WordPress

Setting up a permalinks structure in Wordpress one of the things I normally do right after installing a blog, before event getting started on the templates. However, I always seem to forget what to put in the box so I thought I would put this here to remind myself and to go over the best practices on your own site in terms of SEO.

To set the permalinks on your Wordpress install go into Settings > Permalinks and enter the following into the Custom Structure field.

/%postname%-%post_id%.html

This will make a post on your site have a URL something like this.

/this-is-a-new-post-2.html

It is also possible to create a permalink using the category slug by using the %category% option.

/%category%/%postname%-%post_id%.html

So the post above would become the following.

Whilst setting up a new Wordpress install for a site development I found an odd little issue that would only occur in certain circumstances. My current development platform consists of an Apache server on which I create a virtual host for every development site I need. However, rather than setting a DNS entry for each address I just listen to diferent ports. In this particular instance I used the port 59419.

When the install was complete I was presented with the following error at the top of every admin page.

A small exploit has been found within the latest (currently 2.8.3) version of Wordpress that can cause any attacker to reset the admin password. The attacker won't be able to see what the password is, and the new password is emailed to you anyway, but it might cause some users to be locked out of their blogs if they can't get access to the email or their email is down. However, it is a real pain so I am writing this blog to allow other bloggers to fix their Wordpress installs.

The Problem

Wordpress allows you to reset the admin password, which some users might want to do. The normal course of events is that the admin user selects that they want to reset their password and Wordpress will email the user a link containing a key. Following this link will reset the admin password. The issue is that it is possible to recreate this link without first sending out the email, which will reset the password. Here is the URL that can be used to reset the password.

A common practice when setting up a Wordpress blog might be to create a page and display posts in a certain category on that page. This causes some pages to act very much like category pages.

The first step in creating a page of posts is to create a page template that can be used by the pages. Create a file in your template directory called pageofposts.php and put the following comment in it.

<?php
/**
  * Template Name: PageOfPosts
  */

This will cause it to be displayed in the Template drop down on your Wordpress page admin. This isn't going to do a lot so lets add some other functionality. Add the following lines to include everything you need to create a blank Wordpress page.

This is quite a simple thing to do and it is quite easy to add a little link to your Wordpress posts. If the user is logged into Twitter on the web (which isn't all that common with multiple Twitter apps taking over) then when they click on a link they will be taken to their Twitter profile and their status box will contain the text you have set. You won't actually be able to update a users status for them, they have the final control over that, but some users will update their status so it is worth doing.

This is all done through a URL using the status parameter, like this.

http://twitter.com/home/?status=text+to+post

Because this is a URL you will need to encode it properly in order for Twitter to understand it. Using Wordpress you need to put a call to the urlencode() function to encode any string you might want to post.

Wordpress has a couple of rarely used functions that allow author information to be displayed for the current post and a list of all of the authors on the blog.

Adding a written by message to your posts is not difficult at all. Just use the the_author_posts_link() function inside the post loop.

<?php the_author_posts_link(); ?>

This function shouldn't be confused with the the_author_link() function that prints out the link in the author's profile.

The second way of printing out author information is by using the wp_list_authors() function. This can take a number of arguments, but the simplest use of it is as follows:

Wordpress has a nice little revisions feature that will allow you to revert to a previous version of a post if you don't like the current edit. However, the drawback of this feature is that it is not always needed and it fills the post table full of stuff you will never need. Fortunately, turning this feature off isn't too much of a pain. All you need to do is add the following line of code to your wp-config file, just below the DB_COLLATE line.

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 0);

You can also set the autosave interval here to something greater than the default of 60 seconds. It is possible to do this in the wp-config file since version 2.5.0.

define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 123);

If you want to get rid off all of the post revisions from your post table then you can use the following SQL query.

I recently talked about adding code to blogs and comments to Wordpress and making sure that certain characters are encoded properly. So to simplify things I thought I would create a little set of regular expressions that takes a sample of code and convert it into a Wordress friendly format. It consists of the following function, which takes the value of a text area called tochange and runs some regular expression replace functions on it. I have kept the expressions as simple as possible so they are quite easy to understand. The g argument for each expression means that the replace will be done for all of the text.

One neat thing about Wordpress is the ability to add images to your posts in a quick and easy manner. You can also create thumbnails of larger images and link to them using a captioned image. The only problem is that when you have sorted out how your images look in your post in the admin section they just don't appear the same in your template once you have published it.

This is because Wordpress creates a set of styles that are used in the admin section and the default Wordpress templates. However, these styles are usually left out of custom template stylesheets. If you want to use the same sort of formatting that the Wordpress admin section has then open up your stylesheet file in your template and put the following stylesheet rules in at the bottom.

A widget is a little program that fits into the side menu of your site. These widgets can be moved around using the admin section of your Wordpress blog and there are quite a few to chose from with a default install.

To create a theme that supports widgets you can follow the instructions in the post creating a widget proof Wordpress theme.

You can create a widget in one of two places, either within your functions.php file of your template, or in a plugin. To get a widget to display you need to call a function called register_sidebar_widget(). This function takes two parameters, the name of the widget in the admin section, and a callback function that controls what the widget contains.