Archive for the ‘tutorial’ Category

Adding an image can complement your WordPress blog post or page, the visual interest seems to hold a reader’s attention, generally. Solid blocks of text can get a bit much, including an image or two can break that up nicely and make it easier to read.

This post is a basic “how to add an image to your WordPress post or page”.

If your image is on your computer you need to upload it, and WordPress handles this very well.

When you are creating your post or page, you will see Upload/Insert above your content area.

Clicking into that icon brings you to:

and it’s here that you choose your image file. You can also see options that will enable you to insert an image from an URL – have a play with that if you know of an online image that you want to use (and are allowed to use, of course). Back to uploading your image file from your computer – click on Choose File and you will then be able to select the file you want to upload. When chosen, click the Upload button and this brings you to the following:

Now you can add some alt-text (for accessibility purposes), a caption if you want one, a description, and in the Link URL you can enter a link that clicking on the image will take you to, if useful. Select the alignment (left and right will allow text to the side of the image), and a size if you do not want to use the Full size of the image. And then you do need to remember to click Insert into Post (I forgot this several times when I started out with WordPress).

And your image then neatly appears in your post or page.

You can go back and edit any of the above – within your post/page edit mode, click once on the image and you will see two icons – one to edit and one to delete. Go into the Edit icon and you will have the option for some simple Edit Image options, or the Advanced Settings. Have a play to really get to grips with it all.

And add some visual interest to your blog posts and/or WordPress pages.

This is a more specific post than the earlier tutorial on the “mighty text box” which outlined what we could include in the Text box widget.

Adding just a link: Go to Appearance, Widgets and drag a fresh text box into your sidebar. Within that put your link (I usually copy and paste, to be sure it’s right). Now you need to “tell” WordPress that it is a link by placing some html code around the link; the code you need is <a href=”http://yourlinkaddress.com/”>Text for your link</a>

The a tells WordPress and the Internet that a link follows, and the href says where the link is, and you do need to be sure to “close” your link with the </a>

So, for a link to the Blogmistress free healthcheck the code would be:

<a href=”http://www.blogmistress.com/wordpress-healthcheck/”>Book your free WordPress healthcheck here</a>

Of course you may want to link to an image that is already online, such as something within wikipedia – do be sure that you are allowed to use any images from elsewhere, and you simply use that image’s url instead of the one you uploaded.

And it is possible to add a link and/or image to your WordPress sidebar without using a widget, but that means rolling up our sleeves and coding into the theme’s files – we’ll cover that later.

So – what are “plugins”?

Basically, they add functionality to your WordPress blog or website. There are thousands of them available, all created by elves who love to share their geek creations with the world. (OK – so they’re not elves, but the plugin programmers love that WordPress is open source and add what they can to the collective!). And while they may be free (mostly), if the added functionality is useful for you, it is a good thing to make a donation to that plugins creator, if such an option exists.

The first plugins that you will come across are the Akismet spam filter and Hello Dolly. The first is a welcome standard that we urge you to activate and use, the second is pure frivolity from the WordPress creators and you can either use it or delete!

The way we recommend you approach adding more plugins is to source them from the WordPress.com site (ideally) and to install and activate one at a time. Sometimes plugins can conflict with each other or with a theme – if your WordPress suddenly dies, the first thing we look at is the plugins.

Probably the best way to go about choosing a plugin is to first of all identify what you need, so for this post I have decided I want a cool twitter plugin.

You can review the plugins available on the WordPress website, in which case the first place to go to is WordPress Plugins and search for what you want – in this instance ‘twitter’ and I’ve decided to sort by Highest Rated and after looking at a few I’ve chosen WP to Twitter as it looks pretty interesting.

To add a new plugin, from your Dashboard go to Plugins > Add New – here I am going to search for the specific plugin chosen ‘wp to twitter’ and once the search results come up click on install to the right of the description.

The full description and information will come up but as I’ve already looked into this plugin I am ready to click on Install Now, it shouldn’t take long to install and once done you’ll get a confirmation to show it’s installed and also asking if you want to activate it.

Plugins cannot be used on your WordPress until they are activated – Plugins, Installed and activate (an option under the plugin’s description) - once you have done this you either have to sort out their settings or go to widgets and pop them into the side bar, see WordPress Widgets, What, Why How Post.

Now I’ve activated WP to Twitter I will need to give it more information, as no extra menu appeared in my dashboard sidebar menu I’ve had a look in Settings and it is there at the bottom of that menu. Your plugins options, etc will be available from the Dashboard menu – either within Settings, Tools, or perhaps with a menu item of its own.

So, now I’ve installed the plugin, activated and popped the required information into the settings. That’s it, all done!

While I am in my dashboard I’ve also decided I no longer need some plugins that I had previously installed so time to delete some. To do this simply click on plugins and here you’ll see a list of what you have, if you simply don’t want to use a plugin for now click on deactivate, if you really didn’t get on with that plugin and no longer wish to use it click on delete.

Hopefully having read this you’ll see that there really isn’t much effort or geeky stuff to be done to get a plugin working on your site and if you need help just leave a comment and we’ll get back to you.

If you are unsure of what you should have and would like us to give your WordPress a healthcheck click here to book a session with the blogmistress

Following on from the basic, initial foray into what WordPress widgets do (nutshell: they add things to your sidebar), now let’s take a look at what we can do with the Text Box widget.

This can be very useful! You can add several text boxes and include images, links, any kind of html (and more) in each.

Let’s start with a simple text box that can include your contact information, such as we have on the Blogmistress.

Go to Appearance, Widgets and drag across a Text Box to your sidebar.

This opens a box in which you can add anything – test it out and have a play – just add some text, then save, and have a look at the result on your blog/website to see what happens.

Click on the image to see it full size

For the contact information in the Blogmistress sidebar, we added the following:

Email: <a href=”mailto: hello@blogmistress.com“>hello@blogmistress.com</a>Call: 0845 644 0709Skype: barbarasaul<a href=”http://www.twitter.com/blogmistress”>The Blogmistress on Twitter</a><a href=”http://www.facebook.com/blogmistress”>Join the Facebook fan page</a>

This is the actual “code” so that you can copy, paste and edit to suit you, if that’s useful.

The thing to remember is that whatever you do, you can immediately delete or move out of your sidebar – so don’t be afraid to test things out.

Have fun!

This is something each of us should do immediately. Using the “admin” username is not a good idea from a security point of view, so one of your first WordPress tasks should be to create a new administrator level user (and I do hate calling people “users” but I’ll only confuse things if I call them anything different) and use that.

To create a new WordPress user:

1. Go to Users, Add New
2. Enter the required Username and other details as prompted – the First Name, Last Name, E-mail address, and give them a password – make it something strong to encourage good security.
3. Leave the check box against “Send Password?” ticked if that is what you want.
4. Set the Role of that user – an Administrator can do anything, the Editor role can publish and manage posts and pages – both their own and others’, an Author can publish and manage their own blog posts, a Contributor can write and manage their own posts but cannot publish them (useful if you want to manage yourself), and a Subscriber simply has a profile that they can manage.

And Add User to save. That’s it.

If you want to manage your Users, including change their Role, or delete them – go to Users, Authors & Users and then Edit the user concerned.

If seeing this done is helpful, here’s a screencast of the process: