Blog Title; Categories; Comments

  • louf

    (@louf)


    17 years ago

    I am a rank newbie and have gone through some of the tutorials and FAQ and not finding any answers and can’t get anything to work. That’s the bad news. Good news is I’m a quick learner once I get started.

    Here are my current problems:

    (1) I changed the Theme to “Thirteen”. Then I changed my blog title to “The Barn Door” subtitle “Financial and Political Discussion”. I save the changes. The Thirteen theme shows, but the blog title still says ‘freepct.com’ which is just the name of my website. The “The Barn Door” title doesn’t show anywhere and I can’t figure out how to get it to show. How’s that for a baby step?

    (2) I don’t like the idea of categorizing my posts, at least not at first. I see how to add new categories, but not how to turn off the category function altogether and have everything be in the “default” or “root” category. I’m hoping the root category isn’t just called “uncategorized” because I would prefer to not have that word appear on my screen. I know some html if you could point me to where to edit to get rid of it.

    (3) I don’t like having to click to see the comments. I want all comments to show immediately upon loading the page. Can’t find how to do this.

    Thanks. I find the tutorials and codex nightmarishly frustrating and confusing, as if the person who set them up were intentionally trying to get me to give up. Maybe this is intended as a form of natural selection: if you’re not bright enough to figure out this Dead Sea Scroll documentation, we sure as heck don’t want you blogging!!!

    Regards
    LF

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • stvwlf

    (@stvwlf)

    17 years ago

    Hi – welcome to WordPress.

    1 – blog name – in Admin / Settings / appearance look and see if there is a sub-option for Theme Settings – not all themes have them. If so see if you can change the name there.

    The main settings are in Admin / settings / general

    Each theme handles the display of basic information in its own way. Themes reside in /wp-content/themes/{themename}/ The file that would display your blog info is header.php Unfortunately you have to look at the PHP functions in that file that are called to display your blog info to see which one is putting your domain name up there. If you can’t determine it you can post that part of the code here and someone will help you

    2) You can change the name of Uncategorized to anything you want in the Admin section – under the Posts button in the left column is an option for Categories. You can take the display of any category name off the screen altogether by editing the index.php file in the same theme folder as #1 above.

    3) Comments are set up as they are because WP is also used on heavy traffic blogs. If you are displaying 10 posts per page and there are 50 comments on each posts, that makes a very long page. If your blog is not going to be like that you can add the comment display into the main page by copying the code that displays the comments on the single post page, from file single.php, and pasting it into theme folder file index.php which is your posts page. That may take you some trial and error to get right.

    Before you change any WP theme files, its an excellent idea to make copies of them first, so if your changes don’t work out as you’d hoped you can revert back to the original form.

    Thread Starter louf

    (@louf)

    17 years ago

    Stvwlf – thanks, very helpful.

    (1) I got the theme to show finally (evidently didn’t recache right away, but showed after I logged out). With respect to the php functions, is there a list of the data fields that the php routines call, so I can access a data field (for example, the blog subtitle) that Thirteen doesn’t currently access? So I don’t have to go do a “View Source” for every single theme and make my own list of all the data fields. I assume you don’t have a problem with users creating or modifying their own php routines to call or not call items as desired?

    (2) Got it, thanks.

    (3) Got it, thanks.

    On your final comment, I’m confused. If it’s a canned Theme can’t I just keep on starting over at square 1? Or are you assuming that I’ve made some changes already to the Theme when we get to the point you’re talking about?

    Two new question: (1) I keep on telling it to post “Newer” comments at the top but it won’t listen to me – keeps putting them oldest at the top even though I save changes. What am I doing wrong?
    (2) Is there a way I can let bloggers spell check their own messages prior to moderation?

    Thanks for all your help. LF

    stvwlf

    (@stvwlf)

    17 years ago

    Hi

    The reference page for template functions is this
    http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags

    All I meant about making a copy is often times while learning we screw something up. So having the “before” state handy is helpful at times instead of trying to backtrack.

    See if this comment sort plugin will do what you want
    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/comment-sorter/

    I don’t know of a spellchecker specifically for comments. Would the browser’s built-in spell checker accomplish this?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

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