Changing the Admin User

By default when you first create a WordPress installation a single user is created for you called admin so that you can login. This user has full privileges for the site but it has the name of admin.

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.

As the blog owner, the account you use to login to WordPress needs to have full privileges but you want your posts to come out under the chosen name. An easy way to achieve this is to simple edit the admin user and give it a different name which will appear on posts.

To edit the ‘admin’ user go to your dashboard, click the ‘users’ link and find the ‘admin’ user. Click on it and all the fields that you can edit will be displayed. You’ll want to change the first and last name and perhaps the email address. In order for the name to show up on blog posts, click the drop down box marked ‘Display name publicly as’ and select the name you entered.

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

Setting up Comment Moderation

As your blog grows it will attract more and more comments and alongside the genuine comments from your readers, you’ll also attract some spam so we’ll need to make some adjustments. From your dashboard click on ‘Settings’ and then ‘Discussion’.

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 setting which is a matter of personal taste is whether or not comments should be published immediately or placed into a moderation queue for later approval. From the users point of view, immediate publication is more user friendly but it can easily be abused by spammers and people who wish to abuse your blog in some way!

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 4-figures a month. She shows you how to make money with blogs and provides free downloads of her free guides & courses.

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