Weaning yourself off LJ: Customisation

In the previous article I showed you how to set up Wordpress to create an archive for your fanfic/art/vids. In this article I’ll be talking about some of the next steps you can take in customising your setup.

Make it look better

The default theme that comes with Wordpress is — well, it’s not too awful, but it’s probably not what you want. Luckily Wordpress comes installed with a bunch of themes. Later, we’ll be talking about installing third-party themes or customising your own themes, but for now, let’s just work with what’s there already.

1. Go to the Wordpress admin interface and click on “Presentation” in the top menu.
2. Choose a theme you like the look of.

That’s it! I chose Ocadia 1.3, and my site now looks something like this:

Other presentation settings

You can see in the screenshot above that it says “Just another Wordpress weblog”. We don’t want that. To change it to your own description, go to “Options” and then “General” and edit the tagline. Mine now says “Fanfiction, fanart, and fanvids, mostly from the Age of Sail”.

You might also want to change what’s in your sidebar. Wordpress has a feature called “widgets” that make this really easy:

1. Click on “Presentation” in the admin menu, then on “Widgets” in the submenu
2. Drag and drop widgets into the arrangement you want.
3. To view or change settings on any particular widget, you can click on the little icon on the widget, and change whatever you want. For instance, the “Recent Posts” widget lets you choose how many posts to show in the list, and the “Text” widget lets you put any text you want.
4. Make sure to click “Save Changes” when you’re done.

Setting up categories

By now you’ll have noticed that your first post was “Uncategorized”, and you’ve probably got a category listing in your theme that shows a list of categories. Obviously you’ll want to fix that up a bit.

1. Click on “Manage” in the admin interface, then “Categories”
2. Create categories using the form provided.

I created three categories for “fiction”, “art”, and “video”, as my archive’s going to include all three of them. My “fiction” category is actually a renaming of the “Uncategorized” one, so that a) my original post will automatically end up in it, and b) it’ll be the default category for any new posts.

I also created a category called “By Fandom” and a bunch of other categories with the names of various fandoms, and “By Fandom” as the parent:

When you write or edit a post, you can see the categories in the toolbar to the right:

And when you publish your post, you’ll see a line saying “Posted in Hornblower, Fiction by Skud” (well, the equivalent with your own categories and name) and you’ll see the categories listed in your sidebar menu.

Setting up multiple authors

If you want to share your fan archive with other contributors, you can set up additional users in Wordpress and give them permission to post articles themselves. Here’s how:

1. In the admin interface, click on “Users”
2. Fill in the “Add User” form with the person’s details.
3. Choose whether you want them to be a contributor, author, or editor. Here’s a good description of the differences from Technosailor:

> Editors, assume post-level management. As in a newsroom, editors don’t worry about the lights and the cameras. They are worried about the copy. To that end, editors have the right to manage post-related stuff. They can add their own, edit their own or delete their own – but more than that, they can edit or delete other peoples posts.

>For authors, the assumption is that they are staff writers and are allowed to write whatever they want, whenever they want. Not only can they write stories, but they have the authority to publish them without review as well.

> Contributors tends to work well on blogs where user generated content is welcome. People can submit their own stories but in the end, they cannot publish without an Editor. Editors or Administrators have the ability to go review the Contributor’s work and decide whether to publish or not.

“Author” is probably a good default if you’re just sharing with a small group of friends. If you have people contributing who you don’t know well, you might want to set them as “Contributors” so that their posts are held for approval before going up on the site. If you have a lot of “Contributors”, you might want to set some trusted people as “Editors” so they can help you with the approval process.

Once you create new users, they’ll receive an email with details telling them how to login, and they’ll be good to go.

External links

In the last article, I advised you to get rid of all the “blogroll” entries that were automatically added to your blog. Now we’re going to add them back in.

A “blogroll” is traditionally a list of links to other blogs you like; almost a friends-list, in that it makes them easily accessible for you, and also lets your readers know what else you like reading. You may wish to do the same thing, or you might want to put other kinds of links on your site.

You can rename your blogroll by going into “Manage” then “Categories” and renaming the “Blogroll” category. That’s the default category that links will be added to. Once you’ve done that, you can add links via the main “Blogroll” menu item.

A handful of things you might want to link to:

* any other fanwork blogs you read
* fanfic archives for your fandoms
* LJ communities for your fandoms
* the Crack Van listings for your fandoms
* your own LJ

You can also categorise your links, so they don’t just show up in one undifferentiated mess. Create categories via “Manage” then “Categories”, and assign the links to categories as you add them (or you can edit them later).

Now make sure you’re using the “Links” widget in your sidebar to display them, and you’re done!

So now you’ve learnt how to choose a theme, categorise your articles, add co-contributors, and create links to external sites. In my next article, I’ll be talking about plugins and all the cool things you can do with them, with a side-serve of uploading new themes and customising them yourself.