There have been significant changes in the WordPress dashboard for version 2.5. most of them are visual with a few additional enhancements. One of the big changes is in the write post panel and additional functionality in the visual editor toolbar. This WordPress video guide covers the major changes in the dashboard and shows how to upload images and wrap them within the text of a WordPress Post.
There has been a major change in the widgets menu for WordPress version 2.5. Here is an instructional video guide to help you make your way around the new WordPress widgets menu.
Installing a WordPress plugin is very easy once you learn the basics and the steps involved. After you install the plugin showed in this WordPress guide video you may never need to use an FTP client to upload WordPress plugins and WordPress themes again.
The steps outlined in this video are for installing a plugin that requires its whole folder or directory to be uploaded to your hosting account. Usually uploading an entire folder is required when there are mutiple files associated with the plugin. Some plugins only require a single file to be uploaded while some may require other files to be uploaded into other directories. Always read the instructions supplied with the plugin to eliminate any issues.
The steps outlined in the video are as follows:
Download the plugin
Extract or unzip the compress file
Read the installation instructions
Connect to your hosting account with an FTP client
One of the easiest ways to Customize WordPress is to add links to the footer of the themes template. You could add the link to any website you want and if your blog is part of your website adding a link to the homepage of your site will help your search engine rankings as well. This is a little WordPress Guide that will help interlink your website.
First make sure you can edit your theme’s footer.php file by making in writable in your hosting account. Login to your hosting account, browse to your blogs folder, the wp-content folder and then the themes folder. Look for your current theme and open that folder. Change the file permissions to at least the footer.php file to 777 or 666.
Login to your blog, click Presentation, then Theme Editor, look for the Footer file on the right and click it to open it in the editor. First copy all the content in this file and save it as a text file in Notepad on your computer. That way if you mess things up you can just paste the original code back in to start over.
Now look for the links that are already in place, for the default theme that will look like this:
<?php bloginfo(’name’); ?> is proudly powered by
<a href=”http://wordpress.org/”>WordPress</a>
We want to add a link right after this code, Place your mouse right after the original code and hit the space bar once and add your new link code. Or you could just copy the original code and paste it right after it and then edit the URL, the anchor text and even place some text in front of it like this:
<a href=”http://wordpress.org/”>WordPress</a> More Optional Text <a href=”http://YourWebsite.com”>Anchor Text</a>
Now Click Update File, open your site and marvel at your handy work!
If you are using a free theme that someone wrote and it has a link to their website in it please leave the link intact. After all that is a small price to pay for what they have provided you.
Questions or comments are always welcome, please leave them below and I will try to answer all of them.
AdSense-Deluxe is an easy-to-use WordPress plugin for WordPress 1.5+ (including WP 2.0) for quickly inserting Google or Yahoo! ads into your blog posts, and managing when and where those ads are displayed.
If I installed your blog then Adsense-Deluxe should already be installed and would just need activated and configured. If it is not already installed you can follow these instructions watch the WordPress videos below or contact me to do it for you.
Installing the Adsense-Deluxe For WordPress plugin is very easy, just copy the adsense-deluxe.php file to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory. So if your blog were installed in the root directory of your site login to your hosting accounts file manager, go to the “wp-contents” folder then the “plugins” folder and place the file in there.
Now login to your WordPress admin panel, go to “plugins” and activate the Adsense-Deluxe For WordPress plugin on the right. Clicking the main “Options” panel should now present you with a new “AdSenseDeluxe” subpanel click that and let’s get started.
In the options for AdSense-Deluxe plugin page on the right click “(Add New)”, under “New AdSense Block” put a name for your new block, if this is your first one it will revert to the default name so it really doesn’t matter what you call the first block. Now just paste your AdSense code in the “AdSense Code” box and click “Add AdSense Block”
Adding additional blocks will now add the name of each new block, for example if you create a new block called “new” will return a name that looks like this:
<!—adsense—>
Placing the ad blocks into posts is as simple as pasting in the name of the block where you want the ads to appear, but you must paste them into the “code” box and not the “Visual” box in the “Write Post” screen. You could write your post in “Visual” mode and then switch it “Code” and paste the AdSense block wherever you want.
