Category Archives: Tutorials

Tip for Plugin Developers: Inline Changelogs

Recently, the Dev4Press and Weblog Tools Collection blogs made posts about integrating plugin changelogs into the Plugins dashboard. This functionality was something I was already doing in the SEO Ultimate plugin, so I thought I’d share my technique for doing this. (My method is different because it’s simpler and it integrates directly into WordPress’s update [...] Read more »

How to Find and Fix 404 Errors

If you’ve changed post slugs, taxonomy slugs, or permalink structures, you likely created 404 pages (page-not-found URLs) along the way.
These 404 pages certainly aren’t helpful for visitors who stumble across them and can increase your bounce rate. It can be a particular problem if search engines, pingbacks, and/or internal and external links are sending traffic [...] Read more »

How to Backup Your WordPress Theme

If you’re about to make a modification to your theme files that you aren’t sure about, it’s a good idea to backup your theme, especially if your theme is custom-made (i.e. you can’t just re-download it if something goes wrong), or if you have many other theme modifications you want to preserve.
Here are two ways [...] Read more »

How to Put Blog Posts in Their Own Subdirectory

Cool WordPress-as-a-CMS tip: If your WordPress-powered site includes a blog as a component, rather than the main function, you can opt to put blog posts and archives (category/tag/date/author) into their own subdirectory (such as “blog”). Read more »

How to Create Spaced Lists in WordPress Posts

Say you have a list like this:

Item A
Item B
Item C

…And you want it to look like this:

Item A

Item B

Item C

When you have lists that contain a lot of text, spacing out the items can improve readability. Read more »

How to Optimize Your WordPress Database Tables

As time goes on, all the database operations performed on your WordPress tables (which are what store your blog posts and other data) will create what’s called “overhead.” To keep your database running smoothly, you can get rid of this overhead by “optimizing” your tables (similar to defragmenting your hard drive).
Here are two ways to [...] Read more »

How to Integrate Feedburner into WordPress

Feedburner is a free, Google-owned service that provides great feed statistics and services to bloggers and other feed publishers.
Here’s how to integrate Feedburner with a self-hosted WordPress blog: Read more »

Enable Email Subscription with Feedburner

Not all visitors to your WordPress blog will be familiar with RSS feeds or how they work, while some other visitors just don’t want to mess with using a feed reader. RSS isn’t the only push-delivery method out there: email subscription is another great service to offer to your visitors. Read more »

The Difference Between Trackbacks and Pingbacks

Ever wondered what the difference is between a trackback and a pingback? They both let you know when someone else has blogged about one of your posts, and the terms seem to be used interchangeably at times — so what’s the deal?
The WordPress Codex’s Introduction to Blogging article has a good explanation: Read more »

How to Add Content to Your New WordPress Blog

This tutorial is a beginners’ guide to adding three major types of content to your WordPress blog: Posts, Pages, and Widgets. We’ll look at each one in detail. (If you don’t have a WordPress blog but would like help setting up one, check out my WordPress installation services.)
Before you start adding content, you’ll need to [...] Read more »