Dave Redfern's Post A Week

Week 05

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8 Features in WordPress you may not know about

5

Previous post urls don’t go to 404

If you decide to rename your post title there is no need to worry about people linking to the old URL because WordPress is clever enough to remember all the previous permalinks you used and redirects the visitor to the lastest URL for that post.  You can try the feature out on this post by clicking here.

Advanced hidden settings page

WordPress has an advanced settings page which lists all of the options stored in the database.  By visiting wp-admin/options.php on your website you’re able to view a secret page which is not linked to on any part of the admin to give you full flexibility to the settings with some extra ones which don’t appear in the standard settings menus.

Auto repair your tables

Built into core WordPress is the ability to auto repair damaged tables on your website.  Before version 2.9 you had to use a plugin for this functionality but now you can simply place the following code into your wp-config.php and WordPress will run a repair for you.

define('WP_ALLOW_REPAIR', true);

Once this has been added you can simply visit http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/maint/repair.php and let the magic begin!  Be aware that this should only be used when required as user authentication is not required for this script to be ran.

Enable Full WYSIWYG editor

By default WordPress uses a limited WYSIWYG editor with the options to bold, italic, strikethough, bullets and alignment.  By pressing the multi coloured button on the far right you can gain access to many more options including the ability to make lines of your post headings, justify text and remove all formatting which is handy when adding in blocks of text from Word documents.

Importing also imports media files

Sometimes when building a WordPress site you may wish to import previous posts from WordPress.com or another content management system.  A nice feature of the import tool is it also imports all of the media files attached to each post so there is no need to worry about remotely hosting images on the previous site.

Deleting plugin folders disables the plugin

While this is less of a feature and more of a fail safe I thought it was worth a mention.  In other content management system deleting a plugin can cause your site to have a plethora of php errors on the front end which is not a pretty sight for visitors, WordPress has solved this.  Whenever a plugin folder is not available and it is activated in the admin area it will be auto disabled to save any errors.

I would not recommend just deleting the plugin folder to unistall because often a a script is ran to remove any additional code or tables added to the database its nice to know that your site is not going to collapse if it happens accidentally.

Changing post revision and auto interval settings

WordPress has the nice feature of auto saving your posts every 60 seconds to ensure you don’t lose any of your work.  It will then store each of these as a revision.  This can be customised using the wp-config.php by adding the following code.

define('AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL', 160 );  // seconds
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false ); // disables post revisions
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 3); // limit post revisions

The above allows you to define intervals for autosave and either disable or limit the number of post revisions WordPress keeps. Handy for keeping the database clean of dozens of revisions of the same post!

Alter or disable trash

WordPress version 2.9 introduced the trash functionality which means instead of deleting the post from the database.  This is a nice feature but unknown to most you can alter the settings to change the period they remain in the database.  By default it is set to 30 days but by adding the following code into your wp-config.php file you can change it or even disable it.

define('EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS', 30 );  // 30 days
define('EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS', 0 );  // zero days (disable trash)

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Posted:
14 April 2010
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