Today I want to answer to some questions that are most likely on the lips of many wordpressers. I have managed to find some of the answers on the WordPress site and also on some Internet forums, that discussed the problems relatde to this blogging platform.
You may wonder what is it all about the page 404. You know already that this is the number of the page which cannot be showed on the screen, because the server has a problem, because the admin of the site choose not to show it anymore or other reason. This error may appear on your site, if you choose to delete the Hello World post.
By default, the homepage of your site, which is hosted on the WordPress platform is set to show your recent posts. If you don’t have recent posts, this will be the error showed to your viewers. You can set this to change by entering a specific code in the HTML document. Also, the theme of the 404 page can be changed according to the main theme, that you are using for the site.
To fix this problem of showing the 404 error page, you simply have to go to your site and write something. For example, you can write a single word, say hello to the world again. This will eliminate the error and your viewers will be able to see again the posts that you have written.
If you don’t want to have this stress al the time, if you are not a writer who writes every day, you can set the homepage to display a static page, where all of your posts to be included and presented to the viewer. You can do this by following the next steps. The method is taken directly from the WordPress site, so I can assure you that it will work.
In your Dashboard, click Pages and the Add New. Name the page as you want, a good name would be Home or a name that would suggest that this is the index page, the main page of the site, the front page if you like. Type the content that you want to be displayed and save the content. Publish the page and write a new one. Name this new page “Posts”. In this page, you are not required to type any content, because by default it will not be published. Simply publish the page as it is. On the left menu in the Dashboard, click Settings and Readings. You will see something asking you to display the front page with your latest posts (the option selected by default) or with a static page. You can select from the pages you wrote recently, the pages called Home and Posts.
Another question that may arise is how come the posts I edit are not seen in my categories of articles? This could happen when you edit an article, then you go back to it and instead of updating it, you select to publish it on a certain date, which is not yet arrived. In other words, you schedule the post to appear on other time, not at the time of editing the post. This usually happens when you are a beginner, but I promised not to talk of beginners now.
I have heard that people are using the archives shortcode. What does it mean and how can I use this too? This question is for advanced wordpressers and the answer lies at the following page: http://en.support.wordpress.com/archives-shortcode/. I will resume this by saying that you have to write certain codes to see the archives for a certain period of time, for several months, for the latest 12 posts and more. Everything can be limited. To create an archive index, you need to create a new page. I have already mentioned how you can create a new page. In the new page you create, type the code mentioned at the page above in the visual editor. It is simple like that and the codes are very easy to write, you don’t have to be a programmer, just to know a bit which is the HTML editor, which is the Visual editor, stuff like these.
The recommendation of WordPress is to not copy the codes that are presented on the page mentioned above, but to create your own codes, because they will not work on your page. Let’s see, if you have a blog for 7 months now and you write a code that will show the archive for the latest 12 months, obviously the code will not work. You need to adapt the codes to your current situation.
What is the Autosave feature? If you have used WordPress until now, you have seen that on certain posts, that have more than 200 words let’s say, you will see after a short period the next words: “Draft saved at 2:53:48 pm”. This means that your post was already saved and if you have a problem with your Internet connection, with your computer, the electric current has an issue at that moment, your work will be saved and you will need to enter in the Drafts category, after the problem is solved. This is happening if you write the post directly into the WordPress platform, because you can write it using a text editor, copy and paste in into the Dashboard and then publish it. In this period of seconds, your post will not be saved as a draft, because the period is too short. This is the Autosave feature. Every new draft is overwritten on the draft saved before it. The draft is saved with the title of the article and all. If you added tags and your computer breaks down, the next time when you will enter WordPress, you will see that the article is there, with tags and all.
More answers in my next article. Meanwhile, you can enter the WordPress site by yourselves and browse for interesting information. You can find everything you need to know and more there. If I had not enter the WordPress site, the Support section, I would have never find out of Jabber and of GlotPress, which I presented yesterday. So, explore the site and stay connected to SoftSupplier also, because we resume the best info we get on sites like WordPress, Google, Yahoo, Blogger and so on.
