There are a number of reasons why you'd want to change WordPress' default settings. This post goes over our standard practices and why we've adopted them.
But the first step, of course, is to install WordPress. To do that, go to wordpress.org and follow the directions given there (the directions they have are pretty excellent). To do the install you will need a web host with FTP access, PHP running on the web server, and a MySQL database. How you set up your MySQL database depends on your ISP - contact them to determine how best to do it.
Many ISPs have "one-click" installs for WordPress, but they don't install the latest version. If that's the case with your ISP you then want to do an upgrade and install the latest version of WordPress. This is still less trouble than installing it from scratch since the database and a few other things will be set up for you.
The rest of this post assumes you have WordPress installed and working. The terms used in this post are from WordPress 2.6.x - I know some of the terms will be changing in 2.7, but the general concepts will still be there.
The things we'll be changing are found under the "settings" menu.
Settings: General
Most of these don't need to be modified, but do change the name and tagline for your blog as they usually appear on your site and in your RSS feeds. The URLs should be the base URL for your blog, which may be the root URL of your site or the directory you installed the blog in. The e-mail address is important as it will be used to send you notifications about things like comments that need moderation.
Settings: Writing
There are a couple useful items on this page. First is "Size of the post box" which I recommend you change to 25 or 30 as it will make writing easier since you'll be able to see more when you're writing posts.
The second is all the way at the bottom where it says "Update Services" - those are the services that you want notified when you do a new post. From what I've heard recently WordPress pings these services when you make edits, not just new posts, and some services may think you're spamming if you make too many pings, so use this with a little caution. Nevertheless it is useful to get your posts picked up quickly. Below is a list that you can copy and paste into the area so your posts get maximum exposure as quickly as possible.
http://rpc.pingomatic.com
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://bblog.com/ping.php
There are more places you can ping, but you risk pinging them twice since some places like Ping-O-Matic pass pings onto other services (more info).
Settings: Reading
The settings on this page are pretty important...
"Blog pages show at most xxx posts" - this determines the maximum number of blog posts that will show up on a page. Some people like to set this to a big number so the reader can scan and see a lot of information. I recommend against doing that since it will create duplicate content problems. You want content to move off of the pages that change so search engines understand that the stable pages are the post pages. I typically set the number to 5 or 6 which is a decent balance between duplicate content issues and usability, if you have a very active blog with multiple posts per day that number can be upped without causing any real problems.
"Syndication feed show the most recent xxx posts" - here you want to up the number so people who look at your feed can find articles they saw recently in your feed. On numerous occasions I've wanted to tell something about an article I saw recently only to find it had expired from the feed which made me search for it on the site (not always an easy task). I tend to put this number at 20. If you have a very active blog you may want to raise that to 30 or 40, but much larger than that and you may create feeds that are so large they're cumersome and slow.
"For each article in a feed, show..." - RSS feeds can either show snippets or the full article. The people who use snippets use them so people will have to come to their site to see the full article. When they come to their site they're exposed to advertising which the blogger hopes they'll respond to. The problem is that snippets aggrevate feed users, and regular visitors are far less likely to click on ads than new visitors. So I recommend picking "full text". In my opinion it's best to keep your loyal readers happy than try to make them jump through hoops to read what you write.
A word about "Front page displays"... The idea here is that you can show a page other than the normal home page of the blog. This is useful if you don't want the blog to look so much like a blog. What the option doesn't reveal is that there's a better way to handle this if your comfortable editing HTML. If you put a page named home.php in your theme it will be used for the home page. In my opinion this is far better than the options presented in "front page displays" since you can completely break out of the structure of your theme and have a completely custom page. If you use a home.php page it overrides anything you set with "front page displays".
Settings: Permalinks
WordPress allows you to customize the directory structure of your blog. It's one of the really powerful aspects of WordPress. The default URL for WordPress looks something like http://www.somedomain.com/?p=1234 which is a dynamic URL that shows the post ID for the particular post. WordPress URLs can be a lot better than that, however. The settings pages gives you some of the mor popular options and also lets you have a custom URL.
