Perfect WordPress Setup

July 29th, 2010 by Scott Hendison

Core Tweaks Plugin Feature Requests

I believe we have one of the best WordPress setup plugins available, but there’s ALWAYS room for improvement, isn’t there?

If you watch the video to the right, you’ll see why I think it’s the best, because it lets you save at least 20 minutes on every WordPress setup you do, but we’re out of ideas for ways to make it better. Whats left, other than to write your content?

We released our newest version last night, and now I’m stumped… We have nothing left on the feature wishlist, and I can’t think of any way to make it better, or save users more time.

What are we missing? It can’t really be complete, can it?

With over 14,000 downloads, and lots of user feedback, we’ve added several new features with this latest release, and SEO Automatic Core Tweaks plugin users can now:

• Create a personalized privacy page
• Create a contact page
• Add a Google Map to the contact page
• Add privacy, copyright, admin or privacy links in footer
• Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols.
• Enable the Atom Publishing Protocol
• Undo has been added to nearly 100% of the features

All this is added to the one click setup process, so anyone can now save at least a half hour on every WordPress setup. Great. Is it finally finished?

What more could be added in order to create the perfect “one click” WordPress setup?

What you see below, in italics, is a copy of the admin page inside of our free WordPress setup plugin - so what’s left to add?   

The steps and actions taken with this plugin are primarily used for a brand new WP setup, and are based on an employee checklist from Search Commander, Inc.

This plugin is designed to compliment, not replace, either the All in one SEO pack or Headspace plugin, but you should have no other plugins active while running the SEO Automatic Core Tweaks process.

We also recommend that you use the XML sitemaps plugin,  so there are options below to create your blank .xml sitemap for you. To see a short video of how to use this plugin, click here and if you need support, please visit the forum, and ask your question there, so that others may benefit too.

READ ME FIRST:

After running these processes, there will be a couple of new things added to the WordPress admin screen that you’ll find handy.

1. Reorder your static page menu pages and sub pages. Look under Pages > My Page Order on the menu to drag and drop as needed.
2. Exclude any pages you wish from main navigation. Look in the Tools > Page Links menu item and check / uncheck as desired.
3. A new page navigation widget will be added. Look in the widget options for checkbox page selection to include or remove.
4. SEO Automatic RSS Widget – Under Appearance > Widgets you’ll notice that we have enhanced it, allowing you to nofollow the links or to open them in a new window.
5. There will be a static sitemap page automatically added, but there are additional options are under Settings > DDsitemapGen
6. Post Teaser options are available under Settings > Post Teaser so you can raise or lower your displayed word count as desired.
7. If you create contact or privacy pages, future edits will be done in the pages > edit screen as usual.
8. Permalink structure:One of the most important things you’ll want to do is change the default permalink structure. In order for our plug-in to be able to do that for you, the .htaccess file must be writable. To avoid getting an error message, if you cannot change the permissions for .htaccess, then simply UNcheck the “Change Permalinks” option below.

Unchecked Options:
There are many options below that are not checked by default, but may be something you plan to do anyway, so they have been added here for your convenience.

Note that at the very bottom, there are several THEME SPECIFIC changes, which are UNchecked by default. If you plan to use them, the permissions of your theme files must be 766.

Unless otherwise noted, most items may still be edited in their normal WordPress admin section.

Deselect All

• 
  Change default post category name from “uncategorized” to:
  

• 
  Change default blogroll category name from “blogroll” to:

• 
  Turn OFF organization of uploads into month and year-based folders.
• 
  Set the RSS feed to display only a summary.
• 
  Change permalink structure to custom setting:
  

(We’ve left this on by default, so if you cannot make your .htaccess file writable, then simply UNcheck the “Change Permalinks” option below and DO deal with that later. If you do get the error message, there’s no harm done, but your permalinks will not be changed.)

• 
  Add a SiteMap page for the DDSiteMap Generator.
  (Not to be confused with an XML sitemap)
• 
  Create a privacy page with your contact information using text provided by FreePrivacyPolicy.com
  

We recommended that you edit and customize your own with their privacy policy creator.

• 
  Add a Contact Page using the following information:
  * Do not use double quotesName
  
  Company Name
  
  Contact name
  
  Address
  
  , City
  
  state
  
  zip
  Add a Google Map to this address
  Fax
  

  
  Email
  

  Phone
• 
  Delete default “Hello World” post. (Cannot be undone.)
• 
  Delete default comment. (Cannot be undone.)
• 
  Do not allow people to post comments on articles. (May be overridden at post/page level edit screens)
• 
  Set the main blog email to:
  

• 
  Set the admin user’s blog email to:
  

• 
  Add new user:
  Username:
  
  Password:
  
  Email:
  

If you’re using this installation of WordPress as an entire site, and not just a blog, then you need to define which “page” to use as the home page, and which page WP should use to display your blog posts. Change the name of the existing default page, and create your posts page here.

• 
  Change the default page name from \”about\” to:
  

• 
  Set the default page above as the front page.
• 
  Create the page to designate for displaying your blog posts, and name it:
  

• 
  Change the blog description tagline.
  

• 
  Delete all links in blogroll. (Cannot be undone.)
• 
  Enable the Atom Publishing Protocol.
• 
  Enable the WordPress, Movable Type, MetaWeblog and Blogger XML-RPC publishing protocols.
• 
  Add a robots.txt file to your blog root. (Highly Recommended!) (Cannot be undone (aside from manual FTP).)
• Add a blank XML sitemap file:

(Note that this will overwrite any existing sitemap.xml or sitemap.xml.gz files, but you NEED one to use in conjunction with Arne deBrachold’s XML sitemap plugin.)

• 
  Add the Google sitemaps.xml file to your blog root. (Cannot be undone (aside from manual FTP).)
• 
  Add the Google sitemaps.xml.gz file to your blog root. (Cannot be undone (aside from manual FTP).)

• ADD footer information: (This adds through a hook and not through your theme footer.php. If you are not able to control the look you want using the class .scauto-footer in your style.css, just re-run core tweaks, desellect all options, and select the footer undo options.)
• 
  Add the copyright date to the footer.
• 
  Add an admin login to the footer.
• 
  Add the static sitemap link to the footer.
  (This is to be used along with the sitemap page added above.
  If you did not choose that option, this footer link will not function.)
• 
  Add the privacy policy link to the footer.
  (This is to be used along with the privacy page added above.
  If you did not choose that option, this footer link will not function.)

UNDO footer additions:

• 
  Remove the copyright date from the footer.
• 
  Remove admin login from the footer.
• 
  Remove the static sitemap link from the footer.
• 
  Remove the privacy policy link from the footer.

Post Teaser Plugin: (On by default.)

• 
  Turn Post Teaser on.
• 
  Turn Post Teaser off.

Error Reporting: (Off by default.)

• (If turned on, this will force showing ALL errors caused by ALL plugins and theme functions.
  This is best used in debugging situations.)
• 
  Turn error reporting on.
• 
  Turn error reporting off.

Advanced:

• Uploads Folder: You will need to have writable permission in the /wp-content folder for this to work. Otherwise, you will need to manually add the uploads folder so users can upload pictures into posts, etc.
  
  Attempt to create the uploads folder and set the permission to writable.

• H1 Hack: Your theme files must have at least 766 file permission.
  Premium WordPress themes sometimes have programmed “SEO options” that may prevent these items from working properly. Please consult your theme provider for support.
• 
  Want the ability to change your H1 tag regardless of the page name? We’ve added an H1 hack – In order for this to work, replace your title tag in header.php with <title><?php wp_title(''); if (!is_home() && !is_front_page()) { print(" | "); } bloginfo('name'); ?></title> first.
• 
  Change H2 tags to H1
• If selecting the option above changes your font to a size you dislike, the adjustment must be made in your sytlesheet.
  Ex: h1 { font-size: 12px; }
  Or use this option to change back.
• 
  Undo change of H2 tags to H1

If this were inside your WordPress admin screen, you would have a button here to “run” this process.

Pretty cool, huh? What would you add to the perfect plugin?