The biggest change (at least on the surface) happened in the admin panel which has been completely reorganized. At the time of the transition from 1.5 to 2.x the basic layout of the dashboard and admin panels didn’t change radically; it was more about getting colours and some “ajaxification”.

This time the changes are big. And I don’t refer to the colours (which you can restore anyway, if the dark blue makes you happier!). It is about the organizing principle behind it and how it translates into buttons, panels and subpanels. I don’t understand why some users are complaining about it. It is cleaner, more logical and easy to use. Yes, you will have to spend a few minutes to learn the new layout and/or the name of the new buttons (new name of some buttons?) - but it’s worth.

Just minutes ago I checked the SVN and the current version WP 2.5-RC2 (release candidate 2). Which means we are getting closer and closer to the final. And Matt just posted a screencast about some new features in the WP dev blog.
(more…)

I don’t have the time right now to troubleshoot, so I had to disable it, which means the tutorials showing code snippets will not work. The description is still there but the code is unreadable.

Sorry for the inconvenience — I’ll try to fix it later tonight or tomorrow.

UPDATE.
I managed to replace the plugin with another one, and with a quick Search and Replace changed the “wrapping” around the code portionsincluded in posts. It should work now. Please, let me know if you find posts containing code that don’t work.

Thank you for your patience!

Now, a few days ago I was forced to think whether I need a “commenting policy” or not.

As many of my readers know I was born and lived for a long time in a place where the freedom of speech was just a distant dream. You could end up in jail not only for trying to speak up, but even just telling a good (political) joke to the wrong person. With such a background it might be understandable that I don’t feel like censoring people’s comments. So, when I started this blog — and many others — I thought the common sense sould be enough for “policy”. I am offering here free tutorials and tips for using WordPress, and I don’t debate and discuss controversial political issues that might incite high passions. I was sure I don’t need any rules for the commenters.

Unfortunately, a distinguished professor of mine was right telling me that the common sense is the least common.

If somebody comes here from another site (following a link) just to post comments that contain personal attacks and offensive remarks, my tolerance suddenly starts shrinking. Really, do I have to tolerate comments that are not related to the topic of the post, just giving me lectures or offending me? Should I let them appear in the name of the free speech… on my own site?
Well, I won’t. Period. I don’t want to fight and argue with anybody. And, definitely, I will not argue with idiots.

P.S. To all the WP users that come here to find some ideas or help: please, don’t hesitate for a moment and do comment, ask questions, give suggestions! The rant above is not about you…

The famous 5 minutes install has almost become the trademark of WordPress. Actually, despite the many failed installations, it is true! If you are not doing anything stupid, WP can be installed in five minutes or less. The longest “action” is waiting until the files upload using a FTP client.

And with this - all the five minutes things are over. Forever. And the user should be warned about it. And this is missing from the sales “pitch”.

Unfortunately, this very easy installation process creates very bad, false expectations. That’s what I call the “5 minutes trap”. It is a trap because the unsuspecting new user thinks that everything should (or would) be such an easy five minutes job. Most often s/he wants the theme customization to be an “easy, simple” one-click thing. Something that can be done in “five minutes”. After learning that modifying a theme usually requires a lot of learning (XHTML and CSS basics, at least) — there goes the big disappointment. Nobody wants to hear that the best theme designers out there have spent years learning their profession.

The reality about a WordPress blog is this: it is easy to install and it is equally easy to get a free downloadable theme to change the default “blue” look if it. However, if you don’t know anything about HTML and/or CSS - stop even thinking about doing anything else besides blogging. Go and write and post your articles and be thankful for the script and for the theme that you got for free.

Do not expect that you can learn to customize a theme in 5 minutes. Not even in 5 hours. I don’t want to discourage you from learning how to manage and customize your website. Just don’t expect any five-minutes-solutions. Being the webmaster (and occasional designer) of your own website… has nothing in common with instant gratification.

If you don’t believe me, just ask around how long did it take for your favourite web/theme designer to get to the level of knowledge where they are now.

Now that I went with this latest version, I had the opportunity to check out a lot of new plugins; some of them even made it into the final version of this updated playground. E.g. Meta tags, Clean Archives Reloaded, Feature me, Syntax Highliter, SEO Title tag, Latest posts from the same category etc. (One day I should make a Page where I give credit to all the plugin authors whose code is used on this site - added to the TODO list.)

