serpentcouncil.com

Today we are continuing with pre-production work starting with Permalinks.

Before we do that just a quick aside.  I’m trying to keep each of these tutorials fairly short with the idea being that you are able to fully digest the one or two concepts that we work with.  I strongly encourage you to read further about the items we cover off so that you have a complete understanding.

Now, Permalinks are a setting to make the links, or URL’s of specific pages or posts both easier to read and easier to remember.   If you click on my first blog entry(before I change it to a Permalink), you get sent to http://serpentcouncil.com/?p=3.   As you add more and more posts and other types of pages, those link names, while perfectly functional, are not very user friendly.  So let’s change them.

As always, login to your WordPress Admin section, and on the left-hand menu select Settings > Permalinks

I have chosen a custom setting for mine as illustrated below:

Now when you click on the link of my first entry, it looks like this:
 http://serpentcouncil.com/2009/ultra-soft-launch/

You can read about the different Permalink options at the WordPress Codex Site, or use my custom setting, or even one of the common settings listed.   I choose mine because while it would be the simplest to just use post name, it prevents possible issues of duplication by giving it another field.    If you have problems with Permalinks, it may be a server setting issue, and you will have to read further into the WordPress documentation about mod_rewrite rules or you may need assistance from your hosting service provider.

There are also some optional settings listed for Category and Tag Base, which we may address at a later point when we get into creation of new pages that are not blog posts.