When you run a WordPress site, it’s inevitable that spam comments will find their way into your blog. Plugins like Akismet do a good job at weeding out the spam, separating them from the normal comments.

If you login to WordPress to find that your site has accumulated thousands of spam comments, the first thing you may think of doing is to hit that “Empty Spam” button. This is useful for clearing spam when the number is smaller. When you have thousands of spam, clicking this button can take a long time, and even cause a timeout on the server.

There’s a far quicker way to clear the spam, via this simple SQL command in phpMyAdmin:

DELETE FROM wp_comments WHERE comment_approved = "spam";
DELETE FROM wp_commentmeta WHERE meta_key LIKE "akismet_%";

And voila! The spam gets cleared out in seconds.

After manually clearing the spam in the database, you may also notice an overhead in the wp_comment and wp_commentmeta tables. You can optimise these 2 tables like this:

OPTIMIZE TABLE wp_comments;
OPTIMIZE TABLE wp_commentmeta;

The post How to Quickly Clear Thousands of WordPress Spam Comments appeared first on Sparklette Studio.

WordPress offers the very powerful Multisite Network feature, which makes it possible to run multiple websites on one single WordPress installation. But there may come a point in time when you need to move a website out from a network to its own standalone site, for instance, when migrating a networked site to a different server. Some people may be put off by this process as it seems impossible to change the configuration. I had to do this recently, and successfully migrated a site out of the network onto its own standalone WordPress installation with its own database.

The process is a technical one, but not that complex. Just remember to backup your database so that you can easily restore it if something goes wrong. Here are the steps I took.

Moving a WordPress site from Multisite Network to Standalone Installation

On the old server/database:

1. In phpMyAdmin (or whichever SQL client you are using), export all tables used by the site as an SQL file. Minimally this should comprise the following:
   – Tables with the prefix of wp_#_* (where # is the number corresponding to the site you are moving). If your site is housed in tables wp_2_*, you should be exporting these tables only.
   – wp_users
   – wp_usermeta
2. Open the exported SQL file in a text editor.
3. Find and replace all instances of wp_x_ with wp_ .
4. Find and replace all instances of /files/ with /wp-content/uploads/.
5. Save the file. Your edited SQL file now has the necessary tables for a standalone WordPress site.
6. In a FTP client, download all the Media files that have been uploaded to the site. These files reside in the folder wp-content/blogs.dir/#/files (where # is the number corresponding to the site you are moving).

You should now have the edited SQL file and the Media files. We will need to move these to the new server.

On the new server/database:

1. Run a fresh installation of WordPress. You should have a brand new, working WordPress site with the “Hello World” blog post.
2. In phpMyAdmin, import the SQL file you have earlier edited. This will import all the WordPress content from your previous site.
3. Run this SQL query:

   UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, '/files/', '/wp-content/uploads/');

4. If you have changed your URL, run this SQL query:

   UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, 'http://olddomain.com', 'http://newdomain.com');

5. Browse the wp_options table.
6. Under the field option_name, scroll down and look for upload_path. Change the option_value from wp-content/blogs.dir/#/files to wp-content/uploads.
7. Under the field option_name, scroll down and look for fileupload_url. Change the option_value from http://olddomain.com/files to http://newdomain.com/wp-content/uploads.
8. If you have changed your URL, under the field option_name, scroll down and look for siteurl. Change the option_value from your old URL to the new URL.
9. In a FTP client, upload all the Media files to wp-content/uploads folder.

You should now have your site running on its own WordPress installation, with all the content and files from the formerly networked site.

While these steps are taken to move a site from server to server, they will similarly work for moving a site from one database to another within the same server.

The post How to Move a Website from a WordPress Multisite Network to Its Own Standalone Site appeared first on Sparklette Studio.

For blogs that see high traffic and engagement, what is the best way to showcase this activity to your users? One popular way is to display the total number of comments for each post.

Another way is through social proof, by showing the number of times each post has been shared. Mashable does it for all their stories, and boy do they have many Facebook and Twitter shares. Not only is this a great way to “show off” your site’s engagement, it’s also useful for your readers to be able to tell at one glance which of your posts are the most popular.

We can do the same thing as Mashable by leveraging on SharedCount’s technology, which counts the number of times a URL has been posted/shared/liked on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

Display Total Number of Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus Shares

To do this, simply add the following function to your theme functions.php file, after the opening <?php tag.

function sparklette_social_shares() {
    $url = get_permalink( $post_id ); 
    $json = file_get_contents("http://api.sharedcount.com/?url=" . rawurlencode($url));
    $counts = json_decode($json, true);
    $totalcounts= $counts["Twitter"] + $counts["Facebook"]["total_count"] + $counts["GooglePlusOne"];
    echo $totalcounts . " shares";
}

Then call the function wherever you would like to display the number, for instance, in The Loop or the single.php file, like this:

<?php sparklette_social_shares(); ?>

The post How to Display Total Number of Social Shares for Each WordPress Post appeared first on Sparklette Studio.

In WordPress RSS feeds, we have the option to display either Full Text or Summary. This can be changed in WordPress Admin > Settings > Reading page.

As the name suggests, Full Text displays the posts in entirety, whereas Summary displays a text excerpt for each post in your RSS feed. While functional, the latter is not exactly the most elegant looking.

