WP Queen

Simple WordPress Changes That Don’t Need A Plugin

posted in WordPress Plugins, Wordpress How To

I’m often surprised what people will use plugins for when it is quite simple to make the changes without a plugin.

Here’s some examples of what I mean

If you want to change your username and password you don’t need a fancy pants plugin for this.  In fact, if you use a plugin you are just giving hackers another means of access to your password (in the event that you don’t deactivate the plugin after use).

To change your username and password you just need to set up another user.   Go to Users/Add New and fill in your details and assign Administrator privileges to the role like so:

Once you are finished (and you have logged in successfully) go back to your WP Dashboard and go to Users/Authors & Users.  Now you will see that we have two admin users.

You have an easy choice here.  You can either delete the original username or you can just change the role to something else like author or subscriber.

Now, see how simple that was!

Another thing that is really simple is changing the page order.   Say you have created a number of pages for your site like site map, contact, disclaimer etc and they display in your navigation like mine do.  If I want to change the order that they appear in like site map first for instance then I don’t need to install a fancy plugin I can just do this all by myself without tears.

On my test site I have two pages created one called Contact and one called About Me.  Now, if I want to make sure that Contact is the first in the navigation list I just need to change the page order so it shows 1.   To do that I go to Pages/Edit and click Quick Edit

and change the Order from the default 0 to 1 and click Update Page to save the changes.

If I want the same order to appear in my widgetized sidebar then that’s easy as well.  I just move the Pages widget to my sidebar and from the drop down menu choose to display by Page order.

Click Save and it’s done.

Another thing that people often use a plugin for is to exclude pages.  Again, you don’t need a plugin

If the pages you want to exclude are in your sidebar then you will see from the widget above that there is an area to exclude pages.    All you need to do is find your page number to fill in the field.   That’s easy to do as well so don’t worry.  If you mouse over the page title you’ll see the page number at the foot of your browser.  Sometimes that’s a little difficult if you  have lots of add ons and stuff down the bottom (yes I’m guilty) so what I prefer to do is click Edit and look in my browser address line.

See the number on the end?   that’s your page id number so you just need to add this number to the field in the widget.  If you have more than one page to exclude then you just separate them with a comma like so 1, 2, 3

If you have a navigation bar like I do as well as the sidebar you will need to make a little mod to your theme templates.    It’s quite easy but you will need those page ids.  Usually, you will need to go to Appearance/Editor and find the theme file called header.php and have a hunt for some code.

I use a PC and click Ctrl + F to bring up a search box to make looking for the code easier.

Once I have located it I can then exclude the pages that I want to replacing it with the following code.  The code will exclude pages with the id number 2 and 3 remember to find your page ids first before you start hacking away and always take a copy of  your theme file in case you make a little mistake

<ul>
<?php wp_list_pages(‘exclude=2,3′ ); ?>
</ul>

That’s it.  I think a lot of the time it’s easier to make these changes manually then actually look for and install the plugin.

Personally, I only like to use plugins for things that are too complicated or take too long for me to do without them.  Little jobs like this I would prefer to save my plugin space for more exciting stuff.

Enjoy

Related posts:

1. Simple Search & Replace Plugin
2. How to make a clickable WordPress header
3. WordPress Default Theme is Finally Getting Sexier (a little bit)
4. WordPress Plugin Development Tips
5. Convert Your Old Sales Pages To WordPress