The biggest challenge ahead will be adding tags to all the older posts. Before that I’ll need a plugin that will stop WP from pinging the update services just because I edit the posts. There is one… you just have to register to get it, and I hate doing that.

I am especially curious how the different plugins/scripts that show either posts recommended by myself or posts related by category (when visiting a single post) will help the new visitors to find cool older tutorials which sometimes get buried in the archives.

As always: nothing is completely done, it is a permanent “work in progress”, so let me know if you notice any bug or malfunction.

The only hickup happened when the upgrade script notified that there were two (old) link categories with the same name, and during the upgrade one of them was lost. Other than that - everything seems to be working well.

Seeing so many desperate posts in the forum about failed upgrades I almost began to think there must be something wrong in the script. Now, again, I am convinced if you prepare your upgrade as you should (and your host is not one of those weird companies…) the upgrade should be a walk in the park.

By preparing I mean you do you homework before the upgrade: first of all, read the documentation. I did, even though I know it by heart. Then, I installed the old theme on a 2.3.1 test blog and replaced all the deprecated template tags with the new ones. When the theme worked, I copied over all the plugins from the existing installation and checked if they work with WP 2.3.1. Some of them did, others had to be replaced. So, I searched the plugins repository and the net until I found new, compatible plugins with the same or similar functions. I tested them on my test installation with the updated theme. And only when I was sure that after the WP upgrade I can quickly replace the plugins to re-instate the familiar functions… only then did I proceed.

Yes, it meant some plus work and time spent before the upgrade itself. But if you are a responsible webmaster this is the minimum you should do for your blog. I prefer the additional work vs. running to the forum to post “OMG, I upgraded and my blog died…”
How about you?

The post was so fresh that barely anybody could write anything about it to get a pingback. So I went to visit the ping-senders. Actually, they are feed-stealers, or simply thiefs. From the dictionary: THIEF = a criminal who takes property belonging to someone else with the intention of keeping it or selling it. That’s what they do, exactly.
Here is the list of these sites:
1. http://www.jogos-pc.info/?p=14515
2. http://www.music-mp3-albums.info/?p=13764
3. http://www.jogos-wii-ps3.info/?p=4986

Now I will take a look at their hosts and see if I can get them banned for Copyright infringement…

In the examples I will refer to the same demo installation as I did in Part 1. (You can right click the link and open it in another tab to be able to follow the explanation.

You remember, we created a top horizontal menu using the Fold Page plugin and using this code:

<?php wswwpx_fold_page_list ('depth=1&sort_column=menu_order&title_li='); ?>

Eventually, on the Demo site I modified this to include a “Home” link and to have one of the categories also included (as explained in another post about Pages and Categories).
This is the modified code used on the demo:

<ul>
<li id="one"><a href="<?php bloginfo('home'); ?>">Home</a></li>
<?php wswwpx_fold_page_list ('depth=1&sort_column=menu_order&title_li='); ?>
<li id="five"><a href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/?cat=18">Hidden</a></li>
</ul>

You can notice I have added ids to the first and last li items. Let me explain it but before that comes the disclaimer: since I am not a real coder my solution is not perfect and is not really dynamic; more knowledgeable coders, probably, could come up with a more elegant solution. However, it worked for me. The explanation:
I have five items in my horizontal menu: Home, About, Archives, Contact, Hidden. I know it will not change, so I can put this code in the head section of the header file:

<?php
if ( is_home() ) { $current = 'one'; }
elseif ( is_page('2') ) { $current = 'two'; } //id of the About page
elseif ( is_page('6') ) { $current = 'three'; } //id of the Archive page
elseif ( is_page('16') ) { $current = 'four'; } //id of the Contact page
elseif(get_the_title($post->post_parent) != the_title(' ' , ' ',false)) { $current = 'post_parent'; }
elseif ( is_category('18') ) { $current = 'five'; }//my hidden cat
?>

Now we are prepared to style our menu. The code above will set the “current” class depending on which page/Page we are on. For the styling we also have to remember that the Fold Page plugin adds a special class to the parent Page when we are on the children Pages. You can check the source code on the demo: when we are on the sub-Pages of About the li item around this parent will get the “current_page_ancestor” class (pretty much self-explanatory…).

