Realising Designs web design Canterbury Kent, Canterbury based web designer Kent, Hosting, Domain names, Graphic Designer, Illustrator and Sketch artist.

We have just developed a small ‘quick and easy’ WordPress Thesaurus Plugin, which gives a editor menu button to fetch synonyms on the fly. If it would be handy to you, then drop us an email and we can share the development files.

WordPress Thesaurus Plugin

If you are new to WordPress or would like some tips on some things you might want to do or think about next, then read on. For our customers, we will have taken care of some of the points for you, which are marked.

1. Change the Admin password (COMPLETED)

During the install of WordPress you are issued a generated password, which if you haven’t changed yet you may wish to in case you lose the welcome email and block yourself from the admin section. Remember to make your password stronger with lower and upper case letters, numbers and allowed symbols.

2. Activate the Akismet plugin

Your standard WordPress install comes with a dormant plugin named Akismet, which is great in the fight against spam and will help protect you. It also gives you statistics on its success, so you can marvel at the number of comments you no longer have to mark as spam.

1. Go to the Plugins page in the WP admin area and activate the Akismet plugin
2. To complete the Akismet activation you will need an API key. You can get this by registering on WordPress.com, then viewing your profile.
3. Now go to Plugins > Akismet Configuration, and paste in your key.

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Interesting hour long video from Blogworld Expo 2009 with Timothy Sykes. Covers lots of great ideas and things to consider for your own membership site venture.

If WordPress keeps asking you for your FTP details, you can add them with the following code to your ‘wp-config.php’ file:

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/** FTP connetcion details. */
define('FTP_HOST', 'add_your_ftp_host_here');
define('FTP_USER', 'add_your_ftp_username_here');
define('FTP_PASS', 'add_your_ftp_password_here');

Anyone on a Zeus web server will know that anything ‘Htaccess related’ is going to cause you a headache.  After scouring the WordPress MU (or Multi-user) forums, I found lots of answered threads on exactly that.  With some blood, sweat and tears I now have a working rewrite.script that does take care of most elements required.

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The article section of our site has been undergoing lots of updates recently, including the addition of “Facebook Connect”, allowing you to login and comment via your Facebook login details.  You can try it out with the “Connect” button on the sidebar and above the comments in each post.

We have also now added a Facebook page for Realising Designs, which you can reach from the Facebook icon in the sidebar or here.

If you are looking to connect your WordPress blog to Facebook, here are three useful Plugin links for you:

1. WP-FBConnect plugin, by Facebook
2. Community Facebook Connect Plugin, by Jesse Stay
3. WordPress plugin, by Sociable (some parts of the site are in Spanish)

It was quite tricky in places, but we are now up and running with option 1, the plugin by Facebook.

We certainly do and think the new version is very good indeed and bow (though slightly shocked) to the dedication of this WordPress fan. Click to view the originals on TwitPic.com.

I have since been looking at the rewrite for WordPress and also to use in my own custom built sites for search engine friendly URL’s. Again I found very little on the web, but currently have a working model. The rewrite script passes the URL into a variable ‘q’. So to get it out again I simply passed ‘q’ into an array with the following PHP: (more…)