Blog Administration in WordPress- writedeal.com

Oct 31st 09 Posted by Caroline Middlebrook in Blogging

Blog Administration in WordPress

Modifying the Administrator

By default when you first create a WordPress installation a single user is created for you called admin so that you can login. This user has full privileges for the site but it has the name of admin.

However if you create posts whilst logged in as the admin user they will show up with ‘admin’ as the author and this is undesirable if you wish to promote a personal or business brand with your blog.

Of course you need to use an account that has full privileges but you also want the account to have your chosen name. I achieve this aim simply by editing the ‘admin’ user. All the rights are the same but I just change the name associated with the account.

From your WordPress dashboard, click on the ‘users’ link and find the ‘admin’ username. From here you can edit various details such as the first and last name, the email address and some other fields. Type in the chosen name but for it to be shown on posts you will also need to click on the drop down box entitled ‘Display name publicly as’ and select the new name you entered.

Lastly, be sure to change the password to one of your choosing for the administrator user.

Enabling Comment Moderation

Comments are a crucial part of most blogs and as your blog grows and develops it will attract more and more comments – including a healthy dose of spam comments! We need to modify some settings so from your WordPress dashboard click ‘Settings’ and then ‘Discussion’.

Recent WordPress releases have changed this section a little but it should still basically be the same. Take a look at the following options:

You need to ensure that the boxes marked ‘allowed to comment’ and ‘allowed to leave trackbacks’ are switched on. If these are off, nobody can comment on your blog at all!

The next section allows you to modify the email settings. By default the administrator user will be sent an email every time a comment is left but if you have a popular blog with many comments every day this can soon become overwhelming. I turn off the email functionality and make a point of checking comments on a daily basis.

By default, when somebody leaves a comment it is published immediately and of course that can be good or bad depending on your point of view. If somebody posts something abusive or spammy then you might want to know about it beforehand and this is largely dependent on the topic of your blog.

In the main, real people leave nice comments on my blogs so I try not to moderate too much. I use the akismet plugin to trap about 99.9% of spam so very little gets through. However, one thing I dislike is when people start dropping an excessive number of links into their comments so I chose the option to moderate all comments with more than 2 links.

Any comment that is moderated goes into a moderation queue. You will need to manually click the ‘approve’ button for each one before it will be published and visible on the blog.

Caroline Middlebrook has written a popular blog since September 2007 which brings in 4-figures a month. She demonstrates how to make money with blogs and gives away free downloads of her free guides & courses.