2. Customizing WordPress After Install

Here’s a tutorial on what I suggest you do immediately after installing WordPress. My tutorials are based on fansites so keep that in mind.

First of all, you should always be using the latest version of WordPress. So if you see a message like this after you install, be sure to click Please update now link.

Click Update Automatically. Since you just installed WordPress, you don’t have to worry about the message that says “Important: before upgrading, please backup your database and files.” You really only have to worry about that if you have started using WordPress.  Once it’s upgraded (it only takes a minute) you will see a message like this:

OK, now that WordPress is up to date, we can get into the settings.

Scroll down to the Settings section on the left side. You can explore all the settings, but these are the settings that I always change.

General

I don’t usually make any changes to this section. If you want to allow people to register on your site, you can check the box next to “Anyone can register”

Writing

I don’t usually change anything here either.

Reading

The only thing I change here is For each article in a feed, show Full text or Summary. I choose Summary.

Discussion

This is pretty much up to you in how you want to handle comments on your site. It’s been my experience that people are less likely to comment if they have to register, but it’s entirely up to you. This is what I use:

Media

I usually leave this as is.

Privacy

Make sure that I would like my site to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Bing, Technorati) and archivers is selected, unless for some reason you don’t want your site listed in search engines.

Permalinks

I always use Day and name: http://supergrrl.com/testingwp/2010/07/11/sample-post/ for this. You can leave it on the default setting, but in my opinion it looks better to have your about page, for example, as http://domain.com/about rather than http://domain.com/?p=221.

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