Tim February 23rd, 2007

This post is part of a series:
WordPress 2.1 Part 1 of 3 | Installing from scratch
Wordpress 2.1 Part 2 of 3 | Digging into the Administration Panel
WordPress 2.1 Part 3 of 3 | Customizing and Extending WordPress

Well well well, nice to have you back. If you’ve been tuning into our programming here at DemoMarks you would know that we’ve got a 3 part Demo of WordPress 2.1 going on. Yesterday we covered Installation of WordPress from Scratch. Today we are tackling the Admin interface of WordPress. From writing and managing posts and pages to plugins, links, and presentational elements, the administration panel has a lot of functionality built into a pretty clean and simple package. Let’s take it for a test drive.

Requirements

• WordPress 2.1 installed on a Hosting Service
• FTP Program

1. We begin right where we left off, our default install of WordPress 2.1. Assuming everything went smoothly you should see this basic blog with a “Hello World” post, all done in a Kubrick theme.

2. To jump into the administration interface we will choose the “Site Admin” link under the Meta section. We now get a lovely redesigned logon page that asks for the username and password of the individual (you did write those things down right?).

3. Now if you’re like me you don’t even remember what you had for dinner last night, much less what that default password was they gave me, so I’m going to test out the “Forgot Password” function and see what it has to offer. By typing in my username and associated email address I can receive a new password via email, a pretty handy tool for the forgetful like me.

4. Now that I’ve been reminded of my password I’m finally able to log on which brings me to the homepage or “Dashboard” of the administration panel. Here I get the latest news about WordPress as well as recent posts and comments. Once blogs start linking to me I would also see them listed on the sidebar. This page is basically a catch-all for basic information about your blog.

5. Moving right along the menu I choose “Write” to see what’s in store. Here you can see how the menu works. There are sub-items within the main navigational menus and by default the first sub-item will be chosen (in this case “Write Post”). It seems to me the functionality lends itself better to being a drop-down menu for easier navigation, in fact there’s a plugin that will do just that, but for now I’m keeping it like this.

You’ll notice a lot going on here but nothing that isn’t intuitive enough. We’ve got a basic editor for creating a post with the standard elements to format it. We’ve also got a section where we can assign and add new categories for our post. This is kind of like tagging and keeps track of what areas your post involves. We can also disable comments, apply a password, and adjust timestamp information through the sidebar items. Below the editor we have the option of uploading files to include in our post. Most of the time you will not be using these extra features but it is quite helpful to have them on hand when you really want to start getting into the guts of your blog and pimping it out (which we’ll be covering in Part 3 of this demo).

6. Pages in WordPress are similar in many aspects to posts and as you can see the editing screen is identical. “So what’s the difference,” you might ask? Well calm down, I’m getting there. Pages are seperate from the main blog and can be linked on the homepage. So say you want a page about yourself, or a contact page. You would create one here and unlike a post, it would move off the screen as more posts come in, it would be linked on your blog and remain there. To see what this looks like check out the contact link on DemoMarks, this is a WordPress Page.

7. The Manage section allows us to see the latest posts and find older ones in case we need to go back and edit the information or delete a post for any reason. You will also use this page to remove comments, mark for spam, or approve them.

8. Managing Pages then is pretty obvious. If you need to edit a page you created or remove one you can do so here.

9. You can also Manage your Category list here, editing the names of the categories, adding new ones, and removing others. Categories are very similiar to tags and can be used to call up all posts of a specific topic. I highly recommend getting used to adding categories to your posts to make browsing the archives even more interesting.

10. To facilitate the transition from an older blog you may have kept, WordPress has the option to import your information from a number of competitor blogging platforms as well as another WordPress blog. There is also an option to export your blog if you later need to do that.

11. The comments section is completely dedicated to managing, editing, and administrating the comments left on your blog. You can approve new comments, delete old ones, and search for comments in these pages.

12. Your Blogroll is a list of links for blogs that you read or support. Any websites that you enjoy could be listed here (they don’t have to be blogs). By default we get the full list of WordPress Developers, and hey, if you love them as much as I do maybe you’ll want to just keep them on your list. If not, go ahead and delete them. No one’s watching anyway.

