Under the Settings menu for WordPress there’s an option for Writing.
Looking at this page raises some questions:
- What does it do?
- What is the domain example.com?
- What changes should I make?
The settings on the writing page are related to when you create/post new posts and pages. Offering some default options, possibility for external submission and announcing your new publication.
Writing Setting Options
The upper set of settings cover the posts and pages with their categorisation and formatting. The middle section with remotely posting posts via email and finally at the bottom whether the website should advise other services when a new post is published.
Default Post Format
The default post format shows different styles which are used by the theme to format the content.
I had read that the entries shown are governed by the theme. Although I’ve compared between the default TwentyNineteen theme and some others and observed the same set of entries.
Here’s the list of format options:
- standard
- aside
- chat
- gallery
- link
- image
- quote
- status
- video
- audio
The theme will handle these in different ways, of course.
The default setting is standard the other options can be chosen according to the content input.
But don’t forget that this is the setting for all content submitted in this way, via email. Unless all the posts which you submit via email are the same, perhaps requiring a chat or quote format I would be inclined to leave this set as standard.
The image above is from an older site, running a custom theme.
This view shows additional settings for the default post format, formatting and ping.
Formatting
With the creation of WordPress version 4.3 this isn’t installed/shown. However older sites, which were created based on an older version, do still show it as a configurable option.
There are a couple of options under formatting: emoticons and nested xhtml.
Emoticons are easy, the options sets whether the appropriate characters strings should be converted to happy, unhappy, sleepy icons, and all the rest of them.
The nesting of xhtml is a technical based setting. If you are using the visual editors to enter and amend your content this ought not to be an issue. By default its not checked. Badly created code can affect the layout of your website.
Post via Email
Its possible to send an email to a designated email address. The content of which will then be used to create a new post.
The defaults for these options are based around the domain example.com.
For the password there are suggested passwords to use. but I would make the entered password longer. Why not combine the 3 suggested ones?
If you don’t intend to use of this option you may still wish to make it more difficult to allow posting by email by setting a password and maybe changing the port number.
Conveniently when devising the domain name scheme some have been permanently set aside giving us Unused Domain Name and IP Addresses for Documentation. example.com is one of these domains. It’s not a domain belonging to anyone.
Update Services
The textbox of services which you wish to be updated when you publish a new post is listed here. The default one is Pingomatic. Others are listed on the WordPress Codex page Update Services, see the section XML-RPC Ping Services.
Note if on the Settings, Reading page you have ticked the option to Discourage search engines from indexing this site this option is not configurable. Whilst developing a new website this is often the case – we don’t want to inform the search engines and the wider world until the site is ready.
