Wordpress tutorials

Tutorial : how to create a featured article section

I’ve been craving for a hack or plug-in that could create a featured article on my blog, a sticky kind of article that would show up on every of my pages, above the rest of all posts and stand out a little – all this without too much hassle. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a plug-in that would do the dirty work for me, so I had to improvise – after a bit of digging I ended up on Maxpower blog, reading an article wrote by deepthought.

After wrestling a little with the code, I found another article wrote by Solostream , but that wasn’t too helpful either – so I knew I had to take the matter into my own hands.

Tutorial : How to update to WordPress 2.5 in just four steps

To get you started, I’d suggest getting all of the below plug-ins to make sure everything will run smoothly.

1) Maintenance Mode

When you’re going to upgrade your WordPress installation, your visitors will see a 404 Error page not found. By using this plug-in, you’re making sure they’ll not see that message, but a custom one defined by you.

2) WP-DBmanager

Before even starting to upgrade your installation, remember to back-up everything you need. This is just a safety precaution you should take, for the sake of your data.

3) WordPress Upgrade Preflight Check

It does a quick check to see if your current plug-ins could create any incompatibility issues with your upgraded installation. If you get an error message for a specific plug-in, contact the author of the plug-in directly to make sure everything is fine. If the plug-in is not that important, simply deactivate it.

4) The Instant Upgrade plugin for WordPress

Install and activate the plug-in, deactive all the rest ( remember though to keep activated the maintenance mode plug-in). Run Instant Upgrade, set-it up correctly. If you don’t know, just ask here. The upgrade should be done in a minute or two, maybe less.

There’s not much you could do from this point on, just sit back and relax. You should have a working WordPress installation in a matter of minutes.

P.S : If you’re upgrading with this method, and your hosting uses cPanel ( most hosts do ), and you’re not sure what to put into the FTP path to WordPress box, try completing it with /www/ or /public_html/ ,that is if your blog is installed in the main directory. If not, it’s /www/yourblog/ or /public_html/yourblog/ – remember to replace yourblog with your folder name, where you installed WordPress.

Be the first to comment - What do you think? Posted by Cristian - April 3, 2008 at 11:13 pm

Categories: Wordpress tutorials Tags: wordpress 2.5 installation tutorial, wordpress 2.5 tutorial

Tutorial : How to optimize your title tag

While not many people pay as much attention to this as they should, I’ve been really keen on optimizing my post, category, archives and front-page titles. Why ? It’s good for SEO, and not only. I’ve developed sites over the past 3 years, and usually most of my traffic came from Search Engines. Why ? Because I paid attention to all the details, and tried to optimize my blog as best as I could for SE.

One of the things I paid special attention, was the the title tag of my blogs. Usually, the title of your blog looks something like :

Unfortunately, this is not the best way to code your titles, in an ideal situation you’d want a more search engine friendly way to display your title. To achieve this, you’d ultimately want to use the following code bellow :

<?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo('name'); }<br /> elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo ' - ' ; bloginfo('name'); }<br /> elseif (is_single() ) { single_post_title();}<br /> elseif (is_page() ) { single_post_title();}<br /> else { wp_title('',true); } ?>

For a more into depth optimization of your title tag, I suggest visiting this link : Ardamis, title tag optimization.

If you have any thoughts or ideas, please share them below.

1 comment - What do you think? Posted by Cristian - April 2, 2008 at 5:54 pm

Categories: Wordpress tutorials Tags:

Tutorial : How to fix transparency issues in WordPress

Many new themes for WordPress are only tested in Firefox. Firefox handles things way better than IE, or older versions of other browsers ( Netscape, etc ) . One problem that most designers face with when designing a theme is the problem of transparent images. They don’t render in every browser the same way you’d expect. At this point, you may start thinking that your blog doesn’t contain any transparent images, but you’re totally wrong – that is if you’re using a WordPress theme other than the default one. Even those little icons next to the comments and tag section are transparent.

How can you make sure they render correctly in all browsers ? It’s easy, all you have to do is…

Tutorial : How to create a fancy drop-down menu the easy way

I’ve seen it many times on other blogs and always asked myself : how did they do it ? After a bit of digging and researching I found out it wasn’t that hard after all. If you’d like to have a fancy drop-down menu on your blog, and at the same unclutter your navigation menu then this tutorial is meant for you.

The advantages of using such a menu

It makes your design look more appealing.
Re-arranging pages is a great way to unclutter your navigational menu
Improved page visibility.
Cross-browser compatibility, get rid of all those IE and older browser bugs.
Auto highlights the page you’re currently viewing, no extra coding work needed.