• Hi, I’m brand new to WordPress. I mean BRAND NEW. Just hours ago I got my blog up and running. And I have a few questions.

    1. My homepage shows the entire text of my most recent posts. I’d like it to just show the first few lines of each post, with a link to the permalink where the rest of the article can be read. Is this normal behavior? How do I get it to behave the way I’d like?

    2. My articles don’t contain a byline (my “author name” or whatever it’s called). How do I fix this?

    3. Is there a way to replace the background color used in the header with a graphic that I create (you know, a picture of some kind), over which the title appears?

    4. When I went to activate the Akismet anti-spam plug-in, the text beneath the plug-in listing says, “you’ll need a WordPress API key to use it.” What is that, how do I get one, and what to I need to do to implement it? I don’t want my blog to quickly become a mass of spam messages.

    Okay, that’s it for now.

    Thanks.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)
  • Congratulations. I assume you’ve read the Codex.
    http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Themes
    http://codex.wordpress.org/Stepping_Into_Templates

    1) In index.php of default theme, change

    <div class="entry">
    <?php the_content('Read the rest of this entry &raquo;'); ?>
    </div>

    to

    <div class="entry">
    <?php the_excerpt('Read the rest of this entry &raquo;'); ?>
    <a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>">Continue Reading</a>
    </div>

    2) In default index.php find this:

    <h2>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
    <small><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?> <!-- by <?php the_author() ?> --></small>

    change to

    <h2>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
    <small><?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?> by <?php the_author() ?> </small>

    b) In single.php change postmetadata to :

    <p class="postmetadata alt">
    <small>This entry was posted by <?php the_author() ?> on <?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?> at <?php the_time() ?> and is filed under <?php the_category(', ') ?>. You can follow any responses to this entry through the <?php post_comments_feed_link('RSS 2.0'); ?> feed.

    3) Codex – http://codex.wordpress.org/Designing_Headers

    4) Codex – http://codex.wordpress.org/Akismet

    WordPress Codex and Forum plus Google search are your friends.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

The topic ‘Several newbie questions’ is closed to new replies.