WordPress Setup Plugin

When someone installs WordPress, even with the “one click installation” that some web hosting companies offer, there are still plenty of things requiring completion.

Just like most professionals and companies who routinely “do SEO” for a living,  the experienced WP developers are generally going to follow a sort of “standardized” set of guidelines, rather than keep WordPress installed exactly as it sits “out of the box”.

How do you normally set up WordPress?

Almost always, these are most of the choices that get made:

• Change default post category name from “uncategorized”
• Turn the organization of my uploads into month- and year-based folders off
• Set the Article feed to display summary
• Add a dynamic static site map page
• Change permalinks to custom

If they’re so inclined, and they usually are, there are some other things too,  that most of the true “WordPress experts” would strongly recommend, and they end up having to do them manually after any WP installation:

• Create an uploads folder and set the server permissions
• Delete the default “Hello World” post
• Delete the default sample comment on Hello World
• Set blog commenting permissions
• Set main WP email address
• Set main admin user email address
• Add a new user or admin user

There’s  a whole slew of other WordPress options that really can’t be skipped, especially if you’re using WordPress as a website too, and not just a simple blog, like:

• Change the default WP page name & permalink from /about
• Set that static page as the front page instead of “show posts on front page”
• Create the page for displaying your blog posts, and name it
• Change the default WP tagline “Just another WP blog”
• Delete all the WordPerss default links in “blogroll”
• Change default blogroll name
• Add a robots.txt file to your blog root

Finally, for true control of your WordPress, you need to be able to do two more things, which usually involve going out and finding plugins.

• Choose / Exclude pages from your navigation
• Reorder  the navigation of your menu and submenus

All of these things are pretty easy if you know how and where to make the changes, but they do take time, and you also have to be careful.

If you’re not methodical, then several of these might be overlooked entirely, and that’s why we developed a WordPress setup plugin, which we keep hosted and updated at the WordPress repository.

With 7500 downloads so far, at an average time savings of 20 minutes for even the most seasoned WordPress veteran,  that adds up to  2500 hours of time saved so far.

The plugin is free, and for best results, use it only on a brand new WordPress installation,  or be sure to disable any other plugins before you run the process to avoid conflict, then your other plugins may be safely turned on.

Get it now directly from WordPress

We are *not* replicating the functions of either of our two favorite plugins, All in One SEO and XML sitemap for WordPress and after running our plugin, they’re certainly our recommended next step.

Aside from replicating their functions, what else might you suggest we add to the next version of our setup plugin?  What’s left?

The only thing I can think of would be the ability to upload about a years worth of posts to trickle in…  (shhh, keep that between us for now!)