How to find if a WordPress page has children
A friend called me yesterday* about a list of pages he was trying to set up. He needed pages with children indicated by a ">" after the link. "You'd think there'd be some kind of setting in wp_list_pages", he said, "but if there is, I can't see it." The function we want is get_pages(), which passes the list of pages as an array to PHP to process. You can then test for the existence of... Read more
WordPress upgrade reminders - by email!
There are lots of reasons why people don't keep WordPress up to date. Most excuses revolve around time and busy-ness and forgetting: a few bloggers have the more legitimate cause that they know crucial plugins will break with newer versions than what they're using. And one dear chum gave as her reason for still being on 2.7 the other day, "well, Sue, we're not all as obsessed by our blogs as you... Read more
How to change the WordPress admin user ID
There have (unsurprisingly) been a lot of blog posts written in the last few days about WordPress security and what you can do to keep your blog safe from hackers. I'll be chucking my own twopennorth in shortly, but for now, I want to look at one of the recommendations in more detail: "get rid of the user called 'admin'". This is a pretty sensible piece of advice. On most WP installs, "admin"... Read more
Search and replace for multiple WordPress posts
One feature WordPress lacks is the facility to edit multiple posts at once. If you've changed your URL, for example, you'll be faced with editing dozens or even hundreds of hard-coded image tags in your posts. Moving domains from one host to another often causes WP to render single quotes as “ or â€~, and British pound signs as Á£ - editing all those by hand isn't a task I'd relish... Read more
[Video] How to upgrade WordPress
How to upgrade (from WP 2.7 or higher): it's so quick, you have no... Read more
Excluding categories from the_category()
the_category() is the WordPress template tag which shows the category your post is in. If the post is in multiple categories, it will output them all, linked to the respective archive page. By default, the_category() creates an unordered list (i.e. a vertical list with bullet points); this looks a bit odd with most themes, so you might want to change it to an inline list separated with... Read more
Attacks on old versions of WordPress
Lorelle has news that older versions of WordPress are being attacked. Symptoms include: odd additions to permalinks - "eval" and "base64_decode". Your blog's permalinks will no longer work. a new administrator account, perhaps named Administrator (2), created but not by you. This can happen even if registration is turned off on your blog. If you haven't upgraded, DO IT NOW. As of... Read more
How to move a WordPress blog from one host to another
This post is about moving a self-hosted WordPress blog from one web host to another. If you're wanting to move from WordPress.com to self-hosted WordPress, that's a very much easier process, which will be covered in the next post. Image by Nion My worst every serve move was for a friend who phoned me at 3.30pm to say that her hosting company were being shut down at 5pm: "can you help?!" As... Read more
[Video] How to change the author on a WordPress post
Recent versions of WordPress have hidden the "post author" menu in a place no one seems to be able to find it. Here's how to change the author name on a post. And because blog posts that consist purely of video are really annoying 
here's how to do it. From Admin > Posts, select "edit" for the post you want to change. Scroll almost to the bottom of the page, looking for "Post... Read more
WordPress archives for a single category
I've had a little rash of Google hits for variations on "wp_get_archives for single category" over the last couple of days. I hate to have to tell you this, people-from-Google, but that's the wrong template tag. Let's take a quick look at template tags for creating archives: wp_get_archives() creates a date-based list of archives' pages. By default, they're monthly, but you can add a... Read more
Maybe you know some alternative?
