My Top 5 Wordpress Tips

So you have just installed Wordpress but now your not exactly sure what to do. A scenario that I’m sure quite a few people have come across. Well here are my 5 top tips for getting Wordpress working quickly and extending it to do some cool things.

Use Akismet Spam Catcher

There are a lot of different spam deterring plugins for Wordpress but nothing seems to beat the Akismet plugin that comes with Wordpress. To use Akismet you will need a Wordpress API key which can be found in your account information e-mail when you sign up for a free wordpress.com account. Don’t have one? No problem Just go through the registration but say you just want a username & not a blog. Look in your account info e-mail, then copy and paste the API key from the bottom of the e-mail into Akismet. Easy, huh?

P.S. Akismet is only free for private use. If you want to use wordpress for a commercial purpose then you cannot use Akismet without buying one of their commercial API keys. They start from $5/month which is excellent value.

Find A Free Template.

Wordpress, unlike blogger, has sh*t loads of themes available all over the web. The problem? Because there are so many it’s hard to find the good ones. I mean quite frankly some of them are rubbish but if you can find the sites with the super sexy templates then you could be onto a winner.

There are a few sites I can recommend you start at but first try installing K2. K2 is kind of a theme that extends on Kubrick, Kubrick is the original Wordpress theme that you see straight after install and while K2 makes your blog look similar to Kubrick it enhances the features to include things like:

• Extended Archives
• Ajax(On-the-fly) Comment Submission
• Replaces Widgets With Advanced Sidebar Moduals
• Custom Styles, Keeps All K2 Functionality As Styles Only Alter The K2 CSS

Those are just a few things that K2 adds. Even though it has all of these new features it can still be extended with plugins & if you are javascript savvy you can have a little mess around with the jQuery JS library that K2 uses and probably do just about anything.

There are of course normal themes that you can find. A good place to start is Wordpress’s own theme directory. If they have nothing that you fancy then head for good ol’ Google, but to give you a head start here are a few of my favourites:

1. Top Wordpress Themes
2. Kate’s Theme Viewer
3. Smashing Magazines 83 Themes You Probably Haven’t Seen

The last one is where I found this themes counterpart, Gridlock. I now use Gridlock K2 which is the Gridlock theme ported to the K2 Styling system that I mentioned earlier.

If you are a competent X/HTML coder and either know a bit of PHP or are willing to learn the basics then you could make your own theme. I use this theme because it suits my whole blog and it’s subject, if you can’t find a one you feel works then making your own could be the best idea. For ideas on how to start making a theme try WPdesigner. Unfortunately the author, Small Potato, is selling WPdesigner for personal reasons but hopefully the articles will stay around for a good while.

Use Pictures? Then Try One Of The Lightbox Plugins

Yep, I know it’s probably overused but it looks professional and allows people to view a full size image without leaving the page. As you may have guessed people tend to be lazy, we don’t want to admit it but we’d much prefer to use the Lightbox than press a thumbnail and have to press the back button.

So what did I mean by ‘One’ of the Lightbox plugins. Well there are lots of versions of the Lightbox such as the original Lightbox & Thickbox. I also like Highslide JS but if you are a commercial site you will need to pay for it. There are lot’s more but some don’t have Wordpress plugins yet. If that’s the case you could always try to add it yourself but that’s for another post.

Keep Organised With Tags & Categories

It may sound obvious but one of the best ways to keep your WP posts organised is by using the built in Categories and Tags assigner. When you make a post just give it a relevant Category and some relevant Tags. There is such a thing as overdoing it though. While Categories can keep your posts organised making too many of them can make it impossible to find anything. Try to make broad Categories that cover a fairly large scope of the same subject.

Lets say I have a PHP tutorial about OOP then I could use PHP as the Category but use Tags to place it under sub-categories. In that example post I would probably use the tags OOP, PHP, Function Scope and other things to do with OOP.

Help Google Find You & Keep Simple URL’s With Page/Post Slugs.

Now, Google supposedly uses URL’s as part of it’s spider system when finding and parsing your site for listing in Google’s listings. To help Google understand what your pages are about a bit more we can set up a better URL formatting style.

Go to Options on your WP admin bar and then pick Permalinks. On this page you can alter how WP shows your URL, by default it is like this:

http://domain.com/?p=123

Now this doesn’t tell Google anything about that page. Picking the second option is much better. Not only does it tell Google the date it was posted but it also allows the use of a page/post slug. Enable that option and then remove the /index.php/ in the custom box and put the / back at the front. This removes the annoying need to prefix any static links with /index.php/.

Now when you write a post or page WP will generate a slug for you but don’t just assume it did a good job. Generally it does but sometimes it fails quite miserably but that doesn’t matter, we still love you Wordpress we just need to make some adjustments. The best rule of thumb I have found for page/post slugs is to name them exactly the same as the post/page title with hyphens(-) instead of spaces. Although if you use spaces I think WP replaces them with hyphens anyway.

Now all you have to remember is that if you need to make static links to your own site inside posts/pages your URL is slightly different. it will always go like this for posts:

http://domain.com/yyyy/mm/dd/post-slug/

And for pages it’s just:

http://domain.com/page-slug/

Remember though it is generally bad practice to use http:// links when linking internally. Instead use:

/yyy/mm/dd/post-slug/

The / at the front tells the server that you mean from root. Another words it’s like writing http://domain.com/ without actually writing it. Why is this good? Well if your domain name ever changes you won’t have to manually change your static links.

Well that’s it. They are my top 5 tips for using Wordpress. If you have any tips you’d like to add or you disagree with one of mine please leave a comment, it’s always nice to read them.