Configuring a New WordPress Website – Writing Settings

WordPress’ Writing Settings

The Writing setting offer the chance to establish a little control over how you get content into your site. Although most of the options associated with the Writing setting are of minor importance, there is two that can create a significant security hole. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

The first option, Size of the post box, configures how large vertically is the primary text entry box. If you tend to write and edit quite long posts in which you frequently scroll up and down in your writing making changes, formatting or reviewing what you have written, then give yourself some more room to write and set the default to 20 or 40 lines. The only disadvantage to a really large Post Box is that it will require you to scroll the main window to configure the options that are lower down. Another thing to keep in mind is that you can always temporarily increase or decrease the size of the Post Box by dragging the lower right corner up or down. This way you can set your default with the Size of the post box setting, but alter it as needed for each post.

The Formatting options control two different automated processes when writing posts. The first one converts emoticons, the myriad little faces that help express further emotion online, to their picture equivalent. Selecting the box ensures that a semi colon followed by a parenthesis gets displayed as a winking smiley face like . If you prefer the text version or are having issues with code being converted into emoticons, you can disable this option.

The second checkbox in the Formatting options controls whether you would like WordPress to attempt to correct any invalidly nested XHTML code. This can be useful if you use the HTML tab instead of the visual editor when writing in the Post Box, but I have also seen it break templates and plugins. The default option is unchecked, and I would recommend leaving it that way unless you have a real need.

The third and fourth options in the Writing settings have to do with defaults when it comes to new posts and links. The Default Post Category option allows you to tell our installation of WordPress which Category you would like to automatically select when creating a new post. The default is Uncategoried, but I would highly recommend changing that to one of your specific categories. If you haven’t set up any categories, yet, you will need to do that before you can make a change to the Default Post Category option. It is important to keep in mind that if you forget to select a category when you publish a post, the post will be associated with whatever category you select in the Default Post Category option. It is useful to choose your most common posting category so whenever you write a new post in that category, it will already be selected.

Similarly, the Default Link Category option controls the default Link Category is selected when creating a new link. Since it is very common to not set up Links or Link Categories immediately upon configuring a new WordPress website, it is likely there is no other option than Blogroll. Adding new Link Categories will open up new options in the pull-down list.

The next section isn’t really a configuration for you WordPress install, but rather a tool you can use to help create new posts. Press This is a very useful tool that allows you to create a new post from the content of any website you are browsing. Let’s say you come across an interesting news item that you would like to discuss in a new post on your site. If you have already added the Press This bookmark to your browser’s bookmark all you have to do is click it and a new window will pop open with varying degrees of content from the page you were visiting copied into the Post Box of a window that looks very similar to New Post window. If you have text, images, etc. selected in the window you are browsing that content and a link back to the site will be placed into the Press This Post Box. There is a place for a Title for the post, the ability to add Categories and Tags, just like in a regular post. If you want to add an image from the source site, you can select any of the images on the site and place it into your new post. Finally when you are ready, you can save the post as a Draft or Publish the post immediately. Press This is a must have tool for anyone doing research online and writing content from that research. To install Press This all you need to do is drag the “Press This” link to your Bookmarks. No further configuration needed!

Like Press This, the next option in the Writing settings section is more of a tool, but this one takes a little more configuration. Post Via Email allows writers to create content by emailing it to a special email address. If you are on the road and want to write a new piece, but don’t want to log onto the site, you can do it by emailing to the address you configure in this section. Since email account setups vary widely, it is beyond the scope of this article to explain the specifics of configuring these options for your site. You will need to set up an email address that only you know and that is very hard to guess. Any emails sent to this email address will be posted to your site. If a spammer got a hold of this email address, they could cause a lot of havoc on your site!

Once you have configured the account information in the Post Via Email setting section, you can create a new post just by emailing to that unique address. There are lots of indications that this WordPress tool is receiving some new development effort and will be enhanced in the near future. I will have new information on changes as they become available.

The Remote Publishing options toggle on or off the ability to use either of two remote publishing protocols. If you use an iPhone or iPad, there is a free application that allows you to create new posts, edit existing posts, moderate comments and more all from your mobile device. To enable this functionality you will need the WordPress application and the XML-RPC option selected. This allows the WordPress iOS application and several other applications to connect with your site and interact with the database that manages the content on your site. The Atom Publishing Protocol offers a similar functionality using a different technical protocol that is common with RSS readers and other blogging applications.

Both of the Remote Publishing options are deselected as a default. This is because they present a security risk to your site. By opening up a remote connection into your site, you providing a potential target for malicious attacks on your site. Although neither the XML-RPC or the Atom Publishing Protocol is especially vulnerable to attacks they have been used in attacks on WordPress in the past and do come with some risk. If you are not actively using Remote Publishing for you site, it is recommended that you disable both of these options.

The final option to configure in the Writing settings comes preconfigured. The Update Services option contains the list of Update Services you would like to use to tell other sites about new or updated content on your site. The Pingomatic service notifies automatically a wide swath or websites every time there is new content on your site. You can add other Update Services to that list if you have a preferred service.

Finished

You have now configured the Writing options of the site Settings. Your site now looks the way you want the Post Box to look and you can get new content into your site through a variety of useful and different methods. But don’t forget to save those changes by clicking the button on the bottom of the screen that says “Save Changes”. If you forget to do that and leave that page, all your setting will be lost.

You have now made it through the second set of configuration options related to Writing. It wasn’t that bad, was it! The next one is even easier!