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Daily Tip: 2 Easy Ways to Remove the “Powered by WordPress” Link

One of the most frequently asked questions for new WordPress users is how to remove the “Powered by WordPress” link. Of course, it’s a nice thing to do to leave it in there, but WordPress is licensed under the GPL, so there’s no need to worry if you want to remove it. Perhaps you don’t want to advertise to the world that your site runs on WordPress. Here are two easy ways to remove that from your site’s footer:

Option 1: Remove it Using CSS

Method one is perhaps the simplest way. Go to your dashboard and find Appearance >> Editor and then select your style.css file. Paste this in there and you’re good to go:

#site-generator {
    display: none;
}

Option 2: Remove it from footer.php

In your WordPress dashboard go to Appearance >> Editor and remove the section that looks like this:

<div id="site-generator">
				<?php do_action( 'twentyten_credits' ); ?>
				<a href="<?php echo esc_url( __('http://wordpress.org/', 'twentyten') ); ?>"
						title="<?php esc_attr_e('Semantic Personal Publishing Platform', 'twentyten'); ?>" rel="generator">
					<?php printf( __('Proudly powered by %s.', 'twentyten'), 'WordPress' ); ?>
				</a>
			</div><!-- #site-generator -->

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New WordPress Stack Exchange Offers More Features Than WordPress.org Forums

A new WordPress Stack Exchange is now in beta. This is a resource that covers the exact same material as WordPress.org’s existing forums. Not familiar with Stack Exchange? It’s a programming Q&A website that synthesizes aspects of wikis, blogs, forums, and Digg/Reddit. You can ask and answer questions for free. Whether you’re a WordPress beginner or a seasoned developer, the new WordPress Stack Exchange is bound to be a valuable resource for you.

Joel Spolsky outlines why the Stack Exchange may be more helpful to you than existing forums at WordPress.org:

  • WordPress.org’s forums don’t have voting, so you have to read through every answer and decide for yourself which one might solve your problem.
  • WordPress.org users don’t have reputation, so there’s no way to see whether you’re getting an answer from someone who knows what they’re talking about.
  • The WordPress.org forums don’t have wiki-style editing, so collaboration is impossible.
  • A WordPress user has to log on to answer a question, so the burden of participation is higher.

The WordPress Stack Exchange offers multiple sorting options.

Right away you will notice how many more options there are for sorting questions: newest, featured, hot, votes, active, unanswered, as well as sort by tags or users. When you’re having trouble articulating your problem but want to see if it’s already been answered, you can select the sorting option that makes the most sense to you.

Badges help to motivate user participation.

As you use WordPress Stack Exchange to ask and answer questions, you can earn badges, which will appear on your user page and in your user card. This helps you to be able to gauge the value of another user’s advice, especially if you are selecting from multiple answers for your problem. It taps into the basic human drive for achievement and is more motivating than you might imagine.

While reviewing the site I found it remarkably easy to surf around to various topics, without feeling like I was digging through pages and pages of text. Features I enjoyed most:

  • Live previews of your response to questions as you type
  • Clean, attractive and cheerful UI makes it feel more like fun than troubleshooting
  • Activity timelines and reputation graphs
  • Usage stats displayed, including the percentage of answered questions
  • Individual user RSS for questions, answers, and comments

This is certainly not a replacement for the WordPress.org forums, nor is it to say that the WordPress.org forums are not helpful. Rather, it’s a comparison to the forums that you already know and many of you have been using for years. If you want to try a new way to find answers to your WordPress problems, head over to the WordPress Stack Exchange and give it a spin. Feel free to leave your thoughts and a personal review here in the comments.

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BuddyPress Tip: How to Remove a Member From a Group Without Banning Him

Ever wanted to remove a member from a group who isn’t really doing anything objectionable? Perhaps he’s just sitting around taking up space? A few users have asked for this in the past on the BuddyPress forums. R-a-y was inspired to create a core patch for this option and you can pick it up and paste it into your functions.php file if you’d like. Otherwise, it will be available in BuddyPress 1.2.6, as John James Jacoby has added it to the core. If you want to test it out first, head over to testbp.org.

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Daily Tip: Automatically Sign Users Out of WordPress or BuddyPress After Inactivity

Want to make sure that your users get logged out after a period of inactivity on your site? Install the new Inactivity Auto Sign Out Plugin. It works with both WordPress and BuddyPress and is composed of a single PHP file. You can easily edit it to change the inactivity time period to suit the needs of your site, as well as a redirect URL for auto log out.

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This Just In: New Google XML Sitemap Plugin Supports WordPress Multisite

A new plugin is on the scene that will be of great interest to any WordPress Multisite owner: Google XML Sitemaps with Multisite Support. It is a modified version of Google XML Sitemaps, written by the same developer. Basically, this plugin creates a sitemap for each of your sites and links it in robots.txt.

Why do I need an XML Sitemap?

This is one of the basics of SEO. A sitemap helps search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. Search engines are better able to crawl through your site with a structured sitemap of where your content leads. This plugin supports all kinds of WordPress-generated pages as well as custom URLs. Whenever you create a new post, it will notify major search engines to come crawl your new content.

Here’s what Google has to say about the importance of having an XML Sitemap:

Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.

Why Sitemaps are Critical for WordPress Sites

Due to the ease of creating and updating content on a WordPress site, you will have regular changes that may not be indexed without a well-structured sitemap.

Google makes it clear what kind of sites will benefit from including an XML sitemap:

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

  • Your site has dynamic content.
  • Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
  • Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
  • Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

This is one free SEO tool that you cannot do without. There’s no excuse now that you can install one single plugin to create sitemaps for your entire network of WordPress sites.

If you’re looking for an all-in-one Sitemaps and complete SEO package for WordPress Multisite, then check out our Sitemaps and SEO – WordPress Multisite Style. Not only does it create sitemaps for all of your sites, but it also adds dynamic keyword and description tags based on post or page content to every post and page on every site. If you’re serious about Multisite SEO, then you don’t want to pass up this all-inclusive tool. It’s specially tailored to put Multisite networks on the grid with Google.

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