Here the full overview of WordPress settings.
General WordPress Settings
General: Click on Settings -> General option in WordPress.
Following are the details of the fields on general settings page
- Site Title: It displays the name of the site in the template header.
- Tagline: Displays a short sentence about your site.
- WordPress Address (URL): It is the URL of WordPress directory where your all core application files are present.
- Site Address (URL): Enter the site URL which you want your site to display on the browser.
- E-mail Address: Enter your e-mail address which helps to recover your password or any update.
- Membership: Anyone can register an account on your site after you check this checkbox.
- New User Default Role: The default role is set for the newly registered user or members.
- Timezone: Sets the time zone based on the particular city.
- Date Format: Sets the date format as you need to display on the site.
- Time Format: Sets the time format as you need to display on the site.
- Week Starts On: Select the week day which you prefer to start for WordPress calendar. By default it is set as Monday.
- Site Language: Sets the language for the WordPress dashboard.
After filling all the information about general settings, click on Save Changes button. It saves all your general setting information.
Writing Settings
Writing: To change writing settings, go to Settings -> Writing option.
Following are the details of the fields on the page.
- Formatting : This field defines two sub options for better user experience.
- The first option Convert emoticons like 🙂 and 😛 to graphics on display will turn text-based emoticons into graphic-based emoticons.
- The second option WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically corrects the invalid XHTML placed within the posts or pages.
- Default Post Category: It is a category to be applied to a post and you can leave it as Uncategorized.
- Post via e-mail: This option uses e-mail address to create posts and publishes posts on your blog through e-mail. To use this, you’ll need to set up a secret email account with a POP3 access, and any mail received at this address will be posted.
- Mail Server: It allows reading the e-mails that you send to WordPress and stores them for retrieval. For this, you need to have POP3 compatible mail server and it will have URI address such as mail.example.com, which you should enter here.
- Login Name: To create posts, WordPress will need its own e-mail account. The Login Name will use this e-mail address and should be kept as a secret as spammers will post links redirecting to their own websites.
- Password: Set password for the above e-mail address.
- Default Mail Category: It allows selecting custom category for all the posts that are published via Post by e-mail feature.
Update Services in WordPress settings
Update Services: When you publish a new post, WordPress will automatically notify the site update services in the box. See the Update Services on the codex for the long list of possible services. After filling all the above information, click on Save Changes button to save your information.
Reading
Reading: Click on Settings -> Reading option in WordPress.
Following are the details of the fields on reading settings.
- Front page displays: This section is used to display the front page in any of the following format:
- Your latest posts: It displays latest posts on the front page.
- A static page: It displays the static pages on the front page.
- Front Page: You can select the actual page you want to display on front page from the drop down.
- Posts Page: You can select the page from the drop down which contains posts.
- Blog pages show at most: The number of posts to be displayed per page or site. By default, it is set as 10.
- Syndication feeds show the most recent: The user can view the number of posts when they download one of the site feeds. By default, it is set as 10.
- For each article in a feed, show: This section is used to display the post by selecting any of the following formats:
- Full Text: It displays the complete post. It is set as default.
- Summary: It displays the summary of the post.
- Search Engine Visibility: After clicking on the checkbox, Discourage search engines from indexing this site, your site will be ignored by the search engine.
- After filling all the information, click on Save Changes button to save your Reading Setting information.
Discussion
Discussion: Click on Settings -> Discussion option in WordPress.
Following fields are seen in Discussion settings.
Default article settings:
- These settings are default to the new pages you create or new posts. This contains three more settings. They are:
- Attempt to notify any blogs linked to from the article: When you publish articles then it sends a notification (sends pings and trackback) to other blogs.
Other Comment Settings:
- This setting has the following options:
- Comment author must fill out name and e-mail: When you check this box, it is mandatory for visitors to fill their name and email address.Users must be registered and logged in to comment: If you check this box, only those registered visitors can leave comments, if not checked anyone can leave any number of comments.Automatically close comments on articles older than days: This option allows you to accept comments only for a particular time period as per your wish.Enable threaded (nested) comments: When you check this option, visitors can reply or have a discussion and get responses.Break comments into pages with top level comments per page and the page displayed by default: If your pages are getting a lot of comments then you can split them into different pages by checking this box.
Email me whenever:
- This setting contains two options, namely
- Anyone posts a comment: When you check into this box, the author gets an e-mail for every single comment that is posted.
- A comment is held for moderation: This is used in case you do not want your comment to be updated before it’s moderated by the admin.
