WordPress Tutorials

Xampp and similar localhost webservers that can be run from a local computer do not have mod_rewrite enabled by default. Furthermore, the AllowOverride directive is usually set to none, causing Apache to ignore an .htaccess file. If this is the case, your WordPress installation might return a 404 error, stating post not found and you would only be able to access your posts via a default permalink structure. I.E. http://localhost/?p=2. In the following simple solution, I show you how to make WordPress Permalinks work in Xampp and other localhost server installations. Upon completion, you will also have the ability to use .htaccess files on your local server.

This tutorial will explain how to add a simple Horizontal Navigation Menu to WordPress. The navigation menu or bar will allow your visitors to obtain easy access to your site and all of it's content directly from the top of each page or post.

In the following simple solution, I show you how to remove wlwmanifest and EditURI links from the WordPress head section of your site or blog. You only need these if you plan to use Windows Live Writer to write to your WordPress blog. If you do not plan to use this Live Writer, you can safely remove these links. They are not used for any other purpose.

The following tutorial covers the process of quickly and easily changing or converting your WordPress Tags from using an underscore _ to a dash - for search engine optimization. Google and other search engines do not recognize an underscore as a space. As a result, they will merge multiple keyword phrases into a singular word. Perhaps this not what you want for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of your keyword tag phrases. To fix this we can use a dash which is a space recognizable character for search engine crawlers.

Note: If you have previously migrated from WordPress Ultimate Tag Warrior to the Simple Tags plugin, this tutorial is also for you.

In the following simple tutorial, I'll cover the process of removing the Comments Off text from all of your WordPress Category or Archive lists. A WordPress Blogger might want to do this if they have disabled comments globally and no longer need to display information related to Comments. If you need to Globally disable WordPress comments, see the article to Globally Disable WordPress Comments.

In the following tutorial, I explain how to place Google AdSense ads between your WordPress posts. This is similar to the tutorial on How to add AdSense Ads between posts on category pages, with the exception that this example places ads on your Blog's Main index or Home page.

Adsense WordPress Shortcode: In the following simple solution, I will show you how to create a WordPress Shortcode that can be used to display your Google Adsense ads anywhere within your posts or pages. This simple function added to your Themes functions.php file, makes it very easy to include your Adsense Ads with  post or page content while you are writing the content for your blog.

In the following simple solution, I show you how to use a little php code snippet to automatically update your WordPress Copyright Date every year (appending the new date automatically). The process is super simple, but I figured that there may be others out there looking to accomplish the same goal and thought it would be nice to post an example.

Show More than 15 Recent Posts in WordPress 2.8 +. By default the number of recent posts that can be displayed in your WordPress sidebar is (at most 15). Maybe you want to display 30 recent posts or more? It is really a shame that the default limit is 15 posts, so in the following simple solution, I will explain how to modify the WordPress Recent Posts Sidebar Widget entry to Display More Than 15 Recent Posts.

After upgrading, restoring a database or moving a WordPress site, you may encounter strange characters in your WordPress posts text. It appears to be a character set or charset encoding problem where apostrophes, hyphens, quotation marks and dashes appear in posts and pages as strange characters like ’‚?. The symptoms are obvious. WordPress posts and pages suddenly contain garbled, weird, or strange characters.

This tutorial will show you how to place google adsense ads between articles in your phpbb forum. When finished, Your forum will automatically show one ad after the first post within each article and continue on any additional pages stemming from that article.

WordPress Disable Image Attachment Pages. In the following simple solution, I show you one way to remove or prevent attachment pages from appearing for every image attachment you add to WordPress. Because WordPress stores attached image data in the database as a Post Type, a URL is automatically created for each image.

In this Simple Solution I cover how to Reset Default Zoom Level for your Web Browser (Tested in Firefox and Internet Explorer). There are often times when you might use the Zoom feature of your Browser either intentionally or by accident.  The Zoom feature allows everything on a Web Page to scale larger or smaller, making it easier to read the content by zooming in +, or fit the content into your screen by zooming out -.

In the following simple solution, I cover how to Disable WordPress autosave function. Some people, myself included, are having problems with the WordPress autosave feature. The feature was intended to automatically save your work in the background after a certain period of time to prevent you from losing your work.

This tutorial explains how to modify the WordPress recent posts sidebar widget entry to display more than 15 recent posts. By default the number of posts to show is (at most 15). Maybe you want to display 20 recent posts? Or more? I'll show you how.

Margin different in Firefox and Chrome or Internet Explorer? If you have spent a good amount time messing with CSS, you may have noticed that the margin spacing set for a Class or ID can often preview different between Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer web browsers.

Adding addtional buttons or tools to WordPress WYSIWYG TinyMCE visual editor: Like most people, you probably enjoy using the built in TinyMCE visual editor that is included with WordPress. However, by default the included WYSIWYG editor lacks some essential tools like font color, font size, font family and more. The good news is that most of these tools are already included in WordPress but are simply not active. The following tutorial shows you how to add additional buttons to include these tools to your WordPress visual editor.

