The following is a summary of some of our favorite WordPress tips, shortcuts and FAQs.
You do need to have some working knowledge of PHP in order to implement some of these tips. If you are not sure of what you are doing, either have an experienced PHP programmer make the changes, or keep an original copy of any script that you change, just in case you make a mistake and screw up your blog.
Some of the tips require changes to theme scripts and there are many different versions of various theme. If you are not a skilled PHP programmer, got for the plugin options whenever they are available.
These tips apply to the more current versions of WordPress. Many function names changed with version 2.6.1 and the entire administration interface changed with version 2.7. If you are using an older version of WordPress, you need to upgrade it as soon as possible. Newer versions have closed numerous security holes that hackers were using to exploit WordPress blogs.
How to Disable / Turn Off Post Revisions
Post Revision logging was added to WordPress 2.6 and above. It saves multiple revised copies of WordPress posts. Post Revisions is useful if you have multiple people editing your blogs, of if you accidentally delete an important block of text and want to restore it. But that probably is really useful for less than 1% of the WordPress blogs. If you need this degree of protection, then it can be useful and you should leave it turned on. But if you make a lot of revisions, the log file can build up quickly. To disable Post Revision logging, simply add the following line to the wp-config.php file.
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);
How to Display the Most Recent Posts
There are several plugins that allow you to display links to the most recent posts in your blog. However, displaying the most recent posts does not require any type of programing genius, because the function to do so is built into WordPress. Just use the following code snippet in any WordPress theme script.
<h2>Recent Articles</h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_get_archives('type=postbypost&limit=10'); ?>
</ul>
You can change limit= to any number of posts that you wish to display.
A good place to use this snippet of code is on the Error 404 (Page Not Found) page in your theme. That is named 404.php.