Yes, I forgot my password

And guess what? I went to that page where you enter your email or username and receive a link on your email.

Pretty easy, right?

…

NO!

Unfortunately, when you install wordpress, it generates a key for you that will be used to recover your password. Therefore, in the email, you get a link like:
domain.com/blog/wp-recover.php?key=somestringhere.

Here comes the problem: wp includes the “&” when generating these keys (and for some reason it seems to include it everytime I install a blog, lol), but the “&” char is used to separate the request variables sent by GET. That’s why, when you click on that link, you get a “wrong key” error, because if the key is 1234567&9, wordpress will get only 1234567, which is wrong (duuh).

Solution? I have one that I use. I just open phpmyadmin on my server, go to wordpress database in the wp_users table and change that key to something else (of course, “1234″ won’t do as you might get up one day with all your posts deleted ). After I’m finished with that, I do the process again and I’m able to set a new password.

… Pfew

In this short post, I will teach you how to have a static page displayed on your home page instead of the regular: latest 10 posts (or at least 10 is the default number).

By default, wordpress displays your latest posts (latest first). However, this can be changed to show a static page for your home page. To change this setting, go to your settings menu and pick reading from there.

Please note that you must have a static page in order to display it. By default, WordPress creates a static page and puts it on your blog, but some delete it because of the “hello world” content (so did I). If you don’t have any static page on your blog, you won’t even be able to see that setting.

Here we go: on the reading settings page, you’ll notice you can choose between “latest posts” (the number of posts can be changed as well) and a static page. To make your home page static, pick static and choose one of your pages.

That’s it :)

Note: make sure you have a navigation panel or your sidebar includes a link to latest posts or archive or something. Otherwise, your visitors won’t be able to check your posts and will see only your static content.

Hope it helps,

- Peter

I’ve seen this question many times on forums, so I thought it would be a good idea to make a post on how to have your post title appear on your links.

First, what does this mean? If you look in the address bar, you’ll notice that the URL is this one:
“http://www.wordpress-how-to.com/2008/10/14/how-to-make-your-title-appear-in-your-links”. This is an old SEO trick, now implemented in many web applications and yes, wordpress has support for it, just that it isn’t enabled by default.

The files/directories specified by the link don’t exist on your server, this is basically a redirection made by the htaccess file on your server. Therefore, when you hit “/2008/10/14/how-to-make-your-title-appear-in-your-links”, it will query the database for the post with that title and it will take you to index.php?p=somepostid. That’s all it happens in the background.

Let’s get to the point now. It’s very easy to enable this feature on wordpress. To do that, just login to your admin area, hit “Settings” (it’s in the upper right corner for the newer versions), then, from the contextual menu, pick “Permalinks” (or simply, put this at the end of your blog URL to access the page directly: “yourdomain.com/wp-admin/options-permalink.php”).

From there, you pick one of the options, which one you consider to be the best (I’m using the second: day and name) and then click on save.

Please note that your root folder (or blog folder if it’s not located in root) should be writable. If it’s not, wordpress won’t be able to write the htaccess file.

This is it. If you enounter any problems, just let me know via email or reply to this post and I’ll be happy to help you.

- Peter

Hey there!

Although this topic is changing all the time, it’s like a moving target, but I think it would be useful to list here the plugins I consider useful for a wordpress blog. I’ll modify this post in time, but for now, here you go:

1. Monetize WordPress – Boost your CTR and response rate with more than 30%
2. TweetMe for WordPress – A cool viral plugin to help your users spread the word about your website
3. All in one SEO pack – I consider this one the most important in my list. Why? Because it offers you a lot of SEO options (without having to learn html, of course). For instance, you can have your blog title custom for the home page and custom for all your posts. You can add meta keywords and description (which, by default, wordpress doesn’t offer). In short: get it now, you don’t have anything to lose.
4. Google XML Sitemap For WordPress – it builds a xml sitemap with all your posts, links, pages, etc and submits it to google, msn and others. Multiple options offered as well
5. No-follow Free – it removes the no-follow tag from your worpress blog comments. I don’t know what to say about this one .. the no-follow tag somehow prevents automatic link building and prevents spam on your blog. How ? Well .. knowing that by default wordpress does put this nofollow tag on the links and therefore SEs ignore those links, people won’t spam your blog with comments. However, it’s up to you if you want to use it or not.
6. Google Analytics – allows you to add your google tracking code into your blog without having to modify your theme files.
7. WordPress Polls – allows you to add polls to your website, just like the one you see on my blogs sidebar. Once you create a poll, you have to add it as a widget. Contact me or the creator of this plugin if you need any help
8. Social Bookmarks – with it, your visitors will be able to bookmark your posts and share them with their friends

Well … I personally consider these ones important. Depending on your needs, you may have other “top 5″ or “top 10″ lists. I would be happy to get this list bigger and bigger based on your comments, so, if you have other plugins to recomment, be free to do it and I will add them to this list.

Thanks for contributing.

- Peter

Since (I think) I know a lot of things about wordpress, I’d like to share my knowledge with you, but don’t really know where to start from. I already have a free guide written on how to install a wordpress blog from scratch and how to install themes and plugins. I will post that in a future post, but this post is for you. Here you can reply and let me know what would you like to learn, even though that info might already be somewhere on the net, etc.

So if you need to know something about wordpress blogs, just reply to this post and I will search and bring the info here.

Thanks,

- Peter

Hey there

This is the first post I’m adding here to let you all know that I intend to make this blog explain to you all you need to know about the most powerful blogging platform on the planet – WordPress.

Will include info on how to install, what plugins to use, where to get themes from, how to track your visitors, how to have them optin and on and on.

Bare with me because you’ll learn a lot of stuff.

Thanks,

- Peter