The WordPress Settings Menu:
The Settings tab (submenu) in WordPress dashboard menu (left sidebar) is the central hub from where you can configure settings for different sections of a WordPress website. The WordPress settings menu contains multiple sub-menus that divide configuration options into categories, so that it gets easier for you to find related setting.
Clicking on the settings tab will take you to the Settings >> General screen, which is the first and default setting panel.
In this scenario, you must remember that only Admin Users can access this settings menu by logging in to the WordPress dashboard area by opening the admin URL, i.e.- http://yoursite.com/wp-admin/
Apart from General Setting, there are other sub menus under the WordPress Settings tabs. Those sub-menus are Writing, Reading, Discussion, Media, and, Permalinks.
Moreover, many WordPress plugins add their own settings page as a menu under this Settings tab.
Today we would be describing an overview of the Settings Tab and short summary of each of the submenus under it. Please remember that we are going to discuss the default options and not any extra options that are added by plugins.
General Settings:
The first option within WordPress settings menu and the default submenu which appears if you click on the settings tab. It contains settings to set the desired Site Title, Tagline, WordPress URL, Site URL, E-mail address, Member Registration option, timezone, date format, and many other general options for the WordPress site.
[Suggested: Configuring WordPress General Settings]
Writing Settings:
This section contains settings related to the defining default category, post type, post formatting, option for publishing posts via email, and settings for post update services (ping service).
[See Also: Configuring WordPress Writing Settings]
Reading Settings:
Reading Option contains settings to adjust the Site Front Page, How many blog posts to show per page to readers, customization for RSS feeds (whether to show full text or summary), a checkbox option to discourage search engines from indexing the website.
[See Also: Configuring WordPress Reading Settings]
Discussion Settings:
This tab contains settings related to linking posts with other blogs that are referenced (pingback & traceback), user comment settings, e-mail notifications options for comments, comments approval options, options for comment moderation, and some site Avatar related settings.
[See Also: Configuring WordPress Discussion Settings]
Media Settings:
This section contains settings related to uploading and management of images and other media to your WordPress site. You can control the options like default image sizes, image cropping options etc from this options panel.
[See Also: Configuring WordPress Media Settings]
Permalinks Settings:
This is a very critical settings panel that contains settings related to the URL structure of your website. This settings-panel lists a few options that make it easier for users to customize the blog post URLs to an easy to remember format. Using a correct URL structure also helps to better organize posts within the various categories and helps in improving the SEO.
Options in this permalinks settings panel allow you to structure your website URL in many ways, such as showing dates in your URLs or showing just the title and categories etc or customize some combination of both.
[See Also: Configuring WordPress Permalinks Settings]
We would be leaning these above settings in details in next couple of tutorials.
We hope that you have enjoyed the above tutorial on Configuring WordPress Settings and the WordPress Setting Menu. Be with us to explore free training on Leading Technologies and Certifications.
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