Manually adding AdSense to WordPress posts is a relatively simple task that can be accomplished within just a couple of minutes. In this tutorial, we cover the process of adding the code to the singlepost.php. This will allow us to display advertisements on every post only when the post is individually viewed. There are many places within the singlepost.php to add the code, for the sake of simplicity, we are going to cover the hotspot.

Do you publish WordPress posts on a regular basis which use the same structure? Maybe you have a signature or picture you would like to add to every post? You can eliminate the time spent going back and forth between posts doing copy and paste functions by simply creating a post template. A post template can automatically add text, images or code to every new post you create. Currently, I don't use a WordPress post template on this site. However, I have set it up for others who use specific images and signatures that need to be added to the content of every post.

As a WordPress user, you may have noticed that you can insert a more tag to your posts so that only the text before this tag appears on the archive or category pages. By using the more tag, more post entries can appear on each page while still utilizing an introductory paragraph for each post. Then, when a visitor clicks on the more tag, they are sent to the full post where they can continue to read the article. However, the default WordPress more tag simply says (more...). In the following article, I explain how to change the more tag text to a text that is more meaningful like "click here to read on!"

The Ultimate Tag Warrior is an awesome plugin for WordPress that allows a Blog author to add keyword tags to your WordPress posts and pages. UTW is relatively simple to install and use, but contains many advanced features that the user can customize as well. For example, tag clouds (one of the most popular keyword organizing methods) are often used on some of the highest ranking sites. The following tutorial explains how to add a custom tag cloud to WordPress in the footer section.

Looking to remove the WordPress sidebar Bullets? The following tutorial is for those who use the default WordPress theme or a derivative of it and want to remove the sidebar bullets to make for a cleaner looking blog. The bullets normally don't appear if your using the Internet Explorer browser and although some people prefer the bulleted sidebar look, I tend to remove it on all sites I have helped develop.

Removing the WordPress post per page limit: By default, WordPress posts are limited based on the posts_per_page setting. Making many of your older posts incredibly hard to find for both search engines and readers. Like many readers, I hate (pagination) having to read through pages of posts in a category one page at a time. So I decided to find a way to make every post within any given category show up on a single category page eliminating the need to flip through pages. In the following tutorial, I'll explain how this is accomplished.

The following tutorial illustrates how to add Related Post entries to your WordPress blog. This is done in conjunction with the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin. If you aren't already using Ultimate tag warrior, I highly recommend adding it to your plugin list. There are so many awesome advanced features this plugin has to offer other than just displaying plain keyword tags. Anyhow, on with how to add Keyword Related Posts to your WordPress entries.

The following tutorial explains how to make the WordPress search button inline after the search box in your sidebar. If your like me, you'd probably rather have the search button next to the search box rather than under the search box. However, by default, the sidebar widget employs a break between the search form and search button. This is relatively easy to fix as I explain below.

With the recent introduction of Kontera in text link advertising, many WordPress bloggers have been switching to or adding the new service. Kontera is a publishers advertising system based solely on contextually relevant in text keywords that are discovered in real time on a web site. These keywords are then automatically turned into links to the most relevant ads found within the Kontera network of advertisers.

How to add a second sidebar widget for use on separate pages or posts: The following tutorial covers the process of building a second widget compatible sidebar that can be used on specific pages or posts. Using a different WordPress sidebar for pages and posts allows the user to display different sidebar content on a given post or page. In addition, the user could add the duplicate sidebar widgets plugin to add the same widget content to both sidebars.

Getting Highslide Working with Nextgen Gallery for WordPress is not complicated. Highslide is even supported by NextGen Gallery. However, the support in NextGen Gallery will only get the basic functions of Highslide to work. By default, the Highslide control bar navigation and captions do not work when used in conjunction with NextGen Gallery.

Changing the default WordPress admin login username: By default, WordPress installations use the admin username. The admin account provides access to the WordPress backend and all characteristics of the installation. Since this is well known, it can become a security vulnerability. A hacker can easily perform a brute force attack on the account to retrieve the WordPress admin login password.

WordPress 2.1 (codename "Ella") has just been released from WordPress.org, providing many key improvements. This release symbolizes a major landmark in blogging software development. It looks like it might be time for us to do an upgrade. Just a few of the awesome improvements are listed below:

In the following tutorial, I show you how to change the maximum size of an uploaded image in WordPress 2.5 and beyond. By default, when you upload an image in WordPress using the "full size" image option, the image is automatically resized to a maximum width of 500px. This works fine in most cases, for most people. However, if you are using a theme where your post content is utilizing a width larger than 500px, you may want to upload larger images to help maximize the space you have to work with.

How to Enable or Disable WordPress Comments? You might be asking: How do I disable comments on WordPress without a plugin? How can I enable comments for all posts?

I've always enjoyed using WordPress blogging software from the day I first installed it. It's simple to work with, is well structured and contains an easy to navigate admin menu. WordPress includes a default template called Kubrick that contains a great simple base design to work with.

