If you’re a wordpress power user, you’ll inevitably have some questions about how you can improve your blog or add new features. Here are five tips that will make life easier for people wanting to maximize their use of WordPress.
1. Quickly Find Page/Post ID
One question people often ask is how to find a Page or Post ID when you’re using custom permalinks. Custom permalinks rewrite your URLs to be easier to read and memorable. Finding the ID of a post is not as tricky as it looks. Simply log into to your admin panel and click “Manage” then select either posts or pages. Find the item that you need the ID of and click your post to edit it. In the navigation bar of your browser, you will see a IRL for editing this post. At the very end of this URL you’ll find your post or page ID number!
2. Custom Front Page
Another common problem is people having trouble figuring out how to create a custom front page that doesn’t look exactly like the rest of their blog. This has never been too obvious but it is simple enough to do.
- 1. Open a blank document in a text editor. Then paste the following codes in it:
<?php /* Template Name: YourCustomPageTemplateName */ ?> <html>
- 2. Save the new page template as a .php file. Something like static.php but make sure you do not call it page.php because that file already exists as part of your theme. Then upload it to your hosting account in the root folder of your current WordPress theme (http://yourblog/blog/wp-content/themes/default. Where default is the active theme.).
- 3. Now you can design this page however you wish either in your text editor or in the ‘Design’ tab of WordPress. I usually copy and paste everything I want to keep from the preexisting page.php that I want to keep, leaving out things like the sidebar and footer.
- 4. When you create a new page under ‘Write’ you will notice a new area below the content area called “Page Template”.
Here you will select ‘YourCustomPageTemplateName’. When you publish it, only this page will look like your design for ‘static.php’ or whatever you called your custom page theme.
- 5. To set this as the front page click ‘Options’ then the ‘Reading’ subpanel. Choose the Static Page option, specify your new custom page as the front page. To see this in action click here.
3. Password Protect WordPress
A growing trend is to use WordPress as a CMS to sell premium content. This means the owner may want certain sections of their blog to be free, while the rest is a paid premium. For example http://www.wpdesigner.com/ is a wordpress theme site that offers a free content but only people who subscribe get the premium content. How is this done? You’ll need to password protect wordpress. Here are some options for doing that:
Password Protect by User level – allows you to create member classes that can have different content privileges than other classes. (ex. premium subscribers)
.htaccess Password Generator – a free way to protect your content, this option password protects EVERYTHING
Bravenet – an inexpensive solution that offers protection for sites that it hosts
4. Protect from the ‘Digg Efect’ with HTML
Has Digg brought your site to a grinding halt? Are you sick of waking up to find out your site has been down for hours and you’ve had no idea? WP Super Cache will save your page from the hundreds of visitors per second that Digg can bring by caching pages and serving less server heavy html pages.
5. Stop Hackers
Occasionally you may attract some unwanted attention to your blog from either people jealous of your success or people just looking to cause damage. How can you discourage people from hacking your site? Try the following:
- Protect the Admin Folder – This folder is the door to the rest of your blog so putting up a fortified fence will help prevent attacks.
- Deny Access to Other Folders – Many web hosts by default allow people to browse a folder if there is no default index.html file. Adding a blank index.html file to these folders will add an extra level of protection.
- Remove the WordPress Version – Hackers look for vulnerabilities that they sometimes know exist in specific versions of your CMS, if they can’t figure out what version you’re using it will make it that much harder for them to know which vulnerabilities to exploit. Try this plugin which does exactly that.
5 Responses to “Five WordPress Tips for Power Users”
May 23, 2008
IvyThank you so much for a valuable post. I found the section about password protecting particularly interesting. When I visited the ‘Password Protect by User-level’ plugin site, I found that it cannot be used with any WordPress versions that are 2.1 and above. Apart from this one glitch, all the rest of the tips really useful. Thanks again.
June 18, 2008
Sydney NelsonHey, thanks for the lifesaving tips.
Wow, this is some really cool stuff. I recently had a spam comment even though I have a plugin to prevent it.
So the extra measure of protection couldn’t hurt and setting up the page template is a very helpful tip for me.
By the way, I submitted a Digg story and a Stumble review!
July 19, 2008
Tammy PowellYou just SAVED me like an HOUR of time with this informative post! I was looking all over my WP CMS for the ‘post id’ to use in my ‘sticky’ plugin to then give up, google ‘how to find post id’ and thank you so much for a VERY SIMPLE explanation!
I’ve bookmarked your blog already as this was extremely VALUABLE info for me! Thanks, Tammy
July 20, 2008
JonGos@Tammy Glad it worked out. I admit, it took me a while to figure that one out but it’s always the simple things that get me.
April 21, 2010
JshortThis is a great resource. Thank you a thousand times. I couldn’t find the post id that I needed to do an in line post in a page and I’d resigned myself to having to engage a programmer to make part of my site premium content. I googled post id and got your page. To my surprise I got an answer to the problem I was going to tackle next plus bonus tips to boot. I’ve bookmarked your site and will be visiting often.