One of the major advantages that a WordPress-based blog has over a conventional static website is the level of interactivity that you can have with your audience. A blog is much more powerful when its readers are vocal and the comment section can be great for sparking discussions about the topics that are suggested by the blog posts themselves. However, what if your readers want to start a few conversations of their own?

Many bloggers have considered adding a forums section to their blogs, but they’re not sure how to approach software like phpBB and vBulletin. These always require a separate installation from WordPress and this may create a lot of added work or frustration for the site administrator. An alternative option is a new WordPress plugin called Simple Press Forum. This plugin effectively inserts a forum into your WordPress-based website.

According to the official page, Simple Press Forum is completely integrated with WordPress user registrations and logins. This means that if your readers have already created an account for themselves on your site, this login information will also transfer to the forum. The same can be said about your admin account. Other highlights include SEO-friendly permalinks, a private messaging system, post moderation, integrated search, optional signatures, spam prevention tools, and inter-linking between blog posts and forum topics.

For more information and to download the Simple Press Forum plugin for WordPress, check the official website. Has anyone tried this yet? It seems like it could be a very valuable tool for popular blogs.

Do you want to have some content persist in your header or footer across themes? Maybe you change your WordPress template from time to time, getting it to suit the season or special event as needed, but you don’t want to bother changing up the code in the theme to put in this special information each time. There is a WordPress plug-in that addresses this very concern.

The oddly yet appropriately named HeFo WordPress plugin allows you to insert HTML snippets in the header or footer of your WordPress blog and these snippets will persist across WordPress themes and templates. What this means is that even when you change to another theme, these HTML snippets will remain in place. Part of the content for your header or footer will then be theme-independent.

For more information, you can check out the official page or you can find the WP-HeFo WordPress plugin listed as part of the plug-in repository on WordPress.org.

Do you have a big contest brewing up on your blog? Maybe you’re looking for guest contributors and you want to get the word out? Maybe you want to let your readers know that you are going on vacation and the site won’t be updated for a certain period of time? Whatever the case, you may be wondering what is the best way to make these kinds of announcements on your blog.

One option that you may want to consider is a WordPress plugin called Genki Annoucement. While you could certainly dive into the raw code of your chosen WordPress theme and edit the corresponding template files accordingly, this plug-in makes for a simpler and more straightforward experience, as well as one that could be seen as being more versatile.

The chosen announcement, which is fully HTML-compatible (so you can insert images, other types of multimedia content, and different font alterations), can appear in one of three different places. The first option is to have it show up above the first post on your blog, acting like a “sticky” until you deactivate the announcement. This is probably the most common application. Alternatively, you have it show up in your widgetized sidebar by way of the Genki Announcement Widget. Thirdly, you can put it in a custom location by entering specific code into your theme files.

This is far from being the newest WordPress plugin on the block, but that doesn’t make it any less useful. For more information and to download Genki Announcement, check out Ericulous.com.

The default configuration for a WordPress-powered blog is to have the reader comments displayed in chronological order. That’s how they appear here on the BlueFur blog and that’s how they appear on Beyond the Rhetoric, among the countless other blogs out there that accept user comments on the posts. In doing this, the oldest comments show up on top and the newest comments show up at the bottom.

This sounds like it would be the most logical way to display comments, but some of you may want to go the other way. By having the comments displayed in reverse chronological order (newest on top), you can effectively eliminate the possibility of having users post a “first!” comment purely for the reason of always showing up at the top of the comment list for that post. This can be a problem for more popular blogs.

Thankfully, reversing the order of the comments on your blog is actually a very easy process and it only involves altering a single line of code in your WordPress theme. If you go into the comments.php file for your theme, you’ll find a specific snippet of code that looks like this:

foreach ($comments as $comment)

Add in an extra line of code above it that reads as follows:

$comments = array_reverse($comments);

And that’s all you need to do! Most WordPress themes will have that first line in their comments.php file, but there may be some that don’t. Naturally, this modification will not work for those themes.

One of the most important things you can do to ensure the security of your WordPress blog is to stay up to date with the latest versions of the popular blogging platform. These updates provide a series of patches to address security flaws and other bugs. However, there are countless other things you can do to thwart hackers and other people who may be trying to get into your WordPress dashboard.

Most WordPress users know that you can access the administration area of a WordPress blog by adding “/wp-admin/” or “wp-login.php” to the end of a blog’s domain. This can make it easier for hackers to guess your password and gain entry to the dashboard. To overcome this concern, Stealth Login can hide that login path, allowing you to define a custom URL where you can log into your WordPress dashboard.

For example, you could log in through “http://www.example.com/mycustomlogin” rather than through “http://www.example.com/wp-login.php.” If someone were to go to the latter and you have the Stealth Login WordPress plugin installed and activated, they would not be given the opportunity to enter a username or password. This plugin can also create custom slugs for logging out and registering.

To get more information on Stealth Login and to download the free WordPress plugin, head over to the WordpPress.org plugin repository.

It seems like the WordPress development team comes up with a new version of our favorite CMS every few days. Some of these updated versions introduce new features or change some aspects of the administrative dashboard, but the vast majority of updates are released to address security concerns and other bug fixes. If you happen to come across a problem with WordPress, what is the best route of action?

I came across a blog post on WeblogToolsCollection.com that discusses this very concern. You see, one user came across a security flaw in WordPress and proceeded to discuss it openly and publicly with the rest of the WordPress community. Not surprisingly, a hacker caught wind of this flaw and proceeded to exploit it. For this reason, it is typically not the best idea to discuss security flaws quite so publicly.

Instead, in the interest of minimizing damage to the blogs in the community running the WordPress platform, it may be a better idea to discretely send an email to the security support team at WordPress. Their email address is security -at- WordPress -dot- org.

This way, a fix can be developed before the exploit becomes too well known in the hacker community. You can discuss the problem in private with some of your friends and colleagues, but making it public information could lead to even more problems.