The drama of WordPress word spacing issues: When I first installed WordPress blogging software, I was impressed and thought to myself, this is much better than most of the previous open source blogging software I've used. As I started to become more familiar with WordPress, I began to find some small bugs and quirks. Most of these bugs and quirks were fixed with simple update versions of WordPress and third party plugins.

Moving the Kubrick sidebar to the left side: The default Kubrick template that comes with WordPress is great straight out of the box. However, some people prefer to have their pages and posts laid out differently. One change I've seen many wish to implement is a left sidebar. By default, the sidebar is located on the right side of the page rather than the left. The following tutorial explains how to easily move the sidebar from right to left.

WordPress Adding Banners: This tutorial explains how to add a banner to a single page or set of pages in WordPress. This is particularly useful for those that have the desire to display a specific banner on a per page basis. For example, you might want one page to present a banner but do not want the banner to appear on your whole site. This can easily be accomplished in just a few steps, so let's get started.

I can't recall how many times I have been asked by numerous people how to remove the "Comments are Closed" text from the bottom of WordPress posts. So, I have decided to write a quick tutorial on the subject. The following tutorial explains how to remove the Comment option and Comments are Closed text from being made available on your posts.

Like most WordPress bloggers, you probably like to keep your WordPress up to date. However, when there are major changes done to the WordPress core, some plugins may fail to work as they used to. Such is the case with WordPress 2.3-2.5 series upgrade and Ultimate Tag Warrior. Those that were using Ultimate Tag Warrior, prior to WordPress 2.3 are likely to face some problems when performing a WordPress upgrade. This is mainly due to the fact that WordPress 2.3 and beyond includes it's own tagging structure.

The following tutorial explains how to use .htaccess to redirect underscores _ in a tag url to dashes -. This is very important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) because many search engines including Google do not recognize underscores as spaces between words. They do however, recognize dashes to separate words and tag keyword phrases.

Google AdSense 'Smart Pricing' is believed to be a factor that has a direct and substantial impact on AdSense Publishers Cost Per Click earnings (CPC). Smart Pricing could be considered Google's attempt to give AdWords Advertisers the best value for their investment while helping protect the Advertiser from click fraud and from garbage pages with minimal authority.

The following tutorial explains how to quickly manually upgrade WordPress to a newer version. The process is fairly straightforward and simple and shouldn't take more than a couple of minutes. However, I have frequently caught people including myself become lazy, skipping important steps of the process.

After installing the WordPress e-Commerce shopping cart Plugin, I had to do some modifications to the cart in order to get it to work the way I wanted. One of those modifications has to do with shipping. I think most people would agree that when your doing small business online, you don't want to ship to far reaches of the planet. You probably want to keep your customers localized making it easier to do business without too much risk. In the following tutorial, we will cover the process of setting exactly which Countries you want to ship to and remove the ones you don't. So let's get started.

A TrackBack is a mechanism used for communication between blogs: if a blogger writes a new entry commenting on, or referring to, an entry found at another blog, and both blogging tools support the TrackBack protocol, then the commenting blogger can notify the other blog with a "TrackBack Ping"; the receiving blog will typically display summaries of, and links to, all the commenting entries below the original entry. This allows for conversations spanning several blogs that readers can easily follow. - Information quoted from the WIKI

When creating or editing the content of a WordPress Cascading Style Sheet (CSS), many people neglect to take the time to check their work using multiple browsers, IE. Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Navigator etc. Unlike Internet Explorer and many of the other popular browsers, Firefox is one of the only browsers that properly use some commonly implemented CSS property values. This can propose a problem when viewing your work with multiple browsers.

This tutorial explains how to add Google AdSense ads to your WordPress category and archive listing result pages. Although there are plugins available to do this, it's nice to to have full control over how and where your ads are placed. The process is fairly simple and you should be able to implement the ad placement within just a few minutes.

At some point in time, nearly every WordPress Blogger will experience a broken WordPress blog due to the recent activation of a non compatible plugin. A broken plugin can wreak all sorts of havoc on a WordPress blog including the inability to access the WordPress administration panel. In most cases, when a blog breaks, the fix is fairly simple.

The following tutorial outlines a few WordPress quick fixes for a blogger to try when encountering the almost inevitable incompatible WordPress plugin problem that is causing site errors or limited blog access.

The following article explains how to turn off WordPress trackbacks and pingbacks. In most cases, a WordPress Blog author might decide to disable comments if they are getting an overwhelming amount of spam. However, sometimes the spam can still get through in the form of trackbacks or pingbacks, enabling an abusive user to spam links as comments on the affected blog. Luckily this feature can be easily turned off and or totally eliminated entirely from your WordPress blog in just a few steps.

WordPress is perfect to use as a personal blogging platform. But did you know that it can also be used as a complete Web Site replacement? By using the Static Front Page option built into WordPress version 2.1 and later, one can literally turn a Blog into a Website. In addition, the user can still retain the Blog Post structure.