WordPress Settings
First, go to the settings tab.
Settings->General
This is where we tell WordPress about the identity of our site. We give it a title without forgetting the slogan by not hesitating to inform a maximum of keywords on which we wish to be referred. As we are launching a cooking blog, we will call it Healthy Eating and we will indicate as slogan: All the tips to cook healthy, light and balanced dishes .
Two fields follow in which you must fill in theurl of your site. Be sure to indicate that your site uses secure SSL encryption by using https://votresiteweb.com(and not just HTTP). If you are not sure if you have an SSL certificate on your web installation, contact your web host. Be aware that Google has announced that it will automatically penalize sites that do not use SSL data security, so you might as well get started right away!
First, you need to fill in theWordPress web address (URL). This is your original address. In the case of our kitchen site, we will put: https://www.mangersain.com.
If you have installed your site in a sub-folder, then you must tell WordPress this in the site’s web address (URL) field.
The email address is the primary address that your CMS will use to communicate with you. By default, this is the main administrator’s.
The registration option allows you to authorize user registrations on your site. We want our readers to be able to write articles on our blog themselves. So we check the box everyone can register.
The Default role for all new users option allows us to assign basic permissions to our registrants. They will have limited access to the administration panel to write texts, manage a shop, etc., depending on your needs. In our case, we want our users to be able to write articles but we want to keep the editorial control. So we set this parameter to ‘Contributor’ in order to decide whether or not to publish the articles sent.
Click here to find a summary of all possible roles on WordPress by default.
The site language allows you to switch our site to another language. For our part, we leave it in French.
Finally, we can set the time zone, date format, time format and the first day of the week. We leave all this as default and save the changes.
Settings->Writing options
Here you can select the default category of the articles and the default format of the articles. This last option is useful if your theme is configured to support it. You could for example have a different layout for an article, a video, etc… But we won’t use this feature with Divi.
The article sending by email allows you to send articles on WordPress by a simple email. If this function can be useful in some cases, it is not without danger since any article sent to this mailbox will be automatically published. Even if it’s a spam email offering to buy viagra. To be avoided, therefore.
The update service is probably the most interesting option on this page. This allows you to notify various services each time articles are published or modified. By default, WordPress uses pingomatic which relays the notification to several services such as google blog search, My Yahoo and many others. If you wish, you can add other services but beware that each new service added will slow down the publishing process, without affecting the speed of execution on the side of your Internet users.
Settings->Playback options
This is where we will be able to define the general functioning of our site. In particular, we can adjust the display of the home page. We can either display a list of the last published articles or define a static home page. This is the option we will choose to keep control over the display of the home page. To do this, we will first go to the page menu, click on add and create a page called Eating Healthy: The best recipes for healthy and balanced eating. Always prefer a page with a well-defined title, rather than using a generic term such as home or welcome that offers no added value in terms of SEO. For now, we leave the page blank, publish it and go back to our settings menu->reading options.
Now, when we open the Home Page drop-down menu, we find our page and select it.
The articles page is the page that will display the list of your articles. We leave this parameter empty for the moment.
Then we can set the number of articles to display on our articles page as well as the number of items to include in our RSS feed. We leave these parameters at 10 by default.
The following parameter allows you to decide whether to display the full text of your articles or only an excerpt in your articles page. We choose to show only the extract.
If you are under development and do not want to be indexed by search engines, you can check the last box. Don’t forget to uncheck it once your site is finished.
Settings->Discussion
We are now going to configure the way in which the Internet users will be able to comment on the various articles present on the site.
Attempting to notify linked sites from the content of your article allows you to notify the owners of the blogs mentioned in your articles through a notification. We activate this option.
Allowing notification links from other blogs (pings and backlinks) on new posts allows you to receive a notification each time your blog is cited in another site. We activate this function.
Allow readers to post comments on new articles: we enable this feature.
Other comment settings. Here, we will ask commenters to fill in their name and email address. We don’t want them to have to log in to comment. For the moment, we don’t want to automatically close comments but we will activate this function later if it turns out that our blog becomes a troll den, in order to simplify the moderation work.
We leave five levels of comments, which will allow users to create threads with five levels of depth. We don’t expect a tsunami of feedback for the launch of the site, so we don’t split our comments into multiple pages yet. Finally, we choose to display the most recent comments first.
Next, we ask WordPress to send us a message when a comment is pending moderation. To avoid receiving too many emails, we disable the possibility to receive an email when a comment is published.
In order not to have to approve every comment, we choose the option: The author of a comment must already have at least one approved comment and we uncheck the box allowing us to moderate all comments.
The next option allows us to filter out the unwanted ones, we leave these options by default and we will turn to the Akismet plugin to act as a guardian should spam arrive en masse. This extension can be purchased by paying what you want as long as you stay within the framework of a personal non-commercial site.
The last section allows us to manage user avatars . WordPress uses the Gravatar service to automatically manage avatars. We leave all of the following settings as default.
Settings->Media
This tab offers us the possibility to indicate the sizes of the media we want to use in our articles. Indeed, when we upload an image, WordPress automatically generates thumbnails in order to resize them according to the desired use. We leave all these settings as default.
Settings->Permalians
This is where we will define the structure of our URLS.
Your posts are stored in the WordPress database and to display them, the CMS uses commands via a PHP program. Therefore, the original form of your posts looks like this: monsiteweb.com/index.php?p=123
This way of displaying the URL is not convenient for your visitors and even less for the Google Bots because it does not contain any information about the content of the article.
To compensate for this, WordPress allows the creation of permalinks which are nothing more than rewrites of your URLs.
In this field, all follies are allowed! You can include the date, the name of the article, its author,…
For our cooking blog, we plan to create several categories: a carnivore category, another vegan category and so on. We want these categories to be displayed in the URL.
So we will select the custom structure and use the following tags: /category/postname/
In this way, an article titled ‘Guacamole Recipe’ in the ‘Vegan’ category would be displayed as: www.mangersain.com/vegan/recette-du-guacamole.
The category prefix adds another level to the URL for displaying article categories. For example, if I indicate here: kitchen, my URL will become: www.mangersain.com/cuisine/vegan/recette-du-guacamole.
The tag base allows you to group all the tags or keywords under the same URL. For example, if I put the keyword ‘avocado’ to all my recipes that use avocado, and I indicate that my label base is called ‘ingredients’, the URL for all recipes that use avocado will be: www.mangersain.com/ingredients/avocat.
Settings->Privacy
The privacy options allow your WordPress site to display your privacy policy for your site. With the application of the new European standards under the GDPR, all sites using cookies or scripts must mention it and get the user’s approval. Here you can specify the page on which your privacy policy will be found or create one from a template provided. We will come back to this subject in a later article.
