I need help on how to get it to automatically give someone a rank when they join so they will have simple commands such as set home. Can you help please? Thanks.
-Maggie

You can give those permissions to the one group on the server which has the options: setting of default: true.

To automatically promote users, you'll need to find a different, additional plugin to run alongside PermissionsEx (such as AutoRank) as PEX itself has no form of automation or chat management included.