Book Image

WordPress 2.7 Cookbook

Book Image

WordPress 2.7 Cookbook

Overview of this book

About 120,000 blogs are created every day. Most of them quickly die, but a few stay, grow up, and then become well known and respected places on the Web. If you are seriously interested in being in the top league, you will need to learn all the tricks of the trade. WordPress 2.7 Cookbook focuses on providing solutions to common WordPress problems, to make sure that your blog will be one of the ones that stay. The author's experience with WordPress enables him to share insights on using WordPress effectively, in a clear and friendly way, giving practical hands-on solutions to WordPress problems, questions, and common tasks ñ from themes to widgets and from SEO to security. Are you feeling limited with WordPress, or are you wondering how popular blogs do a certain kind of thing that you can't? With this cookbook, you will learn many WordPress secrets and techniques, with step-by-step, useful recipes dedicated to achieving a particular goal or solve a particular problem. You'll learn the secret of expensive premium themes, how to optimize your blog for SEO and online profits, and how to supercharge WordPress with killer functions used by the most popular blogs over the Internet.

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WordPress 2.7 Cookbook
Jul, 2009 | 304 pages
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Table of Contents (17 chapters)
WordPress 2.7 Cookbook
WordPress 2.7 Cookbook
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Getting Ready to Cook with WordPress
Getting Ready to Cook with WordPress
Managing media files with the Media Library
Live editing themes with the built-in Theme Editor
Editing plugins with the WordPress built-in Plugin Editor
Managing authors and users with the User Manager
Importing and exporting content with the Import and Export tool
2
Finding and Installing Themes
Finding and Installing Themes
Installing a theme
3
Get the most out ofyour WordPress Theme
Get the most out ofyour WordPress Theme
Modifying your theme colors
Modifying your theme fonts
Creating and integrating a favicon
Integrating your own logo
Adding social bookmarking buttons to your theme
Integrating Feedburner feeds on your theme
Integrating Twitter on your theme using the Twitter Tools plugin
Displaying your Twitter entries on your blog using a page template
Customizing WordPress admin login page
Using conditional tags to display content on specific pages
Using page templates in your theme
Creating an archive page
Creating a custom 404 error page
Using a static page as a homepage
Creating a Featured Posts block on your homepage
Making your new posts stands out with a custom style
4
Doing anything withPlugins and Widgets
Doing anything withPlugins and Widgets
Installing plugins
Getting rid of comment spams with Akismet
Backing up your database with WP Database Backup
Scheduling automatic backups
Optimizing your blog performances with WP Super Cache
Adding redirects for changed Permalinks
Getting more comments with the Subscribe to Comments plugin
Accessing real time statistics with WordPress.com Stats
Monetizing your blog with ISIS Ads Management
Extending WordPress search with Search Unleashed
Installing widgets
Making your sidebar widget-ready
Creating two (or more) different widget-ready zones
Modifying core widgets
Creating your own widget
5
Displaying Posts
Displaying Posts
Getting posts within the WordPress loop
Retrieving posts from a particular category only
Getting an exact number of posts
Retrieving posts by date
Getting posts published today
Getting posts published exactly a year ago
Using two different loops withoutduplicate posts
Accessing post data outside of the WordPress loop
Accessing permalinks outside the loop
Displaying any RSS feed on your blog
Displaying thumbnails on your blog homepage
Alternating background color on post list
Displaying posts in two columns
Saving time by using WordPress shortcodes
Creating a nice download message box using a shortcode
6
Managing and Enhancing Multi-Author Blogs
Managing and Enhancing Multi-Author Blogs
Creating an author page template
Displaying a custom login form in your blog's sidebar
Adding a control panel to your blog's sidebar
Configuring author roles
Displaying author-related information on posts
Displaying author picture on posts
Displaying the author's gravatar picture on posts
Adding moderation buttons to the comments
Getting notified when a new draft is saved
Allowing multiple authors on posts
Displaying a list of all of the authors
7
Securing yourWordPress Blog
Securing yourWordPress Blog
Creating manual backups of your WordPress blog
Restoring a MySQL backup
Creating backups of your WordPress files
Using a shell script to create automatic files and database backups
Securing your plugins directory
Removing a WordPress version from the theme files
Getting rid of the Administrator account
Forbiding login automatically after some failed login attempt
Protecting the wp-admin directory brute force with the help of AskApache
Restricting wp-admin directory to your IP address
Testing your blog security
Denying comment posting on no referrer requests
8
SEO Tips and Tricks to Get More Visits
SEO Tips and Tricks to Get More Visits
Optimizing your permalinks for SEO
Migrating your permalinks safely
Optimizing your title tag for SEO
Creating Meta descriptions for your posts
Avoiding duplicate content with a robot.txt file
Adding a sitemap to your blog
Using Google Webmaster Tools
Pinging third party services
Enhancing your WordPress blog SEO with the All in One SEO Pack plugin
9
Making Money with WordPress
Making Money with WordPress
Integrating Adsense to your WordPress blog
Displaying ads anywhere in your posts by using WordPress shortcodes
Displaying Adsense ads to search enginesvisitors only
Managing who Sees Ads
Inserting ads in your RSS feeds
Redirecting your WordPress RSS feeds to Feedburner
Showing your blog stats to find advertisers
Enhancing your Advertise page by adding Paypal subscriptions
10
Enhancing UserExperience
Enhancing UserExperience
Replacing the Next and Previous links by a paginator
Highlighting searched text in search results
Using the CSS sliding doors technique within WordPress
Creating a drop-down menu for your categories
Adding a breadcrumb to your theme
Displaying related posts
Displaying tabs on your sidebar
11
Make your Blog Stand Out
Make your Blog Stand Out
Rewarding your commentators to get more comments
Adding a print stylesheet to your blog
Creating your own Photoblog theme
Creating an iPhone-friendly version of your blog
Integrating a forum in your WordPress blog
Index
Index

Getting rid of comment spams with Akismet

Akismet plugin comes by default with any new WordPress version. As you probably already know, WordPress blogs are heavily spammed. I really think that you should use Akismet instead of boring and non-accessible captchas to prevent blog spam.

Getting ready

As I said, Akismet comes bundled with every WordPress release and so you don't have to download it. The first step is to activate it. Login to your WordPress dashboard and click on Plugins. Scroll down until you see Akismet in the plugin list and click on the Activate button to activate it.

How to do it...

Take note that Akismet is now activated, but it isn't running yet. You have to provide an API key. The API key is free, but you have to create an account at wordpress.com in order to get one.

  1. Go to www.wordpress.com and create an account.

  2. Login to your wordpress.com dashboard and select Edit Profile on the drop-down list that you get when you hover the mouse on My Account.

  3. Your API key is listed here...

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