The Advance Settings Plugin is a powerful plugin that adds several different configuration options to your blog for greater control over your site.

Once you have activated the Advanced Settings plugin in Plugins > All, go to Settings > Advanced Settings to configure.

Cool things you can control or add using the Advance Settings Plugin include:

  • Category filter
  • Custom Post Order
  • Force Content/Excerpt
  • Featured Images
  • Titles
  • Comments
  • Performance
  • Responsiveness
  • Protection
  • Exclude pages
  • Additional code

Category filter

Used to include or exclude post categories from different pages.

For example, I might want only posts assigned the category Class News to appear on the front page of my class blog and then use a custom menu to send posts assigned the categories Homework and Assignments to different pages using a custom menu.

Content filter

To do this I would:

1. Select the Front page from under the All Pages drop down menu

2.  Select Include

3.  Select the check box next to the category Class News

4.  Click Save Changes.

5.  Set up a custom menu to send posts assigned the other categories to different pages.

Custom Post Order

Used to change order.

Custom post order

Options are:

  • Published date – descending
  • Published date – ascending
  • Notification date – descending
  • Notification date – ascending
  • Title – descending
  • Title – ascending

On the Edit Category page you’ll also see an option to change the order of a category.  This allows you to order some categories by date and other category pages by alphabetical order.

You change the order a specific category is displayed as follows:

1. Go to Posts > Category.

Go to Posts > All Categories

2.  Click Edit underneath the category you want to change the order displayed.

Click Edit

3.  Select the order you want the category displayed and then click Update.

Change order

Force Content/Excerpt

Used to change between Excerpt or full content.

For example, the theme I’m using may show full content on all pages but I want to display full posts only on the post page and post excerpts on the search page, the category page, the tag page, the date page and the author page.

Excerpt

Featured images

Used to:

  1. Automatically add the first image attached to a post as a featured image if a featured image is not set.  You might use this option if you’ve changed to a new theme and haven’t added featured images to your posts.
  2. Disable featured images on list view pages such as your blog post page and on single view (the post page).  You would use this option if you’ve changed to a new theme and needed to disable featured images.  For example, your previous theme required featured images to be used the blog post homepage while the new theme displays better when the featured images are disable.
Feature image options

Titles

Used to remove the word ‘Protected’ or ‘Private’ from post titles.

Private

Below is what a private post title normally looks like:

Private

And here is what the post title looks like when this option is selected.

Protected removed

Comments

Used to disable comments on all posts and pages.

Comments

Performance

Used to disable ‘Emoji scripts’ and styles loaded by WordPress.

Emoji

Responsiveness

Used to activate pinch zoom on mobile devices.

Responsiveness

Exclude Pages

Adds a checkbox “exclude page from menus and lists” to page editor which you can use to exclude a page from your navigation menu.

Exclude page

Protection

Designed to help prevent readers from downloading files from your site.

Protection

Additional Code

Allows you to add custom javascript code or css code in header section or footer section.

Additional code

The Body Open section is visible, and can be used for adding Google Tag manager code, if you are using the theme Divi.