Category: Wordpress

Before we install WooCommerce, there are a few pages we should set up first:

Step 1: Setting Up Relevant Pages

1. About Page: Share your story with your customers. ( see example )
2. Contact Page: Provide a way for customers to reach you. ( see example )

Step 2: Disabling Comments on Pages

In WordPress, pages are for static content like “About Us” or “Contact” pages, which typically remain unchanged over time. Posts, on the other hand, are for dynamic content like blog entries or news updates, which are organized chronologically and can be tagged and categorized. Comments are great for blog posts but don’t always make sense on pages. Let’s turn them off:

1. Go to the Admin Dashboard.
2. Navigate to Pages.
3. Select all your pages.
4. Go to Bulk Actions, choose Edit, and click Apply.
5. Under Comments, select Do not allow.
6. Click Update.

Now, when you revisit your About page and scroll down, you should no longer see the comments box, making it more “page-like”.

Step 3: Setting Up Permalinks

Permalinks in WordPress are the permanent URLs of your posts, pages, categories, and other archive pages on your website. These URLs are designed to be permanent and should not be changed, hence the name “permalink.” They help create a URL structure that is easy for both humans and search engines to understand and share.

Pretty Permalinks: These are SEO-friendly and attractive, usually containing words such as the title of the post or page, post category, or tag name. For example: http://example.com/2012/post-name/

Pretty permalinks are SEO-friendly because they include keywords from the post title or category, making URLs more descriptive and relevant to search engines. This helps improve search engine rankings and provides a better user experience by creating readable and memorable URLs.

To create prettier permalinks:

1. Go to the Admin Dashboard.
2. Navigate to Settings > Permalinks.
3. Choose any option other than Plain (e.g., Day and name, Month and name, Numeric, Post name). Personally, I’m a fan of Day and name.
4. Click Save Changes.

Return to your About page and refresh it to see the updated permalink. This will apply to your About page, Contact page, and future Product pages.

If you’re considering starting an online store, WooCommerce offers a robust and flexible platform to build your business. It is a popular e-commerce plugin for WordPress, and it’s a great choice for several reasons:

1. User-Friendly: It’s relatively easy to set up and use, even if you don’t have a lot of technical expertise.
2. Customizable: It offers a high degree of customization, with a plethora of themes and plugins to tailor your online store to your exact specifications.
3. Cost-Effective: The core plugin is free, and while there are paid extensions available, you can start selling online without significant upfront costs.
4. SEO-Friendly: WooCommerce is built on WordPress, which is known for its strong SEO capabilities, helping your store rank better in search engines.
5. Community Support: There is a large community of developers and users, which means you can find plenty of resources and support if you run into any issues.
6. Secure: Regular updates and a focus on security help protect your online store from potential threats.
7. Integration: It integrates seamlessly with many other services and platforms, including payment gateways, shipping services, and marketing tools.

Sharing your personal admin login details has its security risks. In WordPress, you can assign different user roles to control what people can and cannot do on your WordPress site. Such as a contractor, freelancer, consultant, or agency. Only the Site Owner (the person that created the site) can transfer the site ownership to another administrator.

User Roles Explained:

Administrator

An Administrator (or Admin for short) has full power over the site and can do everything related to site administration. Administrators can create more Administrators, invite new users, remove users, and change user roles. They have complete control over posts, pages, uploaded files, comments, settings, themes, plugins, imports, and exports. Nothing related to site administration is off-limits for Administrators, including deleting the entire site*.

* Some Limits on Administrators that apply:

• Only the Site Owner (the person that created the site) can transfer the site ownership to another administrator.
• Administrators cannot access the purchases and stored payment details added by the site owner or other administrators.
• Administrators cannot delete domains unless they are the domain’s owner.

You might add an additional administrator to WordPress for a group project or class where multiple people need to contribute to a website. However, it’s recommended to only have as many administrators as you need because more admins increase the risk of someone’s login being compromised. You should also regularly review your admin users.

Editor

An Editor can create, edit, publish, and delete any post or page (not just their own), as well as moderate comments, upload to the media library, and manage categories, tags, and links.

Author

An Author can create, edit, publish, and delete only their own posts only, as well as upload files and images. Authors do not have access to create, modify, or delete pages, nor can they modify posts by other users. Authors can edit comments made on their posts.

Contributor

A Contributor can create and edit only their own posts but cannot publish them. When one of their posts is ready to be published or has been revised, the site owner or another administrator can review it. Contributors cannot upload files or images.

Once a Contributor’s post is approved and published by an Administrator, it can no longer be edited by the Contributor. However, the post author will still be the Contributor instead of the Administrator who publishes the post.

Summary

• Administrator: The highest level of permission. Admins have the power to access almost everything.
• Editor: Has access to all posts, pages, comments, categories, and tags, and can upload media.
• Author: Can write, upload media, edit, and publish their own posts.
• Contributor: Has no publishing or uploading capability but can write and edit their own posts until they are published.
• Subscriber: People who subscribe to your site’s updates.

Other Roles

Other plugins may create additional user roles or modify what a role has permission to do. For example, when you install WooCommerce, two additional user roles are created: Customer and Shop Manager. Information about these can be found in the WooCommerce documentation.

Different plugins can add different user roles , check the plugin’s documentation for more information on roles added by a particular plugin.

There are also plugins that you can use that offer alternate methods of giving someone access to your site such as Temporary Login Without Password plugin and others you can search WordPress.org for more plugins.