- Before a comment appears: This setting allows how your posts are controlled.
There are two more settings as followed:
- Comment must be manually approved: If you check this box then only the approved comments by the admin can be displayed on the posts or pages.
- Comment author must have a previously approved comment: This can be checked when you want to approve a comment of an author whose has commented and his e-mail address matches the e-mail address of the previous posted comment. Otherwise the comment is held for moderation
- Comment Moderation: Contain only a specific number of links that are allowed into a comment.
- Comment Blacklist: You can input your own spam words which you do not want your visitors to enter into the comments, URL, e-mail etc.; later it would filter the comments.
- Avatars: Avatar is a small image that displays at the top-right-hand corner of the dashboard screen beside your name. It is like your profile picture. Here you have a few more options where you can set your avatar for WordPress site.
- Avatar Display: It displays your avatar besides your name when it is Checked
Maximum rating: You have a four other options of avatars you can use.
They are G, PG, R and X. This is the age section where you select according
to which type of audience you want to display your posts.
- Default Avatar: In this option, there are few more types of avatars with images you can keep these avatars according to your visitors e-mail address.Click on Save Changes button to save the changes.
Media settings
Media : Click on Settings->Media option in WordPress.
Following are the details of the fields on Media settings:
- Thumbnail size: Set the size of the thumbnail.
- Medium size: Set the height and width of medium size images.
- Large size: Set width and height of larger images.
- Uploading files: After checking this checkbox, the uploaded image will be arranged into year and month based folder.
- After setting the dimension in pixels, click on Save Changes button. It saves your media setting information.
Permalink
Permalink: Click on Settings-> Permalinks option from the left navigation menu.
Here are a few settings you can make:
Common settings
- Check any of the radio buttons to choose your permalink structure for your blogs
- Default: It sets the default URL structure in WordPress.
- Day and name: It sets URL structure according to the date and name in your posts.
- Month and name: It sets the URL structure according to the month and name in your post.
- Numeric: It sets numbers in the URL structure in your post.
- Post name: It sets post name in the URL structure in your post.
- Custom Structure: It sets the URL structure of your choice by writing the desired name in the given text box.
- Once you are done with changes, click on Save Changes button to save the permalink settings.
Updating wordpress
One-click Update
- Modern versions of WordPress let you update with the click of a button. (This feature was added in 2.7, so if you are using an older version, you will need to follow the steps to update manually.)
- Going to the Dashboard > Updates screen. Once you are on the “Update WordPress” page, click the button “Update Now” to start the process off.
- You shouldn’t need to do anything else and, once it’s finished, you will be up-to-date.
- One-click updates work on most servers. If you have any problems, it is probably related to permissions issues on the filesystem.
Manual Update
Step 1: Replace WordPress files
- Get the latest WordPress zip (or tar.gz) file.
- Unpack the zip file that you downloaded.
- Deactivate plugins.
- Delete the old wp-includes and wp-admin directories on your web host (through your FTP or shell access).
- Using FTP or your shell access, upload the new wp-includes and wp-admin directories to your web host, in place of the previously deleted directories.
- Upload the individual files from the new wp-content folder to your existing wp-content folder, overwriting existing files. Do NOT delete your existing wp-content folder. Do NOT delete any files or folders in your existing wp-content directory (except for the one being overwritten by new files).
- Upload all new loose files from the root directory of the new version to your existing wordpress root directory.
- NOTE – you should replace all the old WordPress files with the new ones in the wp-includes and wp-admin directories and sub-directories, and in the root directory (such as index.php, wp-login.php and so on). Don’t worry – your wp-config.php will be safe.
- Be careful when you come to copying the wp-content directory. You should make sure that you only copy the files from inside this directory, rather than replacing your entire wp-content directory. This is where your themes and plugins live, so you will want to keep them. If you have customized the default or classic themes without renaming them, make sure not to overwrite those files, otherwise you will lose your changes. (Though you might want to compare them for new features or fixes..)
- Lastly you should take a look at the wp-config-sample.php file, to see if any new settings have been introduced that you might want to add to your own wp-config.php.
Step 2: Update your installation
- Visit your main WordPress admin page at /wp-admin.
- You may be asked to login again.
- If a database upgrade is necessary at this point, WordPress will detect it and give you a link to a URL like http://example.com/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php. Follow that link and follow the instructions.
- This will update your database to be compatible with the latest code. You should do this as soon as possible after step 1.
- Don’t forget to reactivate plugins!