Changing the Administrator

When WordPress is first installed it comes pre-loaded with a default user called ‘admin’ which has a generated password which is emailed to you. This account has full user privileges and allows you to login for the first time.

Generally speaking, most bloggers will want to promote themselves as a personality as well as the blog itself and therefore you want your own name to be used on your blog.

Of course you need to use an account that has full privileges but you also want the account to have your chosen name. I achieve this aim simply by editing the ‘admin’ user. All the rights are the same but I just change the name associated with the account.

From your WordPress dashboard, click on the ‘users’ link and find the ‘admin’ username. From here you can edit various details such as the first and last name, the email address and some other fields. Type in the chosen name but for it to be shown on posts you will also need to click on the drop down box entitled ‘Display name publicly as’ and select the new name you entered.

Lastly, be sure to change the password to one of your choosing for the administrator user.

Setting up Comment Moderation

A good blog will attract comments which unfortunately will include plenty of spam as well as legitimate comments so we’ll need to fiddle around with the settings a little. Go to ‘Settings’ and then ‘Discussion’ and look through the options.

Recent WordPress releases have changed this section a little but it should still basically be the same. Take a look at the following options:

There are two checkboxes that specify whether users are allowed to comment and allowed to leave trackbacks. Both of these boxes should be checked or you will not be allowing any comments at all!

You can alter the email settings here. This is largely a matter of preference. By default WordPress will send the administrator an email when a new comment is left but that can soon become overwhelming if your blog becomes popular. I turn this off and make a point of checking my comments on a daily basis.

Another decision to be made is whether or not to allow comments to be immediately published or have them sit in a moderation queue waiting for your manual approval. Personally, I like to allow comments to be published as this is more satisfying for the reader but it can be easily abused by spammers or people who leave abusive comments of some kind. Use your discretion here.

In the main, real people leave nice comments on my blogs so I try not to moderate too much. I use the akismet plugin to trap about 99.9% of spam so very little gets through. However, one thing I dislike is when people start dropping an excessive number of links into their comments so I chose the option to moderate all comments with more than 2 links.

Any comment that is moderated goes into a moderation queue. You will need to manually click the ‘approve’ button for each one before it will be published and visible on the blog.

Caroline Middlebrook has been writing a popular blog since 2007 which brings in 4-figures a month. She shows you how to make money blogging and offers free downloads of her free guides & courses.

Tags: Blogging