101Jack Davenport

www.mercianlabels.com

What is WordPress?WordPress is a fully fledged Open Source CMS or Content Management System under the GPLv2 licence.

This bascially means its a back end of a website that makes it easy to create and manage web content utilising a database to store the information and a basic (or advanced) text editor with various different tools, most of which you would find in standard office programmes.

Why we use WordPressFor the exact reasons above. To make it easy for non web professionals to create and manage the data without the need for a professional to aid with content.

Downsides to WordPress?Security flaws, keeping it up to date with the latest versions of WP, themes, plugins etc helps to keep WP secure (Always make sure the site and database is backed up BEFORE you update anything on the site, you WILL regret this at some point)

You can find all of the information on WordPress here: www.wordpress.org

To login, just add /wp-admin to the end of the URL.

www.example.com/wp-admin

Additional screen options can be found on most screens inside the dashboard. Adds or removes items from your view.

View the sites front end. The link switches when in the front end to get back to the dashboard.

Update notifications, remember backing up is essential!

Link to your posts...

Link to your pages...

Add, edit & remove media

Add, edit & remove users

What is a WordPress Post?

Posts are most often used as blog posts. They can also be used for ‘custom post types’.

Custom post types are exactly the same as normal posts, the same data, the same screen, the only difference being that they are categorised differently. So instead on the right hand side navigation saying ‘Posts’, it might say, Shop or Portfolio, maybe Dogs or Cats, Movies or Books.

A post is a collection of data held in the database. A list of posts are displayed ready to be created or edited. Posts are entries listed in reverse chronological order on the blog home page or on the posts page. e.g Title, content (text, images, video), meta data (times/dates etc), categories, tags... etc

Blog screen, where the list of 10 posts are (as standard)

To add images & videos click into the content area below where you want to insert the media

Then click the ‘Add Media’ button and upload the images as normal

Upload or select media to insert

Align the image and chose the size you need it to be then click insert

Revisions if old content is lost

Update or Publish your post

What is a WordPress Page?Pages are static and are not based on the date they were created. An ‘About Us’ page is a good example of a page.

Pages can be arranged into subpages. They can use different templates for each page. Just like posts they are a collection of data stored in the database.

Structure related pages. Tip: Create subpages here and select the ‘child lopop template below to display a list of child pages complete with featured image

Page templates can alter the look, structure and pretty much anything on the page or off it in the background. The best themes will have multiple templates.

The ‘kitchen sink’ allows you to edit posts & pages just as you would in an office pro-gramme like OpenOffice or Word.

What is a WordPress Theme?A theme is a set of files that provide structure and style of the website. They can be 2 or 3 files or they can be much bigger depending on how much customisation has been made.

WordPress comes complete with themes that are ready to use. There are also free & premium themes you can download. Some of the premium themes provide high end customisation and can be well worth the small fee.

WordPress’ free themes functions.php a vital part of any custom theme

What is a WordPress Plugin?A plugin is a file or a set of files that extends or modifies the core WordPress structure. There are plugins for almost everything from image galleries to shipping tables and beyond.

Things like custom post types should be defined in plugins as they extend WordPress. If it was part of a theme, when you switch the theme so your site looks nice and new, if the new theme does not have the same custom post types you can’t retrieve the data for these.

Just like themes there are many free and premium plugins available.

Comes with WordPress

Free

Premium

What is a WordPress Widget?A widget is a content area where you can add data to your website. The typical locations for widgets are in the header, sidebar and the footer.

The location of the widgets depends entirely on the theme you use, there could be zero or there could be many.

Drag and drop the widgets to add them and reorder them

There are multiple widgets already available with Word-Press but there are many plugins that offer more, most premium themes will add their own widgets.

What is a WordPress Menu?A menu is a list of links to internal or external websites. There is no limit to how many links you can have unless your server limits them. You can have multiple menus and you can use them in widgets using the ‘Custom Menu’ widget and also in the places designated by your theme.

Add the links you want to the menu.

Tip: If you don’t see all of the options here open screen options and tick the checkboxes!

Drag and drop the menu items to reorder them, indent the menu to create a sub item.

Save the changes to your menu

WordPress UsersWordPress can have multiple users and each user can be set a different level of access to the website or blog.

Note: I have removed usernames from the list to protect the website the list is from.

username

username

username

username

username

username

Add new users by filling in the form. You can read about user roles here:http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities

WordPress SettingsThe settings menu is where you can alter some of the defaults set in WordPress to suit your website/blog. You will also find that if a plugin has any options you will find them nested under the ‘Settings’ tab.

An example of part of the settings menu. You can, amongst other things, change the homepage to show a page instead of a list of posts, alter how the URL looks in the search bar (permalinks) or change the title of your website/blog.