This website was for a collection agency based in Tukwila Washington that wanted to be able to easily edit their entire site, that had been designed several years ago.

Their 25+ page site previously required Front Page to edit, or another .html editor, and there was very little graphic appeal. It was all Times New Roman font on a white page, with the company logo in the upper left corner.

The design they chose (from Template Monster) was actually a Joomla template that we then converted to a 100% Wordpress 2.5 compatible theme, including fully widgetized sidebars.

There’s a very good roundup of what’s changing in the new WordPress version here, and after reading it, we’re making a formal decision NOT to upgrade this blog when it comes out, or use the new version for any projects currently under development.

This goes against our usual practice of upgrading immediately every time a new version is released, and but the changes are just too major to have to deal with until we know more about how it affects plug-ins that we use.

The process of upgrading your WordPress used to be a tedious one. You had to manually backup all of your files, download them deactivate all your plug-ins upload the new version run the upgrade

Assuming that everything went okay, you then had to manually reactivate all of your plug-ins. I went through the step by step Wordpress upgrade using a video on my main blog, and even though it was fairly straightforward it still took up too much of my time.

Thanks to a plug-in that was released last summer the process is now seamless and can be completed in under 60 seconds.

No Video Responses have been posted yet.

Click here to post a video response.

We were asked by a smoker and barbeque company to match their new website for a new blog they’re planning, and when I saw it, I was a bit concerned that Heather night have a tough time with it, maintaining their high end graphics. She took a look, and agreed to give it a try. After all, we have a money back guarantee, right?

Anyway, the original site is totally custom, and I think she matched it perfectly, right down to the “burned edges”…

Here’s the original site on one domain

Here’s the matched Wordpress theme on another

Putting pictures in WordPress posts and pages is easy, but not exactly intuitive. This is a fast tutorial to show you how it’s done with minimum effort.

Did you know that you create a new WordPress user, and set them to ‘contributor’ rather than to author or editor?  When you do that, their option after writing a post automatically changes to ’submit for review’ rather than ‘publish’. It’s pretty slick, and seems like it would be a good way to encourage guest authors on the blog…

I added a new user, then logged in to post as that new user, and here’s what I saw at the “Write” screen -

I’ve always recommended that people not paste text directly into WordPress from Microsoft Word, and instead suggested that they open their Microsoft Notepad, paste into Notepad, then copy and paste back into WordPress. This extra step removes the stupid formatting put in place by Microsoft Word.

Apparently, a recent addition to WordPress (maybe 2.3?) added a button on the WordPress text editor that allows you to paste information directly from Microsoft Word, and instantly strips out all the formatting. I’m exactly not sure how long it’s been there, but it works very well.

Just because Wprdpress has stopped using Technorati is no reason not to continue to claim your blog on your Technorati Profile. Sure WordPress is magic, but you still have to help it along, but submitting your link in the right places! Go to Technorati and create an account, then click on “Claim Your Blog”.

What’s with the new version of Wordpress not showing your inbound links anymore? - Oh - actually, I see now that it is not just in the latest version,  but it’s been removed altogether from the admin control panel.

This is very odd… First they replaced Technorati in there with Google, and now they’ve removed altogether the ability to know instantly when someone links back to you.

That’s a shame, because I really like it! Perhaps it’s just a glitch and it will come back tomorrow?

Having a big ping list added to your WordPress blog is not going to make or break you, but the more exposure, the better, right?

At a recent presentation I gave about using Wordpress, I was adding a slide about the ping list, and decided to count them. I was surprised to see that there were only 46, but that’s what I put in the slide.

Apparently, at some point over the last couple of dozen installations, I dropped off a batch from my list, and even my own blog was running short.