General Settings

Video Transcript

In the previous class, we’ve installed WordPress and then clean things up a bit.

And in this and the next several classes, we’re going to cover the Settings section over here in the left Admin sidebar. And we’re going to begin with the General section.

And you can get there by clicking on the link for General here in the fly-out or just clicking on the word settings here in the left sidebar because it’ll take you to the same spot, right here on the General Settings page. And if you recall, way back when we were installing WordPress using our cPanel one-click install method, I told you that we’re going to leave the site title and tag line alone because there’s another spot in the admin area where we can make those changes. Well, here we are. Here’s our site title and tag line.

And let’s go ahead and take advantage of this and make those changes now. I’m a copy-and-paste kind of guy. And scrolling down a bit, here’s our WordPress address URL and site address URL. There are things you can do with these. But unless you know exactly what you’re doing, leave these alone because one wrong character change can break your entire site. So if you do that, make sure you’ve got a backup first. Otherwise, just leave them alone.
And the email address, this is the same email address that we had entered in the installation process earlier. Make sure that this is one that you have access to because all of your WordPress-related stuff is going to go to that email address.

For the membership here, I’m going to leave this alone. If I have a need to have this as a membership-style WordPress site, there are plenty of powerful plugins, both free and premium, that I would use instead of this. But it is there just in case. Now as far as the new user default role, remember, default is an important word here because you can change the user roles on an individual basis. If you’re adding users, you can go into their profile as the administrator and change the role from whatever it is to whatever you want it to be. This is for the default settings.

So if you have it set up to where somebody can sign themselves up for free (like maybe you’ve got this set as a membership, this is the role that they would be automatically assigned to. So I would leave this as subscriber. That’s the least powerful role of these available if you click on the drop-down. And if you want to learn more about the different abilities or capabilities of these roles, then it is kind of an older article. But you can learn more about those different roles here at codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities. Like it says here, this is a little bit old, but it will give you a basic idea of some of the different powers of each of those roles.

Now coming back, the site language, another thing that we could set in the installation process. But we can adjust that here in the time zone and date and time formats. You can make the adjustments here however you like. Myself, I live in the Midwest here in the U.S., so if I know what the UTC offset is and I can choose that… I think it’s -6. But let’s say I don’t, we can choose the city that’s closest to my physical location which is Chicago because I’m just outside of Kansas City, and there is not one for Kansas City or St. Louis. But this is the same time zone that I’m in. And you can see that once I save these changes I’ve made, my exact time will be displayed off to the side here.

I’ll show you that here in a second. And you can choose your formats for your date and the formats for your time. We’ve got some documentation here on what all this code stuff is. And I’m kind of old-fashioned, so I’m going to put my week starting on Sunday. And don’t forget. If you want all this stuff to stick, click on Save Changes. Now if we come down here to the time zone, you can see now that this is the UTC, and the local time is now being displayed, 3:17. That’s exactly right.

That’s going to bring us to the end of this video on a tour of the General tab in the Settings section of your WordPress site’s Admin section. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.