First, we need to understand what a splog is. Essentially, it is nothing more than a bot that creates “junk” blogs and embeds links to the splogger’s main site, usually for no other reason than to increase its page rank through trackbacks. They usually seek out the wp-signup.php page that is present in every default WPMU installation. One could simply change the name of the file to something like registration.php and make corresponding changes to all of the references to wp-signup.php in all of the themes used. While effective, this was not the best course of action for me, considering all of the themes used on my blogs. Instead, I dug a little deeper and found some interesting info.

When someone comments on your site, cookies with the information the entered are saved to their computers. WordPress makes it easy to access that information. In fact, in your comments.php template they are ready-to-go PHP variables you can spit out anywhere you’d like.

Most database plugins for WordPress offer the option to weekly backup your database and even email it to you but if you have a popular site, you might want to prefer a more frequent backup routine. Imagine how many posts and comments Gawker would lose if they only kept weekly backups and suffered problems the 6th day after their last backup.

There has been a vigorous discussion going on regarding what data WordPress installs send to WordPress.org when doing update checks. Because WordPress (the software) doesn’t know whether a theme or plugin is listed in the WordPress.org repositories, it has to check them all, and let the repository sort it out. Some have expressed concern that private plugins developed for a single client could contain sensitive information in their headers, like contact information for the developer, etc.

WordPress login logo looks nice, but sometimes you may want to change it, for example when building a site for a client. In that case, you can use a plugin, or simply take advantage of this cool hack.

As blogger you should not only backup your database when you upgrade but you should regularly back your data up. But honestly, who visits regularly the options to backup the database.

These navigation links (and their descriptions) are hard-coded into the theme, though, so they’re a little less flexible. For a theme I’m currently working on, I had an idea of creating a navigation like this but using a list of categories instead. The description text will then be pulled from each category’s description, which can be set directly via the Dashboard menu at Posts > Categories, therefore preventing users from having to mess with PHP file:

When you log in to your WordPress blog you are automatically redirected to the Dashboard area – an area displaying various widgets, each containing useful information such as Right Now, Recent Comments and Incoming Links to name a few. What if you wanted to disable some or all of them?

WordPress allows you to add widget areas where ever you want and while we can create custom widgets some times it’s essential to be able to manipulate the arguments of the default ones. This more then being a tutorial is a guide of the filters we can use to manipulate the arguments that these widgets have.

Having trouble creating your wordpress search form and styling it to look good? I have ran into this problem before and it is not the easiest thing to find out how to do just by “googling”, yet it is quite easy.