Junk left behind by plugins after they are removed in WordPress
Junk left behind by plugins after they are removed in WordPress

Greetings! Today I continue criticizing the “Hide My Dates” plugin. Dear author — no offense 🙂

How about this situation: guests come over, eat, make a mess, and leave. Don’t like it? Neither do I. And reading that WordPress plugins leave a lot of garbage behind after removal — I don’t like that either. Especially since I love clean, elegant, and well-documented code. But here we are — some strange records remain in the database, and they’re even loaded automatically on every page reload. And what if your blog has been running for three, five, or even more years? Just imagine what gets loaded each time. Yeah... that scares me too.

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How Hide My Dates in WordPress Hides Dates from Search Engines
How Hide My Dates in WordPress Hides Dates from Search Engines

Hello! In this article I will describe to you the internal structure and the principle of operation of the date hiding plugin "Hide My Dates".

The plugin itself is divided into two parts - front end and back end.

The task of the "front end" part (what the site guest sees) is the function that allows you to hide dates.

The "back end" (admin panel) includes more information and a few settings. Which are basically not needed.

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How to make friends with the Hide My Dates plugin and the Twentytwelve theme
How to make friends with the Hide My Dates plugin and the Twentytwelve theme

Greetings! In this article, I’ll explain why it’s important to hide post and comment publication dates, and how I managed to make the “Hide My Dates” plugin work with the “Twentytwelve” theme I use on my site.

When creating my first WordPress site, I had to read many articles about WordPress itself and its popular plugins. Along the way, I kept running into information about SEO. I came across an article that discussed how dates affect Google search results (and maybe Yandex too, I’m not sure). That is, the date impacts how “fresh” or relevant a post appears. For example, a post from 2010 is less relevant than one from 2014 on the same topic. Of course, the date isn’t the most important ranking factor, but it still counts — better safe than sorry.

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How to Prevent Comment Authors' Links from Being Indexed in WordPress
How to Prevent Comment Authors' Links from Being Indexed in WordPress

Hello! Pavel here. In this article, I want to show you how to “hide” the links of your blog’s commenters from being indexed by search engines.

Over the entire existence of this engine, tens of thousands of plugins have been created — including those related to comments. But in my case, I decided to take a non-standard route: I made some changes to the “functions.php” file of my theme. And now, the links to commenters’ websites are hidden. Moreover, I see more than one way to hide them (but more on that later).

This method of hiding links works with any WP theme. But! If you’re using a default theme — for example, twentytwelve — then after an update you’ll have to make changes to the “functions.php” file again, which is inconvenient. The best approach is to use this method with a child theme (as I do), or a custom theme.

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Why I Chose WordPress
Why I Chose WordPress

It took about a week to understand WordPress, all the plugins used, and the settings. I rented a domain name and hosting. Created a child theme and edited the comment code a bit. And here’s the result — the site is live!

Why did I choose WordPress and not something else? The market. For now, it dictates what to choose. In fact, it will always be that way. It’s hard for an average developer with a custom-built CMS to compete with giants like Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress. These platforms are developed by hundreds or even thousands of developers worldwide. But I still managed to carve out a small niche. However, this site is about something completely different...

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