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Default WordPress Settings

Do you often find yourself changing the default WordPress settings after a fresh install? Not anymore.

WPEngineer has a great article promoting a very simple but ultra-effective plugin.

The plugin was written by Thomas Scholz and addresses the problem of always having to do the same adjustments after a clean WordPress install.

Examples include setting the Permalink structure, deleting the default post, and basically altering any other default setting from the wp_options table. If you don’t have database access you can access an automatically generated overview of available options at [your_base_URL]/wp-admin/options.php.

Instructions🔗

Take the following steps:

  1. Download the plugin by toscho.
  2. Upload the plugin into your /wp-content/plugins/ directory
  3. Activate the plugin
  4. Deactivate the plugin
  5. Delete the plugin

The Code🔗

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Toscho's basic settings
Plugin URI: http://toscho.de/2010/wordpress-grundeinstellungen-per-plugin-setzen/
Description: Some useful default configuration settings. See 'wp-admin/options.php' for more options.
Version: 0.2
Author: Thomas Scholz
Author URI: http://toscho.de
*/
function set_toscho_defaults() {
    $o = array(
        'avatar_default'            => 'blank',
        'avatar_rating'             => 'G',
        'category_base'             => '/thema',
        'comment_max_links'         => 0,
        'comments_per_page'         => 0,
        'date_format'               => 'd.m.Y',
        'default_ping_status'       => 'closed',
        'default_post_edit_rows'    => 30,
        'links_updated_date_format' => 'j. F Y, H:i',
        'permalink_structure'       => '/%year%/%postname%/',
        'rss_language'              => 'de',
        'timezone_string'           => 'Etc/GMT-1',
        'use_smilies'               => 0,
    );
​
    foreach ( $o as $k => $v ) {
        update_option($k, $v);
    }
​
    // Delete dummy post and comment.
    wp_delete_post( 1, true );
    wp_delete_comment( 1 );
    return;
}

register_activation_hook( __FILE__, 'set_toscho_defaults' );

Update: Thomas has kindly provided a link to a public repository on GitHub. Feel free to contribute. https://github.com/toscho/WordPress-Basic-Settings