Power Of Press Tools, Vol. #1

WordPress is a very powerful platform, and it allows you to customize and change many things. Not everything is accessible directly from standard WordPress settings panels, or from the wp-config and settings files. Many options are hidden, available through hacks and very poorly documented. So what you can do then?

There are two ways you can make changes to these ‘advanced’ options. One is using different smaller plugins for specific settings or hacks, or adding the pieces of code in you theme files. The second method can be painful if you update your theme often, and code you added can be deleted. And adding the same code over and over again is not a good solution. Adding 10 or more plugins for simple things is also not good because many plugins will use a more memory. And that’s where GD Press Tools comes. This plugin includes wide range of options and tools to help you tweak WordPress or perform some actions that you can’t access directly. This is first post in the series to describe what GD Press Tools can do.

Dashboard Widget

WP Dashboard

GD Press Tools adds a widget on the WordPress dashboard with some basic operations and info on number of revisions and database overhead with options to delete them. This widget also shows status of visits tracking feature (more in the next post) and direct access to some of the plugins panels.

Plugins front page & Enviroment info

First panel you see, contains some general information. On one side you have server, PHP and mySQL status, and on the other you have plugin related links and information. This panel shows full PHP settings on your server, all PHP constants available and detailed mySQL information and settings.

Administration Tools

Administration

This panel contains several interesting tools. First one allows you to change your username. This is very useful because from security standpoint is a good idea not to use admin as the username. So, here you can simply change it into anything you want. Much easier than to create new administrator account and to delete old admin user. Once you change the username, you will be logged out and you can use new username to log back in.

Various RSS Feeds are cached by the WordPress. But, sometimes you might need to delete them. And you now have option to do just that. Reset Widgets will remove all widgets from all sidebars you might set. This is useful if  you switch themes with different number of sidebars, causing some of the widgets to be lost.

Folder Protection tool will add index.php file into sensitive folders like wp-content, plugins or themes if the file is not already there to prevent displaying folder listing on most servers.

Next post will introduce Posts, Meta tag and Database tools.