But first, let's explain what the core issues are. First, is the number of directories down the post page is. If you use a date directory then you'll have something like /2008/10/02/post-title, but if your blog is in the /blog/ directory then it's more like /blog/2008/10/02/post-title - that's 5 directories deep in the site. Research has shown that Google and others favor pages that are no more than 3 pages deep on the site, so that URL structure actually works against you.
There's a whole debate on whether you should use dates in URLs or not. Personally, I think dates in URLs are useful, but others disagree. There is no right or wrong answer to the question.
We use a custom permalink structure that combines the year and month into one directory like /2008-10/ - to achieve that we enter the following under "custom":
/%year%-%monthnum%/%postname%
The other options under permalink settings are for "Category base" and "Tag Base". WordPress posts can be categorized and tagged. Just briefly, you should think of categories as the main subjects in your blog, and tags all the little things that pop up in the blog post that are minor, reoccurring themes. For this post "blogging" is the category, and "WordPress" the tag, but you can have multiple categories and multiple tags.
By default category URLs start with /category/ and tag URLs with /tag/, but "category base" and "tag base" let you change that. This can be useful from an SEO perspective. Let's say you have a travel blog and it's divided up into virtual blogs one for each destination with each destination virtual blog being a category. In that case you might change the category base to "/destination/" or "/sightseeing/" or "/tourism/" (there are many options...). You could do the same thing with your tag base if you wanted.
Changing the category and tag bases helps get keywords into the URLs which is useful for SEO. But you want to think ahead. If you chose /destination/ for your category base it would mean you couldn't have "budget travel" as a category since it isn't a place someone would go. So before changing category and tag bases, make sure you think ahead.
At the bottom of the Permalink Settings page you may see an area with a bunch of code and a note above it saying something about .htaccess... All of these URL rewrites require special rewrite rules on the server. Those rewrite rules are handled in a file named .htaccess. Some ISPs set things up so WordPress can modify the .htaccess file, but many don't. Working with .htaccess files is a separate subject, but the imporant points are that files that start with periods are invisible on the Mac - so you'll need to use something like Dreamweaver that lets you see them - you won't see them in the Finder.
Settings: Miscellaneous
Miscellaneous settings are where image related settings are currently located...
"Store uploads in this folder" - This setting lets you modify where images you upload for your blog posts are stored. The default setting is OK, but a bit deep in the directory structure. Just realize that if you modify this, you may need to modify your .htaccess file so WordPress doesn't try to control the serving of the image files.
The other thing about the images folder is that it needs to be writable. Making it writable is beyond the scope of this post - if it's not writable (which you'll know when you try to upload something). Contact your ISP and have them make the directory writable.
"Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders" - This is highly recommended as it avoids the possibility that you get too many files in one directory.
"Thumbnail size" and "Medium Size" - WordPress manages your images when you upload them. These settings let you determine the dimensions of smaller versions of the image.
The Askimet Plugin
One other thing which I highly highly recommend is installing the Askimet plugin. This examines the comments that are posted to your blog and automatically marks suspicious ones as spam. As you site/blog gets to be mature you'll be amazed at how many spammy comments appear on the site. Many just say things like "Great site, love your perspective on things", but they exist to have a link back to their site. Askimet is incredible at determining which comments are spam, though it does make mistakes.
To install Askimet you go to the plugins area, find Askimet and click on "activate". It will then give you links to get an activation key from wordpress.com. You'll need to register there and retrieve your key there. Once you tell the Askimet plugin your key, you're all set. If you start another blog, just use the same key - the key is for you as a person - you don't need a different key for each blog.
Once Askimet is installed you'll see an Askimet Spam section in the Comments area it will capture all the spam there and you can deal with when you have time.
[Notes from 4D Summit 2008.]
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Mobile technology is the next new big thing - just getting out of it's infancy.
