How To: Allow Post Contributions in WordPress

Posted in: Tutorials by Brad Williams on September 23, 2009 | 2 Comments

Have you ever wanted to give your website visitors the ability to register in WordPress and contribute posts for review? This feature is actually built into the WordPress core. You can easily accomplish this in WordPress by changing two settings:

First visit the General > Settings SubPanel. Here you will need to set enable the “Anyone can register” Membership option. Next you will need to set the “New User Default Role” to Contributor. That’s it!

Now any visitor to your website can register an account, create new blog posts, and submit those blog posts to you for moderation. Contributed posts can be approved by either an Editor or Admin on your website.

I also recommend installing the Sidebar Login plugin. This plugin will give you a login widget for your sidebar, making it extremely easy for your members to login to your WordPress website. Now all you need are some writers!

How To: Backup your WordPress Website on a Schedule

Posted in: Tutorials by Brad Williams on August 24, 2009 | No Comments

A common question among WordPress users is: “How can I backup my WordPress website?”.  To do proper backups, we recommend a plugin called: WP-DB Backup

The WordPress Database Backup Plugin can be configured to automatically backup all of your WordPress content on a schedule. You can also configure the plugin to email you a copy of the backup after it completes.

Auto-backups can be ran hourly, twice daily, once daily, or once weekly. You can also select which database tables are saved during the backup. If you have old database tables that don’t need a backup you can choose to ignore those during the backup process.

The WordPress Database Backup plugin is a great no worries approach to WordPress backup. Set your scheduled backups and watch as your backup file is emailed directly to you like clockwork!

How To: Publish a Post at a Future Date and Time

Posted in: Tutorials by Brad Williams on August 22, 2009 | No Comments

WordPress has the ability to automatically publish any post at a future data and time. First click the “Edit” link next to the Publish setting in the Publish meta box:

Next set the month, day, year, and time that you want your post to publish and click “OK”:

WordPress will automatically publish your post at this exact date and time.

This makes it extremely easy to write posts ahead of your publishing schedule and have them published automatically. This is a great technique if you are going on vacation but don’t want a big gap in posts published on your website or blog.

How To: Change Your WordPress URL

Posted in: Tutorials by Brad Williams on July 6, 2009 | No Comments

There are two places you need to update your WordPress URL when you plan on changing it.  They are both located under the General > Settings SubPanel.  Update the “WordPress address (URL)” and “Blog address (URL)” values to the new URL for your website.

This is a great tip if you are launching a new or rebranded WordPress website.  Development can happen on http://new.mydomain.com until you are ready to launch.

Optionally if you would like to update this value directly in your WordPress database just run the query below. Make sure you update the value in the query to your new domain before running:

UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = 'http://mydomain.com/' WHERE option_name = 'siteurl' OR meta_name = 'home''

How To: Display More Blog Posts in WordPress

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By default WordPress displays 10 blog posts at a time.  You can change this setting under the Settings > Reading SubPanel. Change the number of posts next to “Blog pages show at most” from 10 to any number you like.

Screenshot example shown below:

Remember it’s best to keep this number identical to the “Syndication feeds show the most recent” option.  This can cause paging issues in certain theme templates if not set the same.

How To: Set a Static Home Page for WordPress

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Do you want to set display your blog posts on a page other than your home page?  In WordPress you can set a static page to be your home page.  First create two new pages: Home and Blog.  Then visit the Settings > Reading SubPanel and select “A static page” for the Front page displays option and select the two pages you just created.

Screenshot example shown below:

Once saved all of your blog posts are now displayed on your new Blog page.  Your front page will now display the static page Home.

How To: Block Your WordPress Website from Search Engine

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Do you want to block your WordPress website from being indexed by Google, Yahoo, or any search engine at all?  Just visit the Settings > Privacy SubPanel and enable the option:

I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers

Screenshot example shown below:

Another good idea is to create a robots.txt file in your root WordPress directory with these two lines of code:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This also tells search engines to stay away and will not allow your content to be indexed.