Usage guide & tutorial to learn how to configure, edit and change the WordPress reading settings to set up your front (home) and posts (blog) page.
WordPress Reading Settings
The WordPress Settings Reading Screen options are few but still significant. You can decide if you want posts or a “static” Page displayed as your blog’s front (main) page. You can also adjust how many posts appear on that main page. In addition, you can adapt syndication feed features to determine how the information from your site is sent to a reader’s web browser or other applications.
Reading Settings
Frontpage displays: Firstly, use this setting to determine if your posts or a “static” Page displays as your blog’s front (main) page. This setting shows only if you have one or more Pages defined. Please note: static front page plugins and other ‘posts display’ control/restriction plugins may affect how these features work!
Your latest posts – Check this radio button to display your latest posts on the blog’s front page. Remember, the number of posts you say is set on the “Blog pages shows at most” setting.
A static page (select below) – Check this radio button to cause a “static” Page to be displayed as your blog’s front page. At the same time, choose the Page that will display your actual Posts. The Frontpage and Posts page cannot be the same value.
Frontpage – In the drop-down box, select the Page you want displayed as your front page. If you do not select a choice here, then effectively, your blog will show your posts on both the blog’s front page and on the
Posts page you specify. If you want to create a static home page template file, do not name it home.php. Otherwise, you will encounter problems viewing your site’s “blog”/”posts” section. To get around this, name it anything but home.php, for example, myhome.php. See Creating a Static Front Page for more detail.
Extra WordPress Reading Settings
Posts page – In the drop-down box, select the page name containing your Posts. If you do not select a Page here, your Posts will only be accessible via other navigation features such as category, calendar, or archive links.
Even if the page requires a password, visitors will NOT go for a password when viewing the Posts Page. In addition, any Template assigned to the Page will stop, and the theme’s index.php (or home.php if it exists) will control the display of the posts. Blog pages show at most.
- [X] posts – Enter the posts displayed per page on your site.
Syndication feeds show the most recent.
- [X] posts – Enter the number of posts people will see when downloading one of your site’s feeds.
For each article in a feed, show.
Determines whether or not the feed will include the full article or just a summary.
- Full text – Click this radio button to include the full content of each post.
- Summary – Click this radio button to include an overview of the post. This could save bandwidth.
Encoding for pages and feeds (Removed as of Version 3.5.0) Enter the character encoding to set the choice of languages in which you, the other authors, and your commenters can write.
The default (and safe choice) is “UTF-8” (see Unicode), as that encoding supports a wide variety of languages. If you wish to use some other character encoding (for example, you have imported or will import articles written using a different character encoding), specify that here.
Caution should be used when changing this field as it may change how information is displayed on your blog. Moreover, for a more in-depth character encoding article, see Wikipedia: Character encoding.
Search Engine Visibility
(New as of Version 3.5.0) Note the Settings → Privacy screen has been removed from WordPress as of Version 3.5.0). Check the Discourage search engines from indexing this site box to ask search engines not to index this site. When you check this option, the following happens:
- Causes “<meta name=’robots’ content=’noindex,nofollow’ />” to be generated into the <head> </head> section (if wp_head is used) of your site’s source, causing search engine spiders to ignore your site.
- Causes hit to robots.txt to send back:
User-agent: * Disallow: /Note: The above only works if WordPress exists in the site root and no robots.txt exists.
- Stops pings to ping-o-matic and other RPC ping services specified in the Update Services of Administration > Settings > Writing. This works by having the function privacy_ping_filter() remove the sites to ping from the list. This filter has add_filter(‘option_ping_sites,”privacy_ping_filter’); in the default filters. When the generic_pingfunction attempts to get the “ping_sites” option, this filter blocks it from returning anything.
- Hides the Update Services option entirely on the Administration > Settings > Writing screen with the message “WordPress is not notifying any Update Services because of your blog’s privacy settings.”
- Allows normal visitors.
*Note: Neither of these options blocks access to your site — it is up to search engines to honor your request. Keep reading to understand the usage guide & tutorial to learn how to configure, edit and change the WordPress reading settings to set up your front (home) and posts (blog) page.
Save Changes
Finally, click the Save Changes button to ensure any changes you have made keeps on your database. Once you click the button, a confirmation text box will appear at the top of the page, telling you your settings have been saved.
WordPress Reading Settings by Visualmodo. Usage guide & tutorial to learn how to configure, edit and change the WordPress reading settings to set up your front (home) and posts (blog) page.