So far we have already gone through some of the wordpress basics (how to write, upgrading wordpress, how to customise your sidebar, using tags & using optional excerpts) in this tutorial we shall cover the rest of the basic.
Wordpress Categories
Categories help divide your blog into sections for e.g. a film review could be posted to a category called films and an article about contraception could go in a section called sexual health. Without categories your blog would tend to be hard to navigate around (image a supermarket with no signs). You can also make it so that a post is posted to multiple categories by selecting more that one in the write options when creating the post.
You can create/edit/delete categories by going to the manage sub tab and then clicking categories in your wordpress admin.
You can also change which categories the posts is posted to afterwards by going to manage > posts and clicking on edit.
Wordpress Comments
Comments are a great feature of wordpress, they give the visitors the chance to voice their views about your post, maybe even add a bit more information about it. If a visitor leaves you a comment, you can then also reply to that comment. (i use brians threaded comments for extra comment control)
<img src="http://mycyc.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/comments.thumbnail.jpg" alt="comments.jpg" />
Comments are displayed directly under each posts, and can be manage by various options (admin > options > discussion) and can be moderated by visiting admin > manage > comments.
Wordpress Themes
The theme of your site is important, to change the sites current theme go to admin > presentation. You should now see a list of themes that are currently available to you, to select a theme click on it and the re-load your blogs homepage.
You can get more themes from places like the wordpress theme viewer*.
Plugins, Hacks & Non-Default Features
The last great thing about wordpress is that where it has such a great following, if you after that something extra, say for e.g. a picture gallery, chances are someone, somewhere has created a plugin that does just that. The best place to look for plugins is the official wordpress plugin site*.
Plugins are easy to install, however you should always read the read me file before uploading any plugins.
Plugins can be managed by going to the plugins sub-tab within your admin area.