14 DAY TRIAL // Yesterday, I wrote an introduction to blogs and I explained how to install Wordpress on your webserver. Now I will show you how to work with the admin panel. After you've installed Wordpress, the setup automatically generated a password and I told you to write it. To change the admin password, login to the admin panel (http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/) and go to Users/Your Profile and type your new password.
In the admin panel, there are 9 menus: Dashboard, Write, Manage, Comments, Blogroll, Presentation, Plugins, Users and Options. Dashboard is the place where you will see the statistics of your blog. Also, here you will receive information about the latest stable and beta versions of Wordpress. In the next menu, Write, you can write your articles, thoughts, everything. From here, you can add another category and select in which category you want to publish your article. If you don't want to allow your visitors to post comments, uncheck Allow categories from discussion tab. To add another page, click on Add Page tab and fill in the information about the page. Don't forget to select the Page Parent and to put the number of the page.
From Manage menu, you can modify almost everything in your blog. In Post submenu, you can view the posts, search a post by status, month or category. You can view the posts, edit them and even delete them if you don't like something. For comments you can edit, delete, approve (or unapprove) and mark them as spam. From Page submenu, you can create a new page, but you can also modify or delete an existing one. If you want to import post, comments and users from another blog of yours, or posts from a RSS feed use Import submenu. From there you can do much more. If you want to create a backup for your website, use Export submenu and export your posts, comments, custom fields, and categories. You can import the XML file later from Import submenu.
From Comments menu, you can moderate the comments posted for your articles. Using Askimet plugin you may filter spam messages. Blogroll is the place where you can add links to your favorite blogs or your friends' blogs. To manage easier the links, you can assign them to different categories. If a program or website you use allows you to export your links or subscriptions as OPML, you may import them from this menu.
