About This Lesson: Creating and Managing Community Organization Websites with Wordpress

By Jeff Ginger | 05.2009 | Wordpress version 2.71

Wordpress is a great free website and blogging service/tool.  This tutorial is for learners who have already setup a new Wordpress site and want to learn the basics.

• If your organization already has a Wordpress site picked out and setup you can skip the first section
• We will commonly refer to “your blog” but you can consider this phrase interchangeable with “your website”
• If you have yet to setup a Wordpress install, see our guide about how to do this with Wordpress.com or Dreamhost (nonprofits only)
• Advanced learners can learn much more about Wordpress at http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page

You will need to complete your blog setup.  Pick a title and working email address for the primary blog caretaker.  You can change these options later.  If you want your blog to be easily found through internet searches, click the “Allow my blog to appear in search engines like Google and Technorati” option.

You will then be directed to sign in with your admin account and given a temporary password.  Right click and copy this password (or write it down), you will need it to login. It can be changed later, don’t worry.

Once you’ve logged in you’ll be confronted with the Wordpress Dashboard.  It’s okay if it looks really complicated, right now there are only a few things you need to know.  Take a look at the picture below:

Note the colored boxes identifying areas above.  The green box is the dashboard navigation, it’s what you use to get around the dashboard.  Use it much like you would use a website. Notice the arrow next to the “Posts” section.  You can click on any arrow to expand a link and see related sub-links. The orange box is a link to view your blog, you can click on it from any page.  Try right-clicking on it and opening your blog in a new page or new tab.  Whenever you would like to see what your blog looks like after you make a change, just open it in a new window or tab. The blue box is the main content area, which will hold the content of whatever part of the dashboard you’re working in.  If it seems like a lot of information, you can turn off some of it on the homage page that you might not need:

It’s important to make sure your website looks engaging and organizes information the way you want it.  Wordpress comes with several preinstalled themes you can choose from. Go ahead and click on the “Appearance” link and go to “Themes.” You can search through themes on the right and preview any of them by clicking on its picture.  Take a look through a few.

If you like a theme, you can activate it by clicking the link in the upper right corner of the preview.

Now that you know what you’d like your blog to look like, you’ll have to make some important setup decisions.  Click on settings on the left. You’ll see a page with options related to your blog’s title, tagline date preferences and more.  Change any of these as so required.

You will also need to decide if you want to allow anyone to register for your blog.  Checking this option will permit any person who visits your blog to register and potentially post or change the site.  You can specify users later, or if you want your website to be a wiki, leave it open to anyone.

Once you’ve done this you’ll want to go to the reading subsection.  You can pick if you want your home page to be a static (unchanging) page, or a continually changing page full of blog posts.  You can set your posts page to a different page if you like, for instance it might be a news page.  This is an important decision. If you set your homepage to be posts, your site will be more like a blog, if you set your homepage to be a static page, it will be more like a traditional website. Make sure to save changes when you’re done.

If you do want to make a page your home page, you’ll probably need to make it!  You can do that next by making posts/pages. Make sure to come back to this option once you have a homepage designed and setup.

A post is a short entry on a website or blog, much like a news item or story.  Blogs often contain lists of posts.  A page (on Wordpress) is a single item and typically changes less frequently.  Pages usually hold posts. To get a better idea of this, let’s take a look at your blog.  Go ahead and right-click on the top link to open your website in a new tab or page.

You can see the different parts of your page labeled above.  See how your tagline text appears right beneath your blog title?  You can change that in the “Setup” area.  The blue box above is where posts appear.  A post-page (like the default homepage) will show many posts.  The sidebar area is also important, this is where you can setup additional tools and include links to different pages on your website.  Let’s go back to the control panel and click on “Posts” on the left in the dashboard navigation.  Go to edit posts.

Below you can see a listing of posts.  The area marked in orange is mainly for sorting and searching your posts and pages.  The column noted by green is simple a listing of posts or pages by title.  Next is author (purple) and categorizing/search/sorting information (blue). The red column pertains to the number of comments on a page or post.

Modifying an already-created post ist just like making a new one.  Let’s take a look at one of the autmoatically included example posts.

Here’s a picture of a post editing form, which is nearly identical to a post creating form or a page creating or editing form.  At the top is a place where you can set the title of your post (purple box).  The main content of your post is marked here by the blue area, and is as easy to use as a word processor.  You can hit the blue “TV-screen” icon or press Alt-Shift-G at the same time to enter and exit editing in full screen.  The icons just above the writing area (orange box) are where you can upload pictures, video, music, and files to your website.  For instructions on how to add these, see the next section.  Once you’ve written a post you can add tags (like keywords) or assign it to a given category in the two sections marked by the green area.  To make a short summary of your post, write it in the yellow box area.  Don’t worry about trackbacks for now.  Finally, when you’re finished, you can preview, update, or publish your post in the upper right red box.  If necessary you can also delete it from here, too.

