Agronesia

Here are some stuffs that I did for my WordPress installations. The plain installation, left alone, is just plainly not good enough :)… I use version 2.5.1 btw.

• Put the appropriate .mo from http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Localization inside wp-content/languages to get a localized theme and admin pages. For example, when using Japanese the date displayed on posts change to something like “1 月 5th, 2008″. (A half-baked translation, since in true Japanese style it is “2008年1月5日”. Could be the theme’s fault, though). The .mo file will only be utilized when you set the variable as described on the next item.
• Put your language code on define ('WPLANG', ''); inside wp-config.php. For example, it is id for Indonesian and ja for Japanese. The most important result of this step is that it will correctly emit the lang attribute for your HTML! In fact, I set it just for that purpose, and purposely not use any .mo files.
• Change the permalink structure from Settings - Permalinks into Day and name. This is to enable pretty URLs in WordPress such as http://www.myblog.net/2008/03/20/post-title/ instead of http://www.myblog.net/?p=42. Make sure that the web server’s (Apache) mod_rewrite is enabled.
• Change so that anyone can comment directly from Settings - Discussion. Uncheck the Comment author must have a previously approved comment box. When I’m commenting on someone else’s blog, I hate it when my comments don’t instantly appear. Rather than tediously approving valid comments, I’d rather tediously manage any spams that slip.
• Install the Akismet plugin to capture many spams automatically: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/akismet/. You need an API key by registering to wordpress.com. Akismet is actually the only useful plugin included by default, but you should check for the latest version on its site.
• Install the stats plugin so that you can track and analyze your customer visits: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/stats/. This statistics feature is one of the things I miss most on a plain WP install when I moved out of wordpress.com.
• Export the contents of your old blog and import it from your new blog, if applicable. The menu is from Manage - Import and Manage - Export.
• Export/import the links (e.g., blogroll) of your old blog, if applicable. You can get the links from http://your-old-blog.com/wp-links-opml.php and import it from http://your-new-blog.com/wp-admin/link-import.php. I have no idea why they hide it from the menu.
• Edit the default theme. First I add <?php comments_template(); ?> somewhere on page.php so that people can actually put comments on my static pages. The second is to add <?php the_author() ?> to index.php, archive.php, single.php, and search.php so that my name is actually displayed.
• Put these meta tags to header.php:

  <meta name="Author" content="PUT_YOUR_NAME_HERE" />
  <meta name="Description" content="DESRIBE_YOUR_SITE_HERE" />
  <meta name="Keywords" content="key_1, key_2, key_3, key_n" />

  They make the site more discoverable from search engines. This can be regarded as a theme modification also. I wonder why it isn’t built in.

• Put additionals notice such as “This site uses lots of image from Wikimedia Commons” on the footer. Can I just do this instead of putting such attribution on the posts themselves?

What I really miss is the ability to plug into wordpress.com’s tagging system, such as http://wordpress.com/tag/japanese. Will they be kind enough in the future to provide self-hosted WordPresses with a plugin?

Anyway, if you see things which I solved clumsily up there, or if you would like to share other plugins and modifications of your WordPress, please do comment.

More posts about WordPress modification and tweaking coming, so stay tuned…

Tags: blog, Blogging, customization, development, free software, gpl, language, meta tag, open source, plugin, search engine optimization, seo, spam, statistics, tag, theme, tweaking, wordpress

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 7th, 2008 at 4:01 pm by Agro Rachmatullah and is filed under WordPress hacking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.