WordPress
Enable/disable comments on all pages or posts at once
Have you ever wanted to turn on comments for all your pages at once? Or perhaps managing comments is too much of a pain, so you decide you want to disable comments for all of your WordPress blog posts easily. Change Posts Individually The most obvious way is, when editing a page or post, to scroll down to the “Discussion” section and check or uncheck the “Allow comments” box. Don’t see the “discussion” section on the page/post edit screen? At the top of the screen on the right side there is a “Screen Options” button. Click it and check the box for “Discussion” to make those settings visible. Change a Group...
Read MorebbPress causes white screen on website
If you’ve tried to install bbPress and buddyPress on the same website, possibly experimenting with forum alternatives, you may run into some strange behavior. This can occur even if one of the plugins is deactivated or uninstalled. The strangest I saw as the website being completely blank—a white screen. The admin console worked fine, but the website proper did not, and even though display_errors in php.ini was set to “On,” no error messages were displaying. Just a white screen. If I deactivated the bbPress plugin, the problem disappeared. Apparently bbPress 2.0 can have some conflicts with buddyPress. Uninstalling the plugin isn’t enough; a...
Read MoreExclude a Page From Search
In some themes, you may have special pages or posts that only appear in a particular location in the theme—perhaps a blurb on the home page, for example. You may be surprised to see this page appear when people search the posts of your site! There are two main ways to hide specific posts from searches: you can modify the PHP code for your theme, or use a plugin. Write Code to Remove Pages From Search Results WPMods has an excellent tutorial on excluding posts and pages from search. You can see the full explanation on their site, but I’ll copy and paste the relevant code here for those who are comfortable customizing PHP code. Why hard-code it instead of...
Read MoreWhy are There Spaces In Front of my Post Title?
Have you ever noticed your site title looks like this? ” My Post | My Website” instead of “My Post | My Website” Somewhere in the PHP code of your website (which you can find under Appearance > Editor), you will likely find calls to the wp_title() function. A sample call may look like this: That results in showing the blog title with a separator (the ‘|’ character) to the right of the title… with a space before and after. In this case, the code is assuming that your blog name would come after that. The problem is when you make a call like this: That has no separator character (perhaps the site only shows the post title, or a...
Read MoreLogin Page is a Blank White Screen
What do you do when you try to login to WordPress—perhaps after an upgrade, perhaps after moving a website to another location—but when you try to go to your /wp-admin or /wp-login page all you get is an empty white page? Usually the problem is caused by a plugin. Disable all your plugins at once, and then see if you can login and turn them on one at a time. You can do this by going into FTP and temporarily renaming the plugins folder to something else (renaming it back after you login), or you can go into phpMyAdmin and run the following SQL query: UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = 'a:0:{}' WHERE option_name = 'active_plugins'; Thanks to Perishable...
Read MoreIntroduction to Custom Fields
Custom Fields allow you to specify metadata for a post or page. All this means is that you can specify extra settings in a flexible, but not very intuitive manner. Usually this is used to add customization to a theme or plugin, when the designer is too lazy to add a specialized panel to the page/post screen. If the instructions for a theme or plugin ask you to use a custom field, just do this: Make Sure “Custom Fields” is Visible If you don’t see the “Custom Fields” section when editing a page or post, then go up to the right-hand corner of the screen and click “screen options.” Make sure the checkbox beside “Custom...
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