Since I’m setting up a couple of WordPress installations today, here are the post-installation steps that I like to go through, for my future reference and your possible edification.

• create non-admin users
• delete sample post
• remove the default sidebar links
• create categories
• set basic blog metadata in Options → General Options
• change RSS feed to full content in Options → Reading → Syndication Feeds
• change permalinks to the template /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%/
• create .htaccess file in the root directory of the blog and chmod it to 666
• use the template editor to put the rewrite rules from the permalink page into the .htaccess
• change wp-includes/template-functions-links.php as specified in this post to fix broken calendar links
• install WordPress Plugin Manager
• install Spam-Karma using Plugin Manager
• install and enable the latest version of PHP Markdown
• install the “del.icio.us cached” plugin using Plugin Manager, and add a delicious('username') call to index.php
• general mucking with the templates