Lesson 2: Tools & Settings
Video (14:33)
Lesson Materials
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Welcome, welcome.
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In this video, we're going to go over some
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of the settings and some of the tools
are available in WordPress.
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These are some of the settings that you
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probably want to go through,
right when you install your site
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to make sure that everything
is according to your wants.
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So first, under settings in general,
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we have just the general
settings of your site.
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This is the date and time,
the language and so forth.
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Here we have the site title.
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This is going to appear here and most
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likely on the front page
of your site in some way.
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This one, I've done some stuff
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with the theme, so it doesn't
but definitely an option.
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The tag line, depending on your theme,
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may also have options to show
up on the front page.
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It will also show up
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in the title of your page.
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So notice how this one has Techie Mamma
has the title Techie Mamma Demos.
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If you have a tag line after Techie Mamma
demos, the tag line will appear.
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The WordPress address and the site
address shouldn't match her domain.
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Make sure to add the S.
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If you set up security with your host
administration, email address is going
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to be your email address that you
want as the main administrator.
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If you change this, it will need to be
confirmed before it takes effect.
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Membership, anyone can register.
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This is who can add themselves to your
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site,
so if you have a lot of subscribers
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that you want active on your site, you may
want to turn this on for most blog sites.
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So you're not going
to want to turn this on.
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You want to just have specific
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registrations enabled and most likely
new user default roll.
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You probably want to keep
this a subscriber.
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You may also want to have
it as a contributor
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and make sure to watch are the user's
video to get kind of some of the
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differences between all of these roles,
your site language,
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you have an option to have a lot
of different languages for the default
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site language, and then your time
zone would set the time zone.
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I'm in Chicago and America
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time zone and the date format.
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So we have the American date format,
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but there's also plenty of other formats
that might be more in line with your
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demographic
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and the time format.
Same thing.
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There's a lot of time formats if you
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prefer military time or twenty
four hour time and so forth.
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Lastly, the week starts on what day
do you want the week to start on?
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And we'll click on Save Changes.
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Our right, our next settings page is are
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writing, the writing doesn't
have too much, but a few things.
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The default post category,
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if you have something besides
uncategorized that you want to be
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the default post category,
you can change it here,
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the default post format.
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So if you're using a theme that
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supports different formats for your
posts, they can be things like a gallery
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or a link or an image beyond just
a standard, like a written post.
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Then you can set your default here.
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So if maybe you have a podcast site,
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you might want to set the default
post format to be audio.
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Posts via email.
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This is a great little tool if
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you are not on the computer all the time,
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if you're maybe writing on your phone,
you can post
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your blog posts via email.
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So here you would put it in your mail
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server, your login
name and your password,
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and then you have some specific
strings to use to set it up.
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And then any update services that you want
to ping when you add a new post are here?
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All right, next up is our
reading settings, so this is
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goes to the users of your site and how
they're going to approach the site,
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some of the options visually
that you can change.
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So you want your home page to display your
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latest posts, or do you want your
homepage to be a static page?
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If you want it to be a static page,
you can pick what that static page is
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and then you can pick a blog
page if you have a blog page,
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the number of blogs to show at most.
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So do you want to show 10 blog
posts at a time or less or more?
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You can choose this
syndication feeds show the most recent.
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How many items?
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If you go to an RSS feed
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and I'll have some descriptions
of what our sources in the notes.
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This is how many
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posts will show up 10 or five or two,
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depending on just how many you
want to bring in for the user.
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And then for each post in the feed
include the full text or a summary.
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So.
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If it's the full text,
they will
get the full text of your blog
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post so that they can read it in their
reader, if it's a summary's and they'll
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see a little summary and then they can
click on it to then go to your website.
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Lastly, the search engine visibility.
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For the most part,
you want this to be unchecked,
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but if you're still developing
and don't have a coming soon page,
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you may want to turn this on just so
that
it doesn't get indexed and you're not
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getting a lot of use while
you're in development mode.
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Of course, it is up to the
search engine to honor it.
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So it may or may not fully work.
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All right, let's go to.
