Modifying the Administrator
The default WordPress installation has a single user called ‘admin’ which has full privileges over the installation and this account allows you to login to your blog and begin work after initial installation.
However, for most bloggers, the name ‘admin’ isn’t really desirable as you would want to promote either yourself as a personal blogger or perhaps some brand or business name.
Seeing as you are the blog owner you obviously also need full privileges so what I tend to do is simply to edit the default admin user and give it the chosen name. You still login with the username of ‘admin’ but posts are published, they come up as having being written by the name you chose.
To edit the ‘admin’ user go to your dashboard, click the ‘users’ link and find the ‘admin’ user. Click on it and all the fields that you can edit will be displayed. You’ll want to change the first and last name and perhaps the email address. In order for the name to show up on blog posts, click the drop down box marked ‘Display name publicly as’ and select the name you entered.
Also, for security purposes change the generated password to something more secure and then save the user.
Configuring Comment Moderation
A good blog will attract comments which unfortunately will include plenty of spam as well as legitimate comments so we’ll need to fiddle around with the settings a little. Go to ‘Settings’ and then ‘Discussion’ and look through the options.
The default settings have changed a bit in recent WordPress releases but here are some of the points to be aware of:
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.
Another setting which is a matter of personal taste is whether or not comments should be published immediately or placed into a moderation queue for later approval. From the users point of view, immediate publication is more user friendly but it can easily be abused by spammers and people who wish to abuse your blog in some way!
WordPress comes installed with the akismet plugin which will trap about 99% of spam so the vast majority of comments that get through will be from legitimate users and I find that most people do leave genuine comments which are no problem so I prefer not to moderate too much. The only thing I find to be an occasional problem is people leaving lots of links in a signature or something so I moderate all comments with 2 or more links.
When this happens you need to manually click the ‘approve’ button for every comment in the moderation queue before it will show up on your blog. This obviously causes a delay for the comment poster so I would advise you to use this feature sparingly.
Caroline Middlebrook has been writing a popular blog since 2007 which earns a 4-figure monthly income. She teaches how to make money blogging and gives away free downloads of her free guides & courses.
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