I finally got around to hacking the Related Posts plugin for WordPress. I love the plugin, but on some posts it listed pages like my contact form or email newsletter confirmation as related pages. None of my "pages" are related to any of my posts and I don't want my pages listed as related to my posts.

I looked on the Wasabi site (home of the Related Posts plugin), but didn't find anything other than a comment from someone with the same problem. The question was posted three months ago and it was never answered. So, I looked at the plugin code and came up with a quick solution.

To disable pages in your related results, just follow these five steps:

1. Log into the admin area of your WordPress blog.
2. Click on Plugins, then click on Plugin Editor.
3. On the right is a list of your plugin files. Click on Related Posts.

4. In the Editing related-posts.php text window, scroll down until you find this line:

   . "AND (post_status IN ( 'publish', 'static' ) && ID != '$post->ID') ";

   Its almost half way down (its a few line below // Primary SQL query). If you are using Windows, you can do a search by hitting ctrl-F and searching for static. It's line 92 if you are using a text editor on your computer.

   Change 'publish', 'static' to just 'publish'
   Static refers to pages and publish refers to posts. The new line should read:

   . "AND (post_status IN ( 'publish' ) && ID != '$post->ID') ";

5. Click the Update File button and you are done.

That's it. Your pages will no longer be listed as related to any of your posts.

When I write a post, sometimes I link to another post on my blog. However, I've noticed that when I do, I end up pinging myself. In other words, the link shows up in the linked article as a pingback in the comments area. I think its kinda of weird to ping yourself. So I looked around in the admin area to see if I could turn off internal pinging. The only option I found was to turn off pinging and trackback from other blogs. This wasn't what I wanted. If anything, it will disable external pinging, but may still allow internal pinging. That's my interpretation on the phrase, "other blogs." Otherwise, it would have read, "all blogs."

Next, I looked in the WordPress Codex. If the info was there, someone did a great job of hiding it because I could not find it. Then I searched on the web via Google. I couldn't find it there either. Obviously, if Google can't find it, then it doesn't exist. So, I gave up until a few days ago. That's when I was working on a non-WordPress site — a site that uses relative addressing. That's when it hitted me. I was using absolute addresses when I linked internally on my WordPress blogs. I was using something like, http://izachy.com/link/ instead of /link/.

In my next post, I used a relative address to link to another post. Result? I didn't ping myself. This discovery might be obvious to some people, but if you're a little dense like me, you might appreciate this helpful hint. Remember, don't use the full URL unless you want to ping yourself.