To Use Your Own Domain Name

If you would prefer to have www.howtogrowpotatoes.com rather than http://www.howtogrowpotatoes.blogspot.com You need a few extra steps.

1. Click on Settings.
2. Click on Publishing
3. Click on Switch to Custom Domain
4. Buy A Domain with Google. They will then switch your blog to your new domain name.

• You can do this at any stage, google will automatically redirect your old .blogspot domain
• You can buy a domain name elsewhere, but you will need to switch cmod or something like that. That starts to get a little more complicated.

Installing and configuring

• Download and extract plugin files to a folder locally.
• You can change the number of posts per page and some other useful settings by editing the paged-comments-config-sample.php file (its all fairly well explained in the file), then save the file as paged-comments-config.php.
• Upload the whole paged-comments directory to /wp-content/plugins/ and enable the plugin through the WordPress admin interface.

Template hacking (yuck)

• We need to include the comment ‘pager’ in our template. If you are using a common theme, it might already be taken care of: just go to /wp-content/plugins/paged-comments/themes, open your theme folder, and then copy the comments-paged.php file there into your theme folder at /wp-content/themes
• If you are not using any of the themes listed in /wp-content/plugins/paged-comments/themes then go to your theme and copy the comments.php file to comments-paged.php

We will then modify the comments-paged.php as follows:

In the code at the start

<?php // Do not delete these lines
    if ('comments.php' == basename($_SERVER['SCRIPT_FILENAME']))
        die ('Please do not load this page directly. Thanks!');

change comments.php to comments-paged.php

To add the pager, place this code

  <!-- Comment page numbers -->
<?php if ($paged_comments->pager->num_pages() > 1): ?>
 <p class="comment-page-numbers"><?php _e("Pages:"); ?> <?php paged_comments_print_pages(); ?></p>
 <?php endif; ?>
 <!-- End comment page numbers -->

before the <ol class="commentlist"> line and again after the </ol> marking the end of it

If you want to make comment number visible on the blog, add this line of code

<div class="comment-number"><?php echo $comment_number; $comment_number += $comment_delta;?></div>

You can add it anywhere between <?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?> and <?php endforeach; / end for each comment / ?>, but the best place is probably before the author name (<cite><?php comment_author_link() ?></cite>). In practice, this hasn’t worked too well for me, so use with caution.

Show author and date

Adding the following :

<p>Posted by <?php the_author(); ?> on <?php the_date('F j, Y'); ?> at <?php the_time('g:i a'); ?>
</p>

will give something like

Posted by Tejvan Pettinger on October 12, 2007 at 7:35 am

The arguments for the the_date and the_time functions tell you what format the date and time is in, you can read a full list of them here…

Show category

<?php the_category(' , '); ?>

shows the category; the comma in the brackets tells you what separates the categories if there are more than one of them.

Edit post link

Very handy to be able to edit posts from the actual post itself:

<?php edit_post_link(__(' Edit this post')); ?>

The stuff between the apostrophes is the wording of the link