Chris K Designs

One of the things that I’ve learned throughout my years of software development is that if you can automate something, do it. Automation, when done correctly, saves time, creates less bugs, and bring consistency. As someone who sets up quite a few WordPress sites, one of the things I’ve come to loath is the installation process, settings updates, and installing plugins. Recently I started keeping a copy of the WordPress files with my most commonly used plugins already in the wp-content folder. This meant I just had to activate them once installation was done. But I wanted to take that a step further.

What if you could have your WordPress installation activate plugins, set your permalink structure, setup your timezone, default your comment settings, and get rid of the ‘Hello World’ and ‘Example Page’ entries?! Yeah, that might save you a few minutes. So here’s the trick.
Continue reading “Creating a custom WordPress Installation with default settings” »

I updated the post about how to create a custom theme for the DigitalNature Mystique theme for WordPess. It’s been updated to reflect new versions of WordPress and the Mystique theme. Let me know in the post comments if you have any other issues with this. Here’s a snapshot of what it looks like.

A Preview of the Login Screen

Visit the original post
Get the Mystique theme

If you have been using WordPress for quite some time, no doubt that you have built up quite a collection of tags and categories. If you’ve ever wanted to clean a little house with your tags, you can do it quick and easy if given access to your MySQL command line interface. The following command will remove all tags that have a post count of “0″ (meaning no posts are using these tags).

DELETE t.*, tx.*
FROM wp_terms t, wp_term_taxonomy tx
WHERE t.term_id = tx.term_id
AND tx.taxonomy = "post_tag"
AND tx.count = "0";

Want to remove any tags that are only being used in 1 post or less? Simple, use the following:

DELETE t.*, tx.*
FROM wp_terms t, wp_term_taxonomy tx
WHERE t.term_id = tx.term_id
AND tx.taxonomy = "post_tag"
AND tx.count < "2";

Now go to your Post Tags management screen and look on in amazement as you now have a manageable number of tags. Keep in mind that this is irreversible, once you run this query...those tags are long gone and will have to be recreated.

You have no idea how hard it was to refrain from using the command ‘sed’ in a totally ridiculous homophoned title. Have you found yourself wanting to change the domain on an established WordPress installation, or even trying to replicate many times over the same exact WordPress database on a different domain? Yeah, me too. I’ve found while doing plug-in development, it helps to have the same database information copied over when I start with a new branch. Luckily, Linux comes to the rescue with the sed command. It’s a 3 step process. Export your source/current database. Search and replace with sed, and then import the database. Here’s a step by step for you.
Continue reading “Change your WordPress domain quickly with Linux, MySQL, and sed” »

Ok, you’ve read this title and thought, “Why would I want to remove the version from WordPress…in fact, what does he even mean!?”. By default, WordPress (since version 2.5+) includes the version of WordPress you are using in the HTML code of your site, and does not have an option to remove it.

If you view the source code of your site after you’ve loaded it up in your favorite browser you’ll see a line like so:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 3.0">

Continue reading “How To: Remove the version from WordPress” »