13. Another feature of the Blogroll I love is the ability to import OPML files from your RSS reader. This allows you a quick way of adding a ton of links that you visit frequently and enjoy.

14. Under presentation we find the lovely themes. WordPress used to include quite a few themes but these days you need to download them on your own and upload them to the theme directory (which we’ll be doing in Part 3 of this Demo). Choosing a new theme is as easy as selecting it from the list. Your current theme will always show up top.

15. You’ll notice after selecting your new theme that WordPress pops up the notifications instantly via AJAX. The new theme is now listed at the top.

16. Let’s take a look at how my blog looks now. Pretty nifty, eh? There are tons of themes available online, many open source and free for the taking. Go nuts!

17. WordPress also gives you the option of editing the styles and php associated with your theme from right inside the administration panels. These updates will be live on your site once you click “update” so make sure you know what you’re doing or you could cause some real damage to your blog. For the advanced users this interface will save you a lot of time.

18. WordPress’ plugin architecture is a huge strength to their blogging platform. Here we see the default plugins which vary from the extremely useful Akismet comment spam filter to the extremely rediculous Hello Dolly lyrics generator. Much like themes, WordPress leaves you to download them and FTP to the plugin directory. Once that is done they will show up on this list where you can activate them.

19. I’ll go ahead and activate a plugin for you to see. Once again the plugin is loaded in the background and an AJAX call notifies us that the plugin is active. Certain plugins will also have an options page located under the last menu item for making changes to the plugin.

20. Again WordPress appeals to the advanced user by allowing editing of the plugin’s php contents from within the admin interface. Unless you’re a php guru don’t go messing around with this, and if you are a guru then why are you reading this?

21. This Demo is getting quite long but fear not, we’re in the homestretch. Onward! The user page lists all people that have registered on your site. If you require someone to register in order to comment this list could be quite long. If you don’t there is probably only the admin user here. You will also notice the ability to assign roles. You could add a user and make them an editor for instance and they would have access to all Posts and Pages but not the presentational aspects of the interface. This is extremely handy for using WordPress as a Content Management System when creating websites for clients who won’t need all the extra features in the administration panel.

22. The Profile Page gives all the regular options for giving information about a person. This is also the page you would go to if you need to change your password to the extremely difficult to remember default WordPress gave you to something much more secure like “password” or “123″. You can also choose to use the visual editor here for creating new posts. For those without a handle on html the visual rich editor is more of a WYSIWYG interface with little to no code showing in the editing box. Again this is helpful not only for some users but also for content management systems.

23. Our last top menu choice is Options which contains a variety of information for editing how your blog works. The first page will give some basic title information and allow you to change the time and date settings.

24. With the writing options you have the ability to adjust how you edit posts. There is also a very nifty feature to allow one to email posts directly to your blog. Just make sure the email address you assign is very hard for anyone to guess. Last thing you want is more spam clogging up your blog than there already is.

25. In the Discussion tab you can regulate whether comments need approval and blacklist certain words and phrases. This is not a catch-all and you should still use a comment spam blacklist and filter of some sort (there are plenty of plugins available that do this) in addition to any specific regulations you set here.

26. One of my favorite options is the ability to choose how your links within your blog are displayed. Direct links to content on your blog are known as “Permalinks” and WordPress allows you to choose from few preset variables as well as create a custom permalink based on many different options. This helps your blog from having a link that ends in 12345-abc.asp or something of that sort. Clean and simple links also improve Search Engine Optimization for spidering your site.

That wraps up our demo of the Administration Panel. As you can see there are a ton of options to customize your blog to your heart’s content. Tomorrow we will also be covering the third part of our series on WordPress with even more options to effect the design and function of your blog. WordPress excels best in it’s extensibility through plugins, themes, and direct editing of dynamic php content. To fill, manage, and customize your blog, WordPress has created a tool that does all this with ease and options for the novice and guru alike.

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• blogging , cms , review , wordpress
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