The following are some WordPress tips and tricks to help you adapt or customise some of the more common WordPress features.

Assigning custom sidebars to individual pages–without making any template changes

Ever wondered if you can have different sidebar content on different pages of your site? Although the out-of-the box WordPress wouldn’t let you do this, there are few plugins that can help, all basically using the same mechanism. My favourite is WooSidebar which is part of the free WooDojo bundle. Another popular one I have used is Custom Sidebar.

The procedure for doing this is similar for both plugins:

• Define a  new widget area
• Define which widgetized area this new widget area replaces (e.g footer, primary sidebar etc)
• Define the pages on which to replace the default widgetized area
• Go to Appearance/Widgets and add Widgets to the newly defined widget area.

Changing the category or tag of several posts at once

Ever needed to change a category or a tag of several posts? Have you, just like me, opted in to editing each post individually. Quite a tedious and boring task! For a long time I was not aware of the fact that WordPress does allow bulk editing that can make this task much easier. Here it how it goes:

In the post/page management area (all posts/pages screen) check all the posts/pages you would like to edit;

Click on bulk actions > edit and apply;

A screen similar to the one below will appear with the list of all selected posts/pages on the left.  Check the categories to which you would like to apply the changes, add the tags into the Tags box and then click ‘update’.

Getting rid of unwanted comments quickly

I often see WordPress websites hit with thousands of spam comments. At this point the website owner typically installs an anti-spam plugin such as Akismet or Defensio. But what do you do about the thousands of comments that are still pending? If you use the default WordPress interface it can take a lot of time and be very tedious and laborious.

Instead I use a plugin called WP-Optimize .  Once installed this plugin offers two options to help you clean comments quickly ‘Clean Unapproved comments’ and ‘Clean marked Spam comments’. Check these two and then click the process button. This should do the trick.

I hope you found this article useful. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you need any more tips in regards to WordPress.