (assuming you don’t force the author name to be something else). For this reason you should decide now if you want it to be capitalised or not (mine is as my username is my name).
5. Optional but recommended: If you know how to, use phpMyAdmin to change the login name for the default Wordpress ‘admin’ account. This is a recommended action for increased security only. The table you’re looking for in your database is the $table_prefix setting mentioned above plus _users. E.g. if your $table_prefix is the default ‘wp_’ the table would be called ‘wp_users’.
6. Extract the theme you downloaded earlier and upload it to /wp-content/themes/. Alternatively you can use the ‘Add New Themes’ link in the Wordpress Dashboard but I’ve had issues once or twice with this. For that reason I always install themes via FTP.
7. If your theme requires additional plugins upload them to /wp-content/plugins/. The Elegant Themes themes, in most cases, requires accompanying plugins. Make sure you upload and enable them before you enable the theme.
8. If you haven’t already you can enable your selected theme now.

The list below is a list of the plugins I currently use on Digital Formula and that I think most blogs should have. It doesn’t contain plugins that I use specifically for this blog. Your list may be different – that part is up to you. Note that I’m not linking to any plugins as plugin authors sometimes change the location of their plugins. To find them you only need to use the ‘Add New’ link under ‘Plugins’ in the Wordpress dashboard.

1. Akismet. This plugin comes with Wordpress and is basically the world-standard for Wordpress comment spam protection. For it to work properly you’ll need to register a user account on Wordpress.com and get an API key – choose the ‘Just a username, please.’ radio button near the bottom of the sign-up form otherwise you’ll be creating an entire blog, too. Once you’ve registered you can go to http://dashboard.wordpress.com/wp-admin/profile.php to get your API key – it’s near the top of the profile screen.
2. Fast and Secure Contact Form by Mike Challis. This is a very nice plugin for easily creating a ‘Contact Me’ form.
3. FeedBurner. This ties into the RSS feed links for your blog and allows you to manage all your feeds from one place as well as see how many subcribers you’ve got.
4. Google Analyticator. Who doesn’t want to know how many visitors they get? Go to http://analytics.google.com, follow the easy-to-use sign-up instructions and note down the UA code. Install the Google Analyticator plugin and, in the settings page, paste the UA code you noted down a few minutes ago. Simple.
5. Google XML Sitemaps. Again, pretty much the standard for making sure search engines can crawl your site effectively.
6. Platinum SEO Pack. Maximises SEO (Search Engine Optimisation, sorry for my non-US spelling) and makes sure your site is as “find-able” as possible.
7. SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam. Another excellent plugin by Mike Challis. This one adds CAPTCHA functionality, by default, to your comment forms to try and minimise web bots sending you comment spam.
8. Wordpress Database Backup. Excellent backup plugin by Austin Matzko that allows you to carry out scheduled database backups and save them to your server or have them emailed to an email address of your choice.
9. WP Security Scan. This one’s for scanning your Wordpress installation to make sure it conforms to recommended security settings. If you didn’t change the $table_prefix in wp-config.php and rename the default ‘admin’ account as recommended earlier in this article, the WP Security Scan plugin will let you know in no uncertain terms that you SHOULD HAVE. It will also say that you should have an .htaccess in /wp-admin – go ahead and make one then upload it. There may also be some recommendations about setting file permissions on the various directories within your Wordpress installation – I always change these but that sort of change is up to you.
10. Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP). Does what it says – displays related posts when you view any post on the site.

1. Add to Any. This small plugin allows you to add links to popular bookmarking/social networking sites. Simple in its simplicity it’s a great way of helping your readers link back to your site (and therefore help your page rank in Google if YOU link to them).
2. Breadcrumb NavXT. Gives the option of adding breadcrumb links to the any point in your pages/posts. Personally I’m a big fan of breadcrumbs as they give readers the option of back-tracking back through the path they came in on, depending on your configuration of course.
3. Lightbox 2. Used properly this widely-known and popular technique can give your image links some power. Instead of linking to a relatively boring image they can be made to popup in a much cooler way – you’ve seen this before but maybe not known it’s called Lightbox.
4. WP-CodeBox. This plugin is aimed exclusively at people with code on their sites. Code snippets can be displayed with syntax-colouring/highlighting to make code reading much more effective.
5. WP-PageNavi. As the plugin’s own description says, “Adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress blog.”

Some of the steps below are recommended, some are completely optional but still things I do on each Wordpress site I create. I’ll leave it up to you as to whether or not you do them on your own site. They can, amongst other things, inform social networking sites when you add content and therefore drive more traffic to your site. All these options are under the ‘Settings’ section on the left of the Wordpress dashboard.

1. General > Tagline. The appearance and location of this is theme-dependent but will inform readers, at a glance, what your site is about.
2. General > Timezone. For obvious reasons you should set to the appropriate time zone for your site.
3. Writing > Remote Publishing. If you want to use a desktop client to publish your articles (e.g. Microsoft Live Writer) you’ll need to enable these options.
4. Writing > Update Services. My list of update services can be downloaded from the Digital Formula Downloads page.
5. Reading > Front page displays. Change this to be a static page if you don’t want your site’s entry page to be a list of your latest articles. If you’re using a theme from Elegant Themes some of the will override this setting – please take this into account before asking “Hey, why won’t my static page show up?”
6. Discussion > Other comment settings > Enable threaded (nested) comments ‘X’ levels deep. This is disabled by default – I always set it to 5. Discussions look better that way.
7. Discussion > Before a comment appears > An administrator must always approve the comment. If you install the ‘SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam’ plugin mentioned above it’s pretty safe to disable this. Only web bots (and people) clever enough to figure out the CAPTCHA images can submit comments anyway.
8. Permalinks > Common Settings. I always the custom structure ‘/%category%/%postname%/’. It looks far better than the default and is also SEO-friendly.
9. Miscellaneous > Uploading Files. Worth mentioning but I always leave these at the default settings. If you want to organise your uploads a different way you can change the settings here.

I hope this article helps someone. These settings, plugins and recommendations have helped my blog’s traffic, according to Google Analytics, from increasing by 15-20% each week to over 60% each week. They work for me and, provided you add decent content to your blog, they’ll work for you, too.

Leave a Reply

Click here to cancel reply.

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

CAPTCHA Code