In this short post, I will teach you how to have a static page displayed on your home page instead of the regular: latest 10 posts (or at least 10 is the default number).

By default, wordpress displays your latest posts (latest first). However, this can be changed to show a static page for your home page. To change this setting, go to your settings menu and pick reading from there.

Please note that you must have a static page in order to display it. By default, WordPress creates a static page and puts it on your blog, but some delete it because of the “hello world” content (so did I). If you don’t have any static page on your blog, you won’t even be able to see that setting.

Here we go: on the reading settings page, you’ll notice you can choose between “latest posts” (the number of posts can be changed as well) and a static page. To make your home page static, pick static and choose one of your pages.

That’s it :)

Note: make sure you have a navigation panel or your sidebar includes a link to latest posts or archive or something. Otherwise, your visitors won’t be able to check your posts and will see only your static content.

Hope it helps,

- Peter

I’ve seen this question many times on forums, so I thought it would be a good idea to make a post on how to have your post title appear on your links.

First, what does this mean? If you look in the address bar, you’ll notice that the URL is this one:
“http://www.wordpress-how-to.com/2008/10/14/how-to-make-your-title-appear-in-your-links”. This is an old SEO trick, now implemented in many web applications and yes, wordpress has support for it, just that it isn’t enabled by default.

The files/directories specified by the link don’t exist on your server, this is basically a redirection made by the htaccess file on your server. Therefore, when you hit “/2008/10/14/how-to-make-your-title-appear-in-your-links”, it will query the database for the post with that title and it will take you to index.php?p=somepostid. That’s all it happens in the background.

Let’s get to the point now. It’s very easy to enable this feature on wordpress. To do that, just login to your admin area, hit “Settings” (it’s in the upper right corner for the newer versions), then, from the contextual menu, pick “Permalinks” (or simply, put this at the end of your blog URL to access the page directly: “yourdomain.com/wp-admin/options-permalink.php”).

From there, you pick one of the options, which one you consider to be the best (I’m using the second: day and name) and then click on save.

Please note that your root folder (or blog folder if it’s not located in root) should be writable. If it’s not, wordpress won’t be able to write the htaccess file.

This is it. If you enounter any problems, just let me know via email or reply to this post and I’ll be happy to help you.

- Peter

Since (I think) I know a lot of things about wordpress, I’d like to share my knowledge with you, but don’t really know where to start from. I already have a free guide written on how to install a wordpress blog from scratch and how to install themes and plugins. I will post that in a future post, but this post is for you. Here you can reply and let me know what would you like to learn, even though that info might already be somewhere on the net, etc.

So if you need to know something about wordpress blogs, just reply to this post and I will search and bring the info here.

Thanks,

- Peter

Hey there

This is the first post I’m adding here to let you all know that I intend to make this blog explain to you all you need to know about the most powerful blogging platform on the planet – WordPress.

Will include info on how to install, what plugins to use, where to get themes from, how to track your visitors, how to have them optin and on and on.

Bare with me because you’ll learn a lot of stuff.

Thanks,

- Peter