WordPress blogs, dealing with favicons

For unrelated reasons, I’m setting up a few new WordPress blogs for people. I’m a bit surprised how at how much of a pain it is to configure the favicon settings in most themes. It would seem to be a pretty common issue to be resolved fairly easily in the theme settings, and not require all sorts of different names and locations for the favion icon, or edit the theme php code.

For many themes, I have to follow these instructions, which require adding something like this:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/favicon.ico" />

to the header.php file in a theme. Is this type of complexity really needed?

I am also a bit surprised that more of the themes don’t give you the option to edit a published blog entry from the viewing mode, without having to go into the dashboard first.

The updates of the themes and the plug-ins work very well, and I wish that Drupal could emulate this.