Disable Comments (Not Recommended)

This is not necessarily something I would recommend, since user-contributed comments are a huge part of the blogging world, however, it should definitely be pointed out that removing the “Post a Comment” section at the bottom of every post would be a sure-fire way to adjust your blog to ensure a more customized look and feel.

While this would contribute to a “non-blog” atmosphere on your website, it is highly recommended that you keep user comments open and instead customize the look of the comment area. Of course, if you’re using WordPress purely as a content management system for developing pages instead of “blog posts” then this would be an obvious choice, and would make more sense.

Customize Metadata for Individual Posts

Every post has “metadata” contained inside of paragraph tags at the bottom of each blog post. This data is generated dynamically through the loop that pulls your content out of the database. You can easily edit, delete, or modify any of these pieces of data that are displayed with each entry, which can be found inside of the index.php file in your theme directory. The default look for the metadata section looks like this in WordPress 2.7.1:

1. <p class="postmetadata"><?php the_tags('Tags: ', ', ', '<br />'); ?> Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?> | <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '', ' | '); ?>  <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments &#187;', '1 Comment &#187;', '% Comments &#187;'); ?></p>  

By editing the above section of code, you can choose to display only comments and categories, and even alter the characters that are displayed. For example the »will display ». You have the option to remove those characters and use something more appropriate for your site’s look.

Use “Decategorizer” Plugin for Cleaner URLs

Customize Your Sidebar and Keep it Consistent

The sidebar in WordPress is a dead “giveaway” when a user visits your site. The sidebar will have default titles like “Blogroll”, “Categories” and “Archives”. You can easily change the text of these titles, and which sections are displayed, by editing the sidebar.php file in the theme directory. Also, WordPress displays a different sidebar depending on what page of the site you’re on, which can also be changed. I personally prefer to display virtually the same sidebar on all pages, to keep the site consistent.

Even if you’re not familiar with PHP, WordPress code is very developer-friendly, and easy to work with. A simple knowledge of how functions are called and how to open and close if statements is often more than enough to help you customize some of the sidebar code.

Also, you can easily duplicate and customize certain sidebar sections. Look at the sidebar here on Impressive Webs: You’ll notice there’s a list for “Articles” and “Tutorials”. This is done by duplicating the “categories” section and controlling what categories are displayed using parameters inside the function call for that particular section.

Check out the WordPress Codex for further information on customizing category listings.

The easiest way to upgrade Wordpress

In an earlier post, I mentioned an error to auto-upgrade Wordpress2.7 to 2.71, the reason is the problem of the free webhost byethost.

If you use byethost too, and need to update, here is the easiest way.

Backup your files and database. Of course you can use FTP to download all files to your local computer, but quickest is to make a copy in the server itself using Vista Panel File manager tool. Export your database, and save it as a file, just in case something go wrong during your update.

Delete wp-admin and wp-include, do as the instructions given out in the Upgrading Wordpress document.

Use Fantastico type installer to install the latest version ofWordpress. Byethost almost has the latest version of Wordpress as soon as a new version released. This save you a lot of work to download and unpack and upload to your server. Don't do thewordpress installation procedure.

Then go to File manager, copy all files except for wp-contents andwp-config and overwrite your old files.

There are no database upgrade from 2.7 to 2.71, so update success!