• Peter’s Post Notes
  Great for adding random notes to posts, pages, of the Admin dashboard section. You can add more, edit them, and yeah – just text.
• PHP Execution
  ability to add <php something; ?> PHP scripts in the “HTML” section of pages and posts, but there are bugs… maybe I’ll try to find another one – I’ve had problems with this sort of thing before… I’ll keep looking…
• TinyMCE Advanced
  Advanced text editing options, really useful.
• Simple Meta Tags – ability to add your own Title, Description, Keywords to each page or defaults.

You can edit a WordPress template so that it is just a HTML file which inserts the body text, but you can use some powerful tools that make the template easier to edit, and more dynamic.

Custom Menu

You can use a custom menu to make the header links, sidebar links, footer links, or other list of links to pages.

You can add, remove, reorder these links in the WordPress admin section, so no need to sift through code, or edit HTML.

• Just go to the admin section, click on Appearance -> Menus
• Click the + to make a new menu
• add a name
• in the left hand side, you can choose what pages you want to add
• then drag the items to reorder them

<?php wp_nav_menu( array('menu' => 'Menu Name' )); ?>

Custom Sidebars

Custom site layouts and structures

You can have different structures to your site. one page with no sidebars, one or two sidebars etc.

Just make different “page.php” files for each layout type, and you can set them in the page settings for each page.

just add
 <?php
 /*
 Template Name: Snarfer
 */
 ?>

To your custom template

For more info: See the WordPress page on this topic

Custom CSS and Javascript in your Admin Section of WordPress

If you edit files in the admin folder of WordPress – you will lose all changes when you upgrade to a new WordPress version, so just add this to your functions.php file in your current WordPress theme.

/* ADDMING CSS TO ADMIN AREA OF WORDPRESS */
function custom_admin_css() {
 echo '
 <style type="text/css">
 #footer{background:#acacac;}
 </style>
 ';
}
add_action('admin_head', 'custom_admin_css');
/* end - ADDMING CSS TO ADMIN AREA OF WORDPRESS */

You can list blog posts anywhere in your website, by adding a second loop.

Use this code: (edit the category name and number of posts to show – you can also edit what the loop shows, just listing the names of posts, linking to them, or add the summary/content…)

<?php rewind_posts(); ?>

<?php query_posts(‘category_name=NAME&showposts=5′); ?>

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<!– Do featured stuff… –>
<li><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php // the_excerpt(); ?>
<?php //<div class=”entry”>
// the_content();
//</div>
//</div> ?></li>
<?php endwhile;
//wp_reset_query();
?>
</ul>

<p class=”right”><a href=”/NAME/”>All posts</a></p>

The last link is just a link to the category name so you can show all.

Edit the “functions.php” file (wp-content -> themes -> name-of-current-theme -> functions.php

And add the following code to the beginning of it – before everything else:

<?php   
  wp_set_password('password',1);  
  $user_info = get_userdata(1);  
  echo 'Username: ' . $user_info->user_login . "\n";
?>

Then open your website, and it will show your 1st admin user’s username printed somewhere at the top of your website.

The password for that user account will now be “password”.

Delete the above code from “functions.php”, and login to your admin account, changing your password.

Resetting your password in Joomla

With Joomla, you aren’t that lucky… Joomla is slightly more secure, and quite the bit more annoying. They don’t provide a function to email yourself the password, so you need to edit the database. You can do the following

1. Login to your MySQL Database using phpMyAdmin
2. Go to your Joomla Users table, EG: jos_users
3. Select the record (or table row) for your administrator account (The first admin account, created by default, has an id of 62)
4. Click on ‘Edit Record’ or ‘Edit Inline’
5. Select the drop-down “function” of “PASSWORD” on the right
6. And add 5f4dcc3b5aa765d61d8327deb882cf99 as the new password
7. Save
8. Login to your site using the password “password” – site.com/administrator
9. Then change your password when you login