For some reason this blog had all of its discussion settings reset, and plugins turned off, on June 2, 2015.

Within a couple of weeks, the blog had accumulated nearly 15 thousand spam comments. These comments were obviously spam, but with Akismet and WP Spam Shield down, and my discussion settings reset — they all went right through and were immediately published.

Deleting 14,700+ comments a screen at a time was not going to work well.

Thanks to this helpful post by the folks at Cats Who Code, I found a much more efficient fix using SQL in PHPMyAdmin.

The steps:

1. Backup your database. (To be safe.)

2. Login to PHPMyAdmin.

3. Navigate to the desired database. (The main database for the blog.)

4. Select SQL, which allows you to run SQL queries.

5. Run a first query to select all comments after the date that everything went bad:

SELECT * FROM wp_comments
WHERE comment_date > '2015-06-01 00:00:00'

6. If you’ve selected them right, you should see the results in a table. Sort the results by date, in both directions, and review them to ensure they’re what you want to delete.

7. If so, then delete them using this SQL command:

DELETE FROM wp_comments 
WHERE comment_date > '2015-06-01 00:00:00'

if (current_theme_supports(‘bootstrap-top-navbar’)) {
get_template_part(‘templates/header’, ‘top-navbar’);
} else {
get_template_part(‘templates/header’, ‘default’);
}

In this short video, I’ll walk you through the steps to control positioning of the navbar in the Roots Theme for WordPress.

Roots Theme Customization – Position the Navbar from David Cochran on Vimeo.

Covered in this video:

1. Create a copy of header.php so that you may revert back to the original navbar if desired.
2. Modify the markup in header.php to remove the class "navbar-fixed-top" and (if desired) wrap the navbar within a div of class "container".
3. In app.css, adjust the styles for .navbar-inner as needed (such as to remove border-radius).

Relevant Previous Videos

If you’ve missed them, here are video introductions to prior steps, for your convenience. (Pick what’s relevant and helpful!)

Create Dropdown Menu Items

Add your Custom CSS

Don’t miss the full Roots Theme series

This is the first installment of a longer series I’m developing on Roots Theme customization.

Additional topics include:

• Getting Started
• Use your custom page template for a static front page
• More topics in the works …

Check out the full series here.

If you’d like an introduction to Twitter Bootstrap …

Again this is another basic introduction, but if that’s what you’re after, I’ve got a Twitter Bootstrap video tutorial series underway at Webdesign.tutsplus.com.

In previous videos, I have walked through the process of creating a custom page template with a custom loop. In this short video, I’ll walk you through setting a custom page as your site homepage (or front-page).

Roots Theme Customization – Custom Front Page from David Cochran on Vimeo.

Covered in this video:

1. Select a custom page template for a page named “Home.”
2. In the WordPress admin panel, under Settings > Reading, select this page as the “Static Front Page.”
3. Remove the template file, front-page.php from the main theme directory, enabling the selected page template to control the page’s markup and layout.

Relevant Previous Videos

If you’ve missed them, here are video introductions to prior steps, for your convenience. (Pick what’s relevant and helpful!)

Create a Custom Page Template

Create a Custom Page Loop

Add your Custom CSS

Don’t miss the full Roots Theme series

This is the first installment of a longer series I’m developing on Roots Theme customization.

Additional topics include:

• Getting Started
• Reposition the Navbar
• More topics in the works …

Check out the full series here.

If you’d like an introduction to Twitter Bootstrap …

Again this is another basic introduction, but if that’s what you’re after, I’ve got a Twitter Bootstrap video tutorial series underway at Webdesign.tutsplus.com.

Don’t miss our curated page of best WordPress plugins.

Here are a few of our current favorites. The list is not exhaustive, but it’s a nice little collection of solid recommendations.

Current Favorite Plugins

• Google Analytics for WordPress by Yoast

  “Uses the asynchronous Google Analytics tracking code, the fastest and most reliable tracking code Google Analytics offers.”

• WordPress SEO by Yoast

  “Improve your WordPress SEO: Write better content and have a fully optimized WordPress site using the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast.”

• Jetpack by WordPress.com

  Social sharing, email subscriptions, stats, spell-check, URL-shortener, Twitter feed widget, easy video embeds, and more.

• Search Light

  Find-As-You-Type dropdown extension for the standard WordPress search

• WP-DBManager

  optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database

• Hyper Cache

  a well reviewed cache plugin specifically for shared hosting

• Page Links To

  allows you to make a WordPress page or post link to a URL of your choosing, instead of its WordPress page or post URL

• Redirection

  Manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

• Disable Trackbacks

  “Globally disables trackbacks to cut down on spam. Very, very few people legitimately use trackbacks and spammers love them, so it’s worthy tradeoff.”

Don’t miss our curated page of best WordPress plugins.

Have great plugins to recommend? Use the comments below to suggest new additions to our list.

If you find yourself wanting to transfer a number of links, which you have entered as “Links” via the admin interface of your WordPress installation, from one WordPress site to another, this support article is helpful …

Import & Export Links — Support — WordPress.com

EXCEPT that my browser tried to save the file as a web archive. Choose “Source only,” and change the extension to xml.

Then upload the file using the Blogroll importer.

Works! with one flaw …

Unfortunately, it will not keep the link categories intact. You will need to update the category for each link. To save time, create a category in the new WordPress installation for the category most used in the old installation. Then select to have them all imported to this category. That way the majority will already be set correctly, and only the others changed.

CMSify is a new plugin that features an admin panel where you can easily hide or enable features you may or may not need, all in one clean sweep.

As you can see below, there are dozens of options for customizing WordPress administration. Highlights include the ability to disable the upgrade notice for non-admins, remove dashboard and plugin widgets, remove post and page columns and remove every kind of post and page meta boxes from the post editor screen.

via Simplify WordPress with CMSify: Dozens of CMS Options in One Plugin.