Webmasters Gallery

Today, the cool guys over at Obox Design introduced their new line of professional WordPress themes called “The Obox Signature Series”.

Thanks to David and Marc, we will be giving away a total of 10 copies of the “Arcade” and “Left Handed” themes (single user license).

All themes are packaged with OCMX-Live, a powerful add-on to the WordPress backend which allows you to control and customize many of the elements of your theme.

To participate in this great competition, simply follow @oboxthemes and leave a comment below with your Twitter username and anything else you’d like to say about these awesome themes.

The 10 winners will be chosen at random on Tuesday, July 14th and they will be notified via email as well as announced here on WDD. See the previews below…

Arcade

“Arcade” is a great WordPress theme inspired by Martijn van Dam who creates some incredible designs. The theme is perfectly suited for gamers or sci-fi subjects with a touch of retro design.

Left Handed

Left Handed is perfect for those who have an art orientated blog and don’t want to be left in the field with just another blog template. This theme will impress your readers with its attention to detail in the custom hand drawn fonts and comment sections.

All winners will receive a full year of support for their new theme for free. For more info you can visit the Obox Design website where you can view their full theme collection and more details on support and pricing.

Once again, in order to participate in this great competition, simply follow @oboxthemes and leave a comment below with your Twitter username and anything else you’d like to say about the themes.

admin theme, wordpress Amazing, themes, word press

Wordpress for iPhone, the only iPhone app that lets you write posts, upload photos, edit pages, and manage comments on your blog from your iPhone or iPod Touch. With support for both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress (2.5.1 or higher), users of all experience levels can get going in seconds.

admin wordpress iphone, word press

In these days of the ever-increasing competitive world of the web, time is as valuable as money. To be noticed, and to stay at the top of the game, content writers must post a lot of content on a regular basis. To keep up with time constraints, Wordpress plugin authors provide an array of useful plugins that will drastically reduce the time required to write, format, and post your content.

In this article, you’ll find 10 excellent WordPress plugins intended to reduce and simplify tasks associated with blogging so that you can spend more time creating content, and less time with site administration.

1. Post Ideas - take charge and manage your post ideas

Post Ideas is a basic plugin that enables you to create rough drafts of ideas and thoughts for future articles without having to make a draft of the post. This plugin helps the writer enter a draft title, description, keywords, links, and most of all, priority of the post idea. Once all the ideas are collected, the writer can pick an article to write by either priority or self-preference. This will enable you to have a web-based idea bank that sits right inside your WordPress installation.

2. Tidy Up - Automatically find errors and clean up your HTML

Tidy Up is a port of HTML Tidy into Wordpress. This plugin can run the HTML Tidy algorithm through all of your posts and or pages and return a proper generated report regarding the HTML code in your posts or pages. In case it contains any kind of errors, it points out to the writer where it is and how to fix it. The plugin does not stop there; it also features a database-cleaning utility that removes unnecessary data in your MySQL database.

3. Pages+ - Deal with many pages with ease

The Pages+ plugin is very handy in case your site has many pages. The default ‘manage’ option via the Administrative Control Panel in Wordpress provides very little features for managing any of your  pages. Page orders, categorization, deletion, addition, and much more, can be accomplished via this awesome plugin.

4. Mass Post Manager - Save time managing old posts

Mass Post Manager helps you easily manage existing posts. This plugin enables you to manipulate the categories and comments related to existing posts. This is an essential plugin to have in case you need to re-allocate categories of your posts, or manage the comments in the same posts, which is quite tedious via normal Wordpress Administration Panel.

5.Attachment list - Easily spice up attachment icons without coding

Attachment List is a simple plugin that spices up those boring old icons that appear on the attachments of a post. You can use this plugin to replace the default icon used by Wordpress and replace it with a set of icons, available free-to-use from FAMFAMFAM.com.

6. Survey Gizmo - Dealing with polls can’t be simpler than this

Survey Gizmo is a premium plugin that has a free version. This plugin is for creating, running, and managing survey results within the WordPress interface. The plugin also allows you to generate printable reports of your results.

7. Tweetable Twitter - Saves time in updating your Twitter feed

Tweetable Twitter is a great plugin if you use Twitter. Tweetable Twitter allows the user to integrate Twitter into your Wordpress blog and automatically Tweets the latest post that you publish. The automatic Tweeting can also be configured to choose the URL shortening service of your choice.

8. Secