WordPress Tip of the Day » Podcast Feed

In this video I’m going to show you how to edit the category name and category slug of your WordPress categories. The category slug is what appears in the address bar of your browser when viewing a category archive page (assuming you have permalinks enabled). Consequently, it’s a good idea to make sure that your category names include relevant keywords that you want your site to be associated with. I’ll also show you how to change the default category that new posts are automatically assigned to when writing a new blog post.

If you are trying to edit your theme template files from within the WordPress Dashboard (click “Appearance > Editor” to edit your theme files), but you see a message at the bottom of the editor that says “You need to make this file writable before you can save your changes”, then you’ll need to edit the file permissions for the WordPress theme that you are using. Similarly, if you’d like to use a custom permalink structure, but see a message saying “If your .htaccess file were writable, we could do this automatically, but it isn’t …” then watch this video to learn how to change those file permissions! NOTE: If your theme files and your .htaccess file are already editable from the WordPress Dashboard, then there is no reason to change the file permissions! Also, I recommend that you never change the file permissions to “777″ …

If you frequently recommend books (or other products) from Amazon.com as an affiliate, the Amazon Reloaded plugin for WordPress can make inserting your affiliate links so much easier! No more worrying about copying and pasting embed code from Amazon, or having to figure out why WordPress is stripping out the iframe code when you publish, once the Amazon Reloaded plugin is configured, you can easily insert affiliate links to amazon books or products from directly within the WordPress Dashboard. In this video I’ll show you how to install and configure the plugin and how to insert an affiliate link into the post editor:

If you’d like to create a “Coming Soon” page for your WordPress site, the Maintenance Mode plugin for WordPress can help you do just that. Perhaps you are building a new WordPress site and don’t want visitors to see your work in progress while the site is being built, but you still want to be able to access the WordPress Dashboard and preview the changes as they’re being made. With the Maintenance Mode plugin, you can create a custom landing page for your site that regular visitors will see when they access your URL, but you will still be able to see the actual site when you’re logged in as an admin user. In this video I’ll show you how to install and activate the Maintenance Mode plugin, and how to easily format the HTML code for your coming soon page:

If your WordPress blog has a ton of articles and you’re only displaying 10 articles at a time on each page (based on the settings you are using on the “Settings > Reading … ” page of the WordPress dashboard), the WP PageNavi plugin can help provide your site visitors with a more user friendly way of navigating your blog. In this video, I’ll show you how to install and activate the WP PageNavi plugin:

The Advanced Videobox plugin allows you to customize a playlist of YouTube videos that you can insert into the sidebar of your WordPress blog (or any other widgetized area of your site). The width and height of the video player is easily customized, and you can add up to 20 videos in the playlist. In this video, I’ll show you how to install and customize the advanced videobox plugin:

The WordPress Countdown Plugin allows you to insert a timer that counts down to a specific date & time and automatically redirects the browser to a new URL when the countdown reaches zero. This type of countdown is perfect for WordPress sales pages and limited time offer pages where you only want the URL to be available for a specific amount of time. The countdown timer is based on Universal Time, and you’ll need to insert the following shortcode in the WordPress page where you want the countdown to appear, changing the date and the “window.location” URL (redirect location) to suit your needs: [countdown date="12:00:00 06/07/2010"] This offer ends soon! [counter] [after] [/countdown]

If you use traditional HTML code for embedding an iframe, the WordPress backend filter may actually strip out your code when you switch between Visual and HTML view in the post editor, causing your iframe to not be displayed. However, there is a WordPress plugin called embed iframe that will allow you to use a shortcode to embed an iframe; using the shortcode allows you to switch between Visual and HTML view without the risk of losing your iframe code. This video explains how to install the embed iframe plugin, and how to insert an iframe into a WordPress post or page using the embed iframe shortcode.

If you would like to offer your visitors an easy way to receive your latest blog content automatically via e-mail, and you don’t want to use Feedburner to deliver the e-mail, one alternative is to setup a Blog Broadcast through AWeber. The main benefit of using AWeber to send out your latest blog content (instead of Feedburner) is that you have complete control over your list, and once you’ve captured a person’s e-mail address through AWeber, you can send that person an e-mail whenever you like. Additionally, AWeber offers you the ability to customize your e-mail template and to control when the e-mail actually gets sent.

The Follow Me plugin allows you to display links to all your social media profiles in one, easy-to-access button or window. In this video, I’ll show you how to install and activate the Follow Me plugin, as well as how to configure the settings to include links to all of your social media profiles.