For more writing options you can hit the “kitchen sink” button just above the content area in the area marked by the blue box above. You can see the blue “TV-screen” that makes this editor full screen just to the left of the “kitchen sink.”

You will also want to determine if your page or post will allow discussion comments.  You can do this in the section that looks like this:

Note that you can review current comments there too.

Editing pages is identical to posts, except in one big way.  Instead of the categories and tags section (marked by the green box above) you have choices for page attributes.

If you want a page to be listed beneath a number of others (like a contact page that’s found within an about section) you can set a parent page.  Order is the order in which pages are displayed in the navigation (sidebar).

As you upload more pictures, movies, and documents you’ll want to keep these organized and may also wish to use them more than once.  Your “Media Library” is where all of these materials are collected and listed.  The picture below displays the general organization.  You can search through and sort your media with the controls in the places overlaid by orange boxes.  Your files are listed in the column marked by green.  You can see authors and the pages/posts the materials are attached to in the columns marked by purple and blue.  Any comments to specific media can be tracked by the talk bubbles marked in red, and you can of course see an item’s date in the yellow.

You don’t always have to add media to a specific page or post.  You can upload them separately for future use or reference too.  Just go to the “Add New” link and select the files from your computer.  The following prompt will look the same as the one to upload files to a post or page.

After the file uploads you can write in details for the file, including title, caption and description.  Make sure to save changes when you’re done.  If you upload multiple files at once you can also use the “Hide/Show” links to manage them.

Sometimes it’s hard to keep track of many links to outside websites and resources.  Wordpress helps you to keep these organized with the “Links” section.  You can add new links much like you’d add pictures or posts.  When you go to insert a new link in a post you’ll be able to choose from ones you’ve previously entered.  Your links will also display by default on the sidebar with many Wordpress themes.  You’ll probably want to delete the default links to Wordpress development websites before you officially launch your site, most visitors won’t use them.

Now that you’ve learned your way around the Wordpress interface you might want to teach others how to use the website.  If you go to the “Users” section you can add new users.  Start by making a profile for yourself, this way you can be easily identified when you write posts or modify pages.  Make sure to set your “Role” to Administrator.

There are some differences between the roles.  They’re somewhat complicated, but you can generally consider them this way.  The most powerful user is the administrator, and each level below this going down to subscriber has fewer abilities and privileges.  Editors can do things like write, delete or edit any pages or posts, manage any links and media, and access private pages.  Authors can only write, delete and edit posts (not pages) and upload files.  Contributors can only read and edit posts, they can’t make new ones.  Subscribers can only read.

Finally you may want to add some tweaks and features to your blog!  Almost anything you can think of can be added on as a widget.  You can find the “Widgets” section in the “Appearance” area. The most common place widgets appear is in the sidebar, but some themes may let you add them elsewhere. Displayed below are the standard widgets included with Wordpress.  You will probably want to make sure to include a meta link somewhere on your site, so you can login and administrate it!

On the right side is what widgets are attached to which area.  You can see the default is your sidebar, but there may be other areas, like a footer or second sidebar, that can accept widgets.  To add and customize a widget just hit “Add” and them modify it and hit the “Save Changes” button.

You can download more widgets from the Wordpress website.  Widgets are considered to be a form of plugin, which you can add and update easily.  We’ll explore how to do this in the next section!

Let’s install a sample plugin to make sure your blog runs quickly!  Go to the “Plugins” link in the “Appearance” section and add a new one. Go ahead and sort by popular plugins and look for WP Super Cache.  You can read the description if you like, but don’t worry if you don’t understand it. Essentially this plugin helps to speed up blog performance.  Click “Install,” which will bring you to the customization page, where you can also hit “Install” in the upper right.



It should install automatically. This plugin is special, however, and can’t be activated just yet.  “Return to Plugins” page first.

The Plugins page will suggest you go to the plugin admin page to enable caching.  You should do this.  Go ahead and click on the red link and turn WP Super Cache Status to “On.”

You can now go back to the Plugins page and activate Super Cache.  This will enable it completely.

Normally installing plugins won’t be this involved, but you can see how sometimes they might be a little bit complicated.  Typically when you add a plugin you can activate it on the spot, and then add it in the Widgets section, if it happens to be a widget.

Congratulations!  You’ve made it through you’re the Wordpress tutorial.  If you have more questions you can probably find help in the Wordpress.org codex, located at http://codex.wordpress.org/Main_Page.

Alternatively you can create an account and search for help on the forums, here: http://wordpress.org/support/ - remember to look for answers to your questions before you ask them!

If you’d like ideas for ways to use Wordpress you can also look at their showcase of featured sites available here:http://wordpress.org/showcase/