Changing the Admin User
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.
However, for most bloggers, the name ‘admin’ isn’t really desirable as you would want to promote either yourself as a personal blogger or perhaps some brand or business name.
Seeing as you are the blog owner you obviously also need full privileges so what I tend to do is simply to edit the default admin user and give it the chosen name. You still login with the username of ‘admin’ but posts are published, they come up as having being written by the name you chose.
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.
Be sure to also change your password to something secure and then click the save button.
Configuring Comment Moderation
Comments are a crucial part of most blogs and as your blog grows and develops it will attract more and more comments - including a healthy dose of spam comments! We need to modify some settings so from your WordPress dashboard click ‘Settings’ and then ‘Discussion’.
The default settings have changed a bit in recent WordPress releases but here are some of the points to be aware of:
You need to ensure that the boxes marked ‘allowed to comment’ and ‘allowed to leave trackbacks’ are switched on. If these are off, nobody can comment on your blog at all!
The next section allows you to modify the email settings. By default the administrator user will be sent an email every time a comment is left but if you have a popular blog with many comments every day this can soon become overwhelming. I turn off the email functionality and make a point of checking 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 earns a 4-figure monthly income. She demonstrates how to make money with blogs and offers free downloads of her free guides & courses.
