WordPress installation that can’t be managed. Core changes also make it very difficult to update WordPress because all changes made are overwritten when the updated version of WordPress is installed. As discussed in the previous section, critical fixes to the WordPress core are only made in the current branch, so if you are forced to update WordPress to pick up a security fix, you’re going to have to re-integrate any core changes you’ve made and hope they don’t conflict with the changes you want. Maintaining the integrity and stability of your WordPress installation over time is much simpler when you’re not changing files in the core.
In general, the wp-admin, wp-includes, and root directory core WordPress files should never be edited, but the next section covers some core root directory files that can be modified as part of advanced configuration. In general, however, follow this rule that is revisited in Chapter 4: Don’t hack the core!
WORDPRESS CONFIGURATION
WordPress features specific files that can be edited for different purposes. These files can alter how WordPress functions. Always test changes in a development environment before publishing to a production server.
This section covers database connections, storing FTP info, enabling debugging tools, and more using wp-config.php. It also covers the power of the .htaccess file, including increasing PHP memory limits and max upload sizes, creating redirects, and setting access restrictions.
The most important file in any WordPress installation is the wp-config.php file. This file contains all database connection settings, including the database name, username, and password, to access your MySQL database. This file also stores additional database and other advanced WordPress settings. The wp-config.php file was originally named wp-config-sample.php. Renaming the file to wp-config.php is one of the first steps to installing WordPress.
The wp-config.php file is typically stored in the root directory of WordPress. Alternatively, you can move the wp-config.php file out of the WordPress root directory and into the parent directory. So if your WordPress directory is located here:
you can safely move the file to here:
WordPress looks for the wp-config.php file in the root directory first, and if it can’t find that file it looks in the parent directory. This happens automatically so no settings need to be changed for this to work.
NOTE Moving the wp-config.php out of the root WordPress directory is a good security measure, making it nearly impossible to potentially access this file from a web browser.
Some options in WordPress are stored as constants and these can be seen in the wp-config.php file. The constants all have the same format:
OPTION_NAME is the name of the option constant being set; value is the option value and can be updated to whatever setting you would like to save for that option. When adding new options to the wp-config.php file, it’s important the options are added above the line that reads:
If your WordPress installation is having problems connecting to your database, this is the first place to start troubleshooting. If you receive the error message “Error establishing a database connection,” the first thing to do is verify that the DB_NAME, DB_USER, and DB_PASSWORD options are correctly set for your database server. Also verify that the DB_HOST name is set to the correct host for your server. Typically, this is set to localhost, but some hosting companies configure WordPress packages with web servers and MySQL servers on different machines, necessitating a host company–specific configuration option to locate the MySQL database. Contact your hosting tech support or consult their online documentation for the correct host value to set here.
You can change the database character set (charset) by changing the DB_CHARSET option value. By default, this is set to utf8 (Unicode UTF-8), which supports any language, and is almost always the best option.
Since WordPress 2.2, the DB_COLLATE option has allowed designation of the database collation, that is, sort order of the character set. (A character set is a collection of symbols that represents words in a language. The collation determines the order to use when sorting the character set, usually alphabetical order.) This option, by default, is blank and should typically stay that way. If you would like to change the database collation, just add the appropriate value for your language. You should change this option before installing WordPress. Altering this value after installation could cause problems in WordPress.
WordPress security can be strengthened by setting secret keys in your wp-config.php file. A secret key is a hashing salt, which makes your site harder to hack by adding random elements (the salt) to the password you set. These keys aren’t required for WordPress to function, but they add an extra layer of security on your website.
To have secret keys auto-generated for you, visit the link to WordPress.org for secret key generation in your wp-config.php file (https://api.wordpress.org/secret-key/1.1/salt/), shown in Figure 2.2. Alternatively you can just type a bunch of random characters in place of “put your unique phrase here.” The goal is to use secret keys that are 100 percent random and unique.
Figure 2.2 Randomly generated secret keys
You can add or change these keys at any time; the only thing that will happen is all current WordPress cookies will be invalidated and your users will be required to log in again.
Another security feature included in wp-config.php is the ability to define the database table prefix for WordPress. By default, this option value is set to wp_. You can change this value by setting the $table_prefix variable value to any prefix, like so:
If a hacker is able to exploit your website using a SQL injection attack, this will make it harder for them to guess your table names and quite possibly keep them from doing SQL injection at all. Setting the table prefix to a unique value also makes it possible to run multiple WordPress installations in a single database. If you want to change the table prefix after you have installed WordPress, you can use the Change DB Prefix plugin (http://wordpress.org/plugins/db-prefix-change/) to do so. Make sure you make a good backup before doing this, however.
The wp-config.php file also contains the option for localizing your installation of WordPress. WordPress has the built-in capability to be used in many different languages. Setting the WPLANG option value sets the default language for WordPress to use. A corresponding MO (machine object) file for the selected language must be installed to wp-content/languages for this option to work. MO files are compressed PO (portable object) files, which contain translations for WordPress messages and text strings in a specific language. The MO and PO files are components of the GNU “gettext” subsystem that underlies the WordPress multi-language capabilities. For a full list of available MO language files, visit the following resources:
● WordPress in Your Language Codex page—http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_in_Your_Language
● WordPress Language File Repository—http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress-i18n/
Debugging errors in WordPress can be made easier using the WP_DEBUG option. Enabling WP_DEBUG displays WordPress errors on the screen, rather than suppressing those errors with a white screen. To enable WP_DEBUG, just set the option value to true:
New installations of WordPress will have this option defined