Now will add a bit of CSS into our head section:

<style type="text/css">
#<?php echo $current; ?> {
background-color: #ff0000;
padding: 0 16px;
}
#nav .current_page_item {
background-color: #6eaae9;
padding: 3px 8px 2px 8px;
}
.current_page_item, .current_page_ancestor {
background-color: #ff0000;
padding: 0 16px;
}
</style>

A few quick notes to this: lines #2-5 set the background colour for the “current” page/Page.
Lines #6-9 set the background for the sub-Pages in the sidebar - my sidebar is in a div id=”nav”!
And, finally, the last lines will set the colour for the “ancestor Page (in the case of the Demo - About) and for the current page items in the top menu.
Of course, you can use all your colours and style elements that fit into your theme and make it part of your design.

In case you want to see the whole header.php used in demo - here is the whole code.

Basically, that’s all. As I said, it’s more like a hack than elegant code but it works well with a horizontal menu that is not going to change too much in the future. When I needed a quick fix for a blog with a similar menu system, I found the components for this solution in the Codex and in the WP support forums… I just put them together.
If you have suggestions to improve it, to make it more dynamic, feel free to take it and make it better. And if you just need a quick fix - enjoy it.

I have to admit I have never heard about the CSS Zoom before and don’t remember ever visiting that site of a fellow Canadian, Scott Kimler. You can go directly to the description of the technique PZ3 (PhotoZoom v. 3) and you will find there all you need to copy/paste into your style.css. Of course, you can adapt the colours to fit in the colour scheme of your own theme.

You can also just copy and paste the HTML code from the site above into your posts or Pages. Warning: read further only if you don’t use the wysiwyg/visual editor monster of WP. It is not installed on my blogs and I don’t know if it works with that terrible thing…

As you can easily see the HTML code has 3 parts:
- before the image code

<div class="PZ3zoom PZ3-r Bdr Cap Lnk" style="width:210px; height:137px;"><a href="http://randsco.com/blank.html" onclick="return false">

In this one you set the size of the thumbs you want to show.

- the image code itself (as img src etc.)
This one you should insert simply using the Upload > Browse > Send to editor routin in your Write subpanel. Note: Use the “not linked” and “using original” options!

- after the image code

<span class="PZ31cap" style="width:479px;"><span class="PZ3inr"><strong>Afternoon Light: </strong>The same Pioneer Basin view, looking toward 3<sup>rd</sup> & 4<sup>th</sup> Recess, later in the day.  <em><span style="color:#ccf; background:inherit;">Photo by Brian Ernst</span></em></span></span></a></div>

In this code snippet the only important part is the 479px in this example taken from Scott’s code. That should be exactly the width of your picture(s).

This is all fine till now but if you are as lazy to type code as I am… then you start thinking whether you want this or not. Well, I am lazy and don’t like to type long code lines, so here is what I did. As I mentioned above I never use the wysiwyg thing, so all I see in my Write panel is Quicktags. And you can always add new quicktags to that JS file. The quicktags.js file is located in your wp-includes/js/ directory.

Open the file and add the following between any two buttons you want to place your PZ3 quicktags:

edButtons[edButtons.length] =
new edButton('ed_pzr'
,'PZ3'
,'<div class="PZ3zoom PZ3-l Bdr Cap Lnk clearer" style="width:145px; height:100px"><a href="http://www.transycan.net/blog/blank.html" onclick="return false">'
,'<span class="PZ31cap" style="width:640px;"><span class="PZ3inr"><strong>TITLE</strong> - DESCRIPTION - <em><span style="color:#4d5663; background:inherit;"> (photo &copy;Moshu)</span></em></span></span></a></div>'
,'PZ3'
);

I have put it at the very beginning of my Quicktags. What it does: on the first click it inserts the HTML code needed before the image. Then you go and insert the image code with the “send to editor”. (If needed, edit the alt text and such.)
Then click again on your PZ3 quicktag to “close” the whole thing. It will add the second part of the code. Done. Write or finish your post.

Some notes about the usage of the quicktag. As you can see my width for images and the caption width is set to 640px. That’s because it fits in my blog where I am using it and also because for me it is easy to get that size: my camera takes pictures of 1280px and in my image editor I just re-size it to 50%, so all my images will be of the same size. You should set your own width in your quicktag. Next, I remind myself to write a TITLE and a DESCRIPTION to appear in the caption part of the full-size view.

That’s it, folks. All the credits for the PhotoZoom code should go to Scott! I just tried to make my life easy using this really light script because I didn’t like the options offered by WP. I didn’t want to make the images as attachments (no need for comments); I didn’t like the thumb linked to the image option either because you have to click back and forth… and I found all the “light” box solutions slow and complicated.

This one works excellent. Check out the demo blog.