There is an Adsense-Deluxe drop-down box that can be used from the Write Post panel but only if you chose not to use the visual editor when writing. To turn this option off go to Users, then the Your Profile subpanel and uncheck the box next to “Use the visual editor when writing”. Now the AdSense Deluxe drop-down box will only appear after you click the “Save and Continue Editing” box when writing or editing a post. Simply place your curser where you want your AdSense ads to appear in the post and select what code you want from the drop-down box.
I suggest creating a post template filled with all your AdSense codes (and anything else you may want), just start a new post called “Post Template” and save it without publishing it. Then when you write a new post open the post template in “Code” copy the code and paste it into your new post. Now delete what you don’t want in your new post, add the new content and publish.
Adsense-Deluxe is one of the WordPress plugins that is very versatile and you can use it for more than ads, you can put anything you want into the “AdSense Code” block and display just about anything you wish. There are also some advanced options for using it in templates in the read me file.
There may be times when you want to create a blog page or that looks different than a normal page. Or Perhaps you want to use WordPress to run your entire website but want the main page of your domain to look completely different than a typical blog. This is an easy way to Customize WordPress that can be very easily accomplished by creating a custom WordPress page Template.
The first step is to create your desired page in HTML, I use an HTML editor since I am somewhat geek impaired and can’t actually write any code. In this case we are not going to add content to this page from within the dashboard so add all your meta tags for SEO. It will need a title, description, keywords, basically everything a regular static HTML page would need. After you create your new page you need to create a new WordPress page template. This can be done either in a text editor and FTP uploaded to your site or, since it is a small simple file you can create it directly in your hosting account’s control panel.
To create the new page template paste the HTML code into a text editor like Notepad, then paste the following PHP code directly above the opening <html> tag like this.
<?php
/*
Template Name: NewTemplateName
*/
?>
<html>
Copy just the 5 lines of code above the <html> tag (don’t include <html> twice), paste it into your new template and change NewTemplateName to a name of your choosing. Save the new page template as a .php file. Something like front.php, and upload it to your hosting account in the template folder of your current WordPress theme. Don’t call your new template page.php! There is already one called that. In fact look in the themes directory to see what files exist to not create a duplicate.
The directory to place the new page template in is blog/wp-content/themes/default. Where default is the currently active theme.
Since you are placing this new [tag]WordPress[tag] page template into a specific themes folder it will only be available when that specific theme is active. If you change themes you will need to place a copy of it into the currently active theme.
To create a new page template within your hosting accounts control panel. Browse to your blogs main directory, wp-content, themes, then click on your currently active theme. Create a new PHP file, call it whatever you wish, like above front.php, paste your HTML code and then the PHP code directly above it and save.
Creating Your New Custom Page
Login to your WordPress Dashboard, click Write then Write Page. Since we didn’t specify in the custom page template to get the content, or any other information for that matter, all we need to do here is create a new page and specify the page template to use.
Type a title in the title box, then look over to the right and click the Page Template drop down box, choose your new WordPress page template and click publish.
Using A Custom Static Front Page
If you want to use a your new custom page for a static front page you will first need to create another regular page as a URL as your blogs Posts Page . Create a new page and give it the title blog, or anything you want. Again don’t bother writing any content, on the right side type the same name as the title in the Post Slug box and click publish.
To specify using a static front page, click Options then the Reading subpanel. Choose the Static Page option, specify your new custom page as the front page and the newly created blog page as the Posts Page and click Update Options.
Now your blog will show your new custom page as the front page. But what about your blog? Where did it go? If you followed my directions and used blog as the the Posts Page the URL should be YourBlogsURL.com/blog so if your blog is in a directory called blog then the URL will be YourBlogsURL.com/blog/blog. Having a blog/blog URL isn’t all that cool huh? Well this is intended for use on a website ran entirely on WordPress without a static HTML front page. But you can use a different name in the title and Post Slug when you create the new Posts Page.
Now that your have read the entire post here is a short video to explain it.
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