Understanding the Settings: Extras
© Judy van der Velden, sweets, via Flickr
I've finished going through the Settings in WordPress.com (having covered Settings: General; Settings: Writing; Settings: Reading; Settings Discussion; Settings Sharing and Settings Media and Ratings), but I noticed that there were some differences on a self-hosted WordPress.org blog.
Therefore I felt compelled to make the final post in this series explain this, particularly for beginner bloggers who are using WordPress.org. Here the Settings section has been simplified and reduced, but if you install plugins, some may place their own settings pages into that area.
Here are the pages that contain something extra:
Extras in Settings General
If you have a self-hosted blog, you will have your own web-address or domain name. Here you can edit or amend it if this is necessary. It's important to make sure they are identical.
Your email address is displayed, which is used to contact you as the blog owner.
Here is how you create a default user's role if they subscribe as a member of your blog. This can also be over-ridden in the membership confirmation pages.
And hooray, WordPress.org allows you to blog in UK English rather than in American. I knew this was possible via your blog!
Permalinks
There is a new Settings page specifically for Permalinks. These are web-address or URL of each post's separate page. Note this option is not available in a WordPress.com blog as the webaddress is created by WordPress and cannot be altered.
You can read more about permalinks here. Circled is the permalink version I prefer to use.
What's missing!
The most important Settings pages that are missing are for Sharing and Ratings. Though, of course, you can add these through a relevant plugin to install and use their facilities.
In fact, all the other Settings pages in WordPress.com that I didn't write about, such as Polls, AdControl, Email Post Changes, Open ID and Webhooks, are also not included.
In Settings: Reading the related posts and the enhanced post facilities are not shown here.
In Settings: Discussion some of the Akismet facilities are not available. Akismet is a plugin that needs to be activated by a special API key that is obtained direct from its website. Also the gravatar facilities are not shown here, in particular when you can mouse over your gravatar to see more details. And the comment form prompt isn't there either.
In Settings: Media the Image Gallery Carousel is much more basic, with no tiled galleries option. Also the option to show full sized image in a carousel slideshow is not available.
In Settings: Sharing a WordPress.org user would have to install the JetPack plugin to get those facilities. This would also give you a lot of other widgets and other applications found as standard on a WordPress.com blog.
Therefore considering all the extra facilities in the Settings pages, this would suggest to me that starting your blogging career with a WordPress.com blog is a very good idea!
Latest posts by Alice Elliott (see all)
- How to create a blog if you’re a real beginner - 9 January 2016
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