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Her last option in the settings
area is
the privacy policy page,
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so the privacy settings,
there's actually a couple of different
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tools as well that we're going to talk
about in conjunction with this.
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So it's now really important,
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more than ever before to have
a privacy policy on your site.
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You can do this by just creating a new
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page and then filling
in kind of the default
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guide that they have created for you.
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And I'm not sure why that happened.
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Let's see if this works.
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There you go.
That looks promising.
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All right, so here we have the privacy
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policy page and
WordPress has put together
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kind of a template, so to say,
of what to include.
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So you can just go in and add some more
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content and then publish
and you have a privacy policy.
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I am not a lawyer and none of this is
my full recommendation for what to do.
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Please, please go look up all the laws
and check what affects you in your area.
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And as a business,
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WordPress also has a guide that you
can go to and see what they recommend.
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So it's basically the template and then it
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kind of talks about what
goes in each section
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are right.
So let's go to the next one.
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And that's some
tools to manage your privacy policy.
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So for many, laws are coming into effect
and European laws are already in effect.
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The one of the things that needs
to happen is a way to export
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any personal data that has been collected.
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So WordPress has this built in and
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all you have to do is
entering the user name
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that they want.
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Let's see, let's do.
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Yeah.
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And send the request.
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And sure, why that's happening again,
let's try this one more time.
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Ah, right, so it will send
out an email to the person
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and wanting confirmation that they
have requested this information.
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Once that happens, then you can download
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the personal data and it may I believe it
sends it out automatically to that person
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or you can download it
and then send it out.
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I believe it sends it out automatically.
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Similar to the exporting.
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We have the iRace personal data.
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So similar functionality you put
in the requesters email address or
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username, and that's
the username in WordPress.
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And then send the request.
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It will email them, verify the requests,
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and then it will go
in and erase all their
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data, make sure that they are really,
really ready for this to happen.
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All right, let's close these two.
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Next, we have under tools,
we have site health site health gives you
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a neat little snapshot of your
site so you can see under info
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your WordPress information and clean
like
your version number and so forth,
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the directories and the sizes
that you're using, the active theme.
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This is kind of just all
the stats of your WordPress site.
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You can copy site info to your clipboard
and then you can send it to a developer.
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Or if you're having issues with a plugin,
sometimes they will ask for that
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on the status page and then it
will take a little bit to load.
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It gives you some information of what
you can do to improve your site.
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So I'm actually getting
the option of should be improved.
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And that's because my PHP version
is not completely up to date
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and I may be getting an API here as well.
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So you have critical issues and then you
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have recommended improvements
and then you have the tests.
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I have been the half past.
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So this is a neat little way to just kind
of get some information about your site
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and if you're getting some help
from a developer or from the plugin
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developer or the developer,
this information can be really helpful.
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Lastly, but not least, is the import and
export options for your WordPress site.
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So if you are importing from another
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system or another WordPress site,
you have a number of different installers
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for importing
content into your new WordPress site.
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You can go WordPress to WordPress.
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There's a Tumblr one.
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There's an RSS which a lot
of systems can
just export to RSS,
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Movable Type and Life Journal or some
dated ones, but they're still out there.
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And then blogger
categories and tags converter
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lets you convert categories
to tags or tags to categories.
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And there's a separate video and lesson
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on what tags and categories are
and how you use them properly.
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Just like we can import,
we can also export,
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so if for whatever reason
you need
to export anything
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to another site or to something else,
you can export all content.
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You can export just posts or
just pages or just your media.
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So really
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good functionality
that you might want to use.
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And again, under tools and under settings,
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you will see that plugin
developers add certain items here.
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So if you're looking for satins
that from a plugin that you've installed,
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there's a good chance that they'll
be under settings or under tools.
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If they're not in either of those places,
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then they've probably added a manual
link directly to the dashboard menu.
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All right.
That was a long video.
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Thanks for watching.
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Give you a little overview of some
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of those menu settings
and the tools available.
There are several tools available in the tools menu. Get familiar with the different tools so you know where to go when you need a tool.