Be Excellent To Each Other

Hello knowledgeable web chums, it has just struck me that I have been using wordpress for a number of months now but actually have no idea how it really works.

I mean, I have mastered the writing a load of nonsense bit, but underneath that there is a load of room for adding gubbins that I have been diligently ignoring.

I've attached a screenshot of the area below where you write your posts, and there are a few field there that a complete mystery to me:

1) DISCUSSION
- allow comments (understood)
- allow pings (?) Pings? Pings?

2) POST SLUG


3)OPTIONAL EXCERPT
OK, I understand that I may post an optional excerpt, but can someone explain what the significance of this? Where would posting just a part of the article be of benefit? There is already a <more> tag that you can write into your post if you only want a post preview to appear on the first page - is this something different?

4)TRACKBACKS
It's asking for a URL. I have no idea what this is at all.

5)CUSTOM FIELDS
Eh?

See, I have read the documentation, and I cannot find what these things are for - what their function is. I don't know if I should perhaps have been paying far more attention to these things than I have been.

I also wondered if there was any way to insert keywords or short descriptions for the benefit of search engines, or if that is relevant to a blog.

I is most confuddled

I don't know most of these things, nor have I ever really needed to. However, this might help:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Posts

Thanks, mrbogus,

I had read that page before, but it is written in some gobbledy language that I did not understand. If I uncheck the allow pings box then no pinging will ensue? Well, I can see that, but i do know know what a ping is

Also, it doesn't tell me about lugs. I am worried that my blog may be full of slugs, just like a student kitchen.

Post Slugs allow you to couple threads via your underlying layout matrix - don't allow pings if you're doing this though, or you'll end up with recursive horizontal linkage, and I don't need to tell you why thats bad. Tracebacks cause any future posts to be reindexed according to your routing schema, so whether you want them is purely down to the number of internal channels you've created, discounting your primary channel of course. Custom Fields are essential if you intend to publish your tagging via XSD2. If so, you need a unique custom field that refers to each parent node of your RSL, and make each value linkable to the overall symbol table.

I hope that clears things up.

Pings are sent out when you update or publish a blog post. They're just notifications to a blog indexing site that you've posted something new, so that the indexer can (I suppose) add your new content to its index.

Post slugs are apparently a way of choosing a specific URL for your post, in order to make it more appealing to search engines:

http://www.dailyblogtips.com/wordpress-post-slug/

However, if you're running WordPress on your own server I imagine this would require some tedious fiddling with config files to make it work properly.

(I had to read through Squirt's post twice to be sure that it wasn't a genuine answer, because it makes just as much sense.)

EDIT: Missed a couple. Custom fields are only useful if you're programming your own theme, so ignore those. Trackbacks appear if someone links to your blog from another blog, and then someone clicks that link. They appear as short comments below the post with an excerpt of the blog that linked to you as the comment text. Most of the time they just seem to be used as ways of injecting spam.

Hehe, OK.

Well, I am on my own server, and tedious fiddling with files makes me want to wear the concrete boots, but I am rather disappointed that posting slugs is not something far more fun

The ping thing is automatically checked, I have just ignored it up until now. If it is not doing anything detrimental then I shall leave it checked, I think.

Slugs are simple. They're neater URLs you give to posts.