To beautify the Summary feed a little, I like to display the post’s Featured Image just above each excerpt after the title. To see an example, view http://sparklette.net/feed in your RSS feed reader.

Add the Post Featured Image to your WordPress RSS feed

To do this, simply add the following function to your theme functions.php file, after the opening <?php tag.

function sparklette_rss_thumb($content) {
	global $wp_query;
	$postid = $wp_query->post->ID;

	if (has_post_thumbnail($postid)) {
		$image = wp_get_attachment_image_src( get_post_thumbnail_id( $postid ), 'large' );
		$thumb = $image[0];
	} elseif (get_post_meta($postid, 'thumb', true)) $thumb = get_post_meta($postid, 'thumb', true);
	else {
		$output = preg_match_all('/<img.+src=[\'"]([^\'"]+)[\'"].*>/i', $wp_query->post->post_content, $matches);
		$thumb = $matches [1] [0];
	}

	if(is_feed()) {
		if($thumb !== '') {
		$content = '<img src="' . $thumb . '" /><br /><br />' . $content;
		}
	else {
		$content = $content;
		}
	}
	return $content;
}
add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'sparklette_rss_thumb');
add_filter('the_content', 'sparklette_rss_thumb');

The post How to Add Featured Images To Your WordPress RSS Feed Excerpts appeared first on Sparklette Studio.

For instance, a frequently mentioned company name or website URL has changed and you need to update your posts to reflect the new name or URL. For most people, the obvious thing to do would be to log in to WordPress admin, and manually edit the posts one by one. But what if you have dozens of posts to edit? Thankfully there’s a much quicker way to do this that will only take seconds. The answer to this is the REPLACE() function in mySQL.

In phpMyAdmin (or whichever SQL client you use), run the SQL query:

UPDATE table_name SET field_name = REPLACE(field_name, 'Old string', 'New string');

For instance, if I have recently migrated a site from olddomain.com to newdomain.com (as mentioned in a previous tutorial), there will be several times that olddomain.com was mentioned in the posts that would all need to be changed to newdomain.com. Here’s the SQL query to use:

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content, 'olddomain.com', 'newdomain.com');

This can also be done to remove texts, by simply making the second parameter an empty string, like this:

UPDATE table_name SET field_name = REPLACE(field_name, 'Text to remove', '');

Few things to note:

• The strings are case-sensitive.
• This works for multiple lines too!

The REPLACE() function is a very powerful one. Hence always ALWAYS remember to backup your database before making any such changes.

The post How to Quickly Find and Replace Multiple Instances of Text In WordPress appeared first on Sparklette Studio.

A theme that supports Child Themes is made up of 2 folders: the parent theme folder and the child theme folder (with the suffix -child). The child theme inherits the styles, layout and functionality of the parent theme.

To make any coding changes to the theme, here’s the way to do it.

1. Copy over the template file, for eg. single.php, from the parent theme folder into the child theme folder.
2. Make changes to the copy of the file in the child theme. This file will override the equivalent file in the parent theme directory when your site loads.

The only exceptions will be for the files functions.php and style.css, for which you should simply add on your own functions and classes/IDs without copying the original files over.

The post How to Work with WordPress Child Themes appeared first on Sparklette Studio.

This Christmas, they sent us a handwritten note to thank us for the work done. It feels good to know that your work has been appreciated!

Happy holidays to everyone at SCMP. Thanks for being such a wonderful client!

A sampling of the artwork we adapted:

The post Always good to hear from a happy customer… appeared first on Sparklette Studio.

One feature that is hidden by default is the option to create menu links that open in new windows/tabs.

If you are looking for a way to open links in new windows in the WordPress Menus editor, here’s how.

1. In WordPress, go to Appearance > Menus (the address bar should look like this …/wp-admin/nav-menus.php).
2. In the top right-hand corner of the screen, click on Screen Options. A grey panel will slide down.
3. Under Show advanced menu properties, check the box next to Link Target.
4. Try editing any link in your menu. You should now see the new checkbox Open link in a new window/tab.

This hidden option may be frequently used, but for reasons unknown, is not easily accessible by default. The Screen Options also displays other useful functionalities, such as the option to include CSS classes for each link.

The post How to Open Links in New Windows in WordPress Menus Editor appeared first on Sparklette Studio.

This is one reason why some of us prefer to keep plugin overhead to a minimum, and find alternative solutions that we have better control over where possible.

Do you use many plugins? How many plugins are currently active on your WordPress site? Take the poll below and feel free to share your thoughts on plugin use.

[poll id=”2″]

Recommended for you

Here are a few tutorials on how some commonly used WordPress plugins can be easily replaced by adding new functions to your theme:

• How to Add WordPress Pagination without a Plugin [Enhanced]
• How to Add WordPress Paged Comments without a Plugin (plus CSS Styling)
• How to Display Most Commented Posts in WordPress without a Plugin
• How to Display Every User’s Comment Count in WordPress without a Plugin

The post How many WordPress plugins do you use? appeared first on Sparklette Studio.

Sunny landscape: Click to enlarge

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

Wintry landscape: Click to enlarge

Have you done anything to your site design lately? There’s never a better time to do this than at Christmas.

Happy holidays everyone!

The post Our site has been Christmasified! appeared first on Sparklette Studio.