WordPress Tips

A well-known tactic for SEO called “interlinking” is when you link to your own posts. In WordPress, pingbacks are the equivalent of interlinking, and are automatically enabled by default. This can start to get annoying after a while when you are referencing other blog posts often… WordPress will automatically create a new comment about the pingback of that post. These pingback comments will appear in the comments section of your posts, and can start clogging up your comment list with something that looks like spam to other potential commenters.

To disable self-pingbacks from your own website, simply add the following lines of code to your functions.php file:

add_action('pre_ping', 'disable_self_ping');
function disable_self_ping(&$links) {
    foreach ($links as $l => $link)
        if (0 === strpos($link, get_option('home')))
            unset($links[$l]);
}

Gravatar is a great service by Automattic, the folks behind WordPress. In Gravatar, you designate your online profile picture one the one website. Whenever you sign in with this address on another website, it can display your universal Gravatar image.

In the default WordPress Comment system, each comment will be displayed alongside an image from the Gravatar service. If the user has not signed up with the service before or is unknown, then the WordPress page will display a random image. If you want to customize what this random image is, all you need to do is add the following lines of code to your functions.php file:

add_filter('avatar_defaults', 'add_custom_gravatar');
function add_custom_gravatar($avatar_defaults) {

    $myavatar = get_bloginfo('template_directory') . '/images/custom-gravatar.png';
    $avatar_defaults[$myavatar] = "Custom Gravatar";
    return $avatar_defaults;
}

In the above example, the ‘custom-gravatar.png’ image would be located inside the Theme’s images folder: /yourtheme/images/custom-gravatar.png

When creating your Custom Avatar image, the dimensions should be: 80px x 80px square.

Threaded Comments are a great way to visually show direct replies to comments. When a person replies to a comment already on your site, the reply will display indented underneath the original comment. To enable Threaded Comments in your theme, simply add the following lines to your functions.php file:

add_action('get_header', 'enable_threaded_comments');
function enable_threaded_comments() {
    if (!is_admin()) {
        if (is_singular() && comments_open() && (get_option('thread_comments') == 1))
            wp_enqueue_script('comment-reply');
    }
}

Now you will be able to see Threaded Comments wherever comments are shown on your theme.

In WordPress, you can use shortcodes in the content of your pages and posts. Unfortunately, when you attempt to use shortcodes in Widgets, it won’t work properly — the WordPress default behavior is to output the text of the shortcode, instead of processing it:

[my-shortcode]

There is a way to enable shortcodes in widgets, comments, and excerpts in WordPress, by using the “do_shortcode” function. Add the following code to your functions.php file:

// ENABLE SHORTCODES IN WIDGETS //
add_filter('widget_text', 'do_shortcode');

// SHORTCODES IN COMMENTS //
add_filter( 'comment_text', 'do_shortcode' );

// SHORTCODES IN EXCERPTS //
add_filter( 'the_excerpt', 'do_shortcode');

Now, when you go to use the shortcode, it will be processed on the page as expected.