How to future proof your WordPress Blog

There's one last bit of business to take care of before I delve into populating your WordPress Blog with some awesome content: your WordPress Blog's settings. Clicking the Settings hyperlink in the top navigation bar, which appears on all pages in the WordPress administrative interface, takes you, surprisingly enough, to your WordPress Blog's Settings tab. In addition to setting general options, this page is where you specify how you write blog posts, how those posts are displayed, and who can read what.

General Settings

When you first click the Settings hyperlink, you see the general settings for your blog. Many of these settings are defined in the wp-config.php file, but you can change them at any time. After you change any of the settings, make sure to click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page. If you don't, your changes won't be saved, and you'll need to make them again.

WordPress Blog name and tagline

The Blog Title and Tagline options are often used in a blog's header, so make sure that you like the name you give your WordPress Blog. Something to keep in mind: Should your WordPress Blog succeed, there's a chance that you'll be known by your WordPress Blog's name. In some circles I am known as Blankbaby, which a weaker man might not be able to handle. Name your WordPress Blog well.

WordPress and blog URLs

The WordPress Address and Blog Address options aren't the same, though it certainly seems that they would be. The WordPress URL points to the directory on the Web server that houses your installation of WordPress, whereas the WordPress Blog URL is the address people enter to get to your blog. In most cases these URLs are the same, but you can separate the files that make up the WordPress application itself from the contents of your WordPress Blog.

Storing WordPress and content files together

WordPress, as you know, is made up of various folders and files. By default, those files are stored in the same directory. But if your WordPress Blog is just one component of a multifaceted Web site, you may want to have tighter control of your directory structure. Confused? Consider a concrete example: the WordPress for All blog. I uploaded the contents of the wordpress folder, which I got from WordPress.org, to my Web site's root directory. That folder is now chockablock with all the files and directories that WordPress needs.

Separating WordPress and content files

Moving all those WordPress files into their own directory would really neaten things. This change won't have any noticeable ramifications for your readers but will affect the people who create content for your blog, no matter what roles they play. Again, consider the example WordPress for All blog. As it's set up at the moment, people log into the administrative side by going to www.yourblogname.com/wp-admin. Moving the WordPress files to their own directory would change the URL for logging in to the admin interface. Separating WordPress and content files is easy. Just follow these steps:

1. Create a new directory to hold the WordPress files. For this exercise, create a directory called wordpress. Next, because you're moving the entire WordPress application, you need to make sure that WordPress knows where all its files are before you move them.

2. On the General Settings page, change the WordPress Address (URL) option to refl ect the future home of your WordPress installation.

3. Click Save Changes. You'll get an error message. Don't worry about it.

4. Move all your WordPress files to your new wordpress directory, but leave the index.php file in the root directory.

5. Open the index.php file in your favorite text editor and look for this:

require(‘./wp-blog-header.php');

This bit of code tells the index file where your WordPress files live, and because you just moved them, the code is pointing to the wrong place. By default, this file assumes that all the WordPress files are in the same directory where it resides.

6. Add the name of the new directory to the code in Step 5, using this format:

require(‘./directory/wp-blog-header.php');

For this exercise, you moved the files to a directory called wordpress, so change the code to this:

require(‘./wordpress/wp-blog-header.php');

7. Save the file.

Everything works exactly as it did before, but your files are better organized, as a glance at the General Settings page shows.

E-mail address

The important thing to remember for the E-Mail Address setting is to supply WordPress a valid e-mail address. WordPress will send notifications about your WordPress Blog in general to the address you enter, and you'll want to get them.

Membership options

In the Membership part, checking the Anyone Can Register check box allows visitors to your WordPress Blog to create user accounts. If you select the other option, limiting comments to registered users, you have more control of your WordPress Blog. You can also set what role is automatically assigned to new users, with the default being the least powerful role: Subscriber.

Time options

Time is our most precious resource, and it isn't renewable. Luckily, WordPress gives you a lot of control over how time is displayed and kept in your WordPress blog. You can set the time zone, date and time formats, and the day on which your week starts.

Time zone

Setting your time zone is straightforward, but support for daylight saving time isn't built in. You have to change the time manually when DST comes around. WordPress employs Coordinated Universal Time, which is known casually as Greenwich Mean Time. Technically, UTC and GMT have some slight differences, but for purposes of this discussion, they're the same.

Date and time formats

The Date Format and Time Format settings are a little more interesting. WordPress time-stamps all the content in your WordPress Blog for a variety of reasons, and this part allows you to specify how the time is displayed. The time function of WordPress is written in PHP, as is the rest of WordPress, which means that your customization options are pretty wide open.

Start of week

Finally, this part of the General Settings page allows to you tell WordPress which day of the week to treat as the start of the week. The default setting is Monday, but you can choose any day of the week from the Week Starts On drop down-menu.