6 Little Known WordPress Writers’ Hacks

And perhaps you want the comments closed?  I wouldn’t blame you.

If you scroll down in your write>post screen there is a section called “Advanced Options”.  This is for you! Let’s go through them:

• Excerpt: This will override other excerpts of this post on the archives or category pages.  Click on the arrow and insert the excerpt that you like the best into this window.
• Trackbacks:  From what I understand, there are some sites that don’t automatically catch the links in your post and notify the linkee(the one you linked to).  Oh, you didn’t know that was happening?  Yup, be careful what you say in link form!  The linkee will (usually) be notified.  If they have an older system, then you can enter the url of the linkee in this window.
• Custom Fields: These fields are (in a good theme)entered into your meta data, on each post.  So if you wanted to insert the weather into the post, you would create a key: “weather”, and enter the data in the value field.  I use this to select which image to display in my portfolio.
• Comments & Pings: This is where you can turn OFF your comments, and it will override the blog’s original settings in the admin>settings>discussion panels. Turning OFF pings will (on this post only) NOT notify your linkee(the person you linked to).  So if you are talkin’ smack about someone, and you’re a bit of a scaredy cat (not that I am or anything) you would turn these off so they wouldn’t know about it.  Except if they found out.
• Password Protect This Post: Yup.  It will.  It will also show up in the loop as “This post is password protected.  Enter password here:  ” or something like this in a good theme.
• Post Author: IF you have more than one author a drop-down list will be here and you can select – oddly enough – the post author.

Some plugins will add more advanced options and let you edit them right from your write screen.