Useful WordPress Tips

Here are a handful of tasks that are useful to know how to perform in WordPress, but aren’t directly built into the platform:

• Setting up a contact form
• Searching and replacing across your site
• Duplicating posts and pages
• Enhanced copy paste to include your website URL

Setting Up a Contact Form

The two hard parts about WordPress contact forms are 1) preventing spam and 2) enabling mail services on some WordPress hosts. It’s best not to try to host your own mail server.

I’ve found that combining the Contact Form 7 plugin with the Mailgun for WordPress plugin provides an elegant solution. Mailgun is free for low volume usage.

Searching & Replacing Across Your WordPress Site

Over time, you’ll find situations where it’s helpful to do a global search and replace across your site content. WordPress doesn’t support this directly. You can either use MySQL to search and replace directly or you can use the search and replace plugin. Note: Before you do this, it’s best to backup your site database. 

Cloning or Duplicating Posts and Pages

It’s also quite useful to duplicate posts and pages. I’ve had success with the Duplicate Post WordPress plugin.

Enhanced Copy and Paste with Your Site URL

When readers copy and paste your text, it can be useful to automatically append your site URL or other copyright or contact information to the clipboard. To see an example, visit Dame Magazine and try selecting text, copying and pasting to an email or text editor.

You can do this by manually editing the code in your WordPress installation or using the Tynt service and plugin.

Please feel free to ask questions or post comments to this guide below. You can also reach me on Twitter @reifman or email me directly. [button link=”/publishing-with-wordpress/related-wordpress-links” size=”medium” variation=”red” textColor=”#ffffff” align=”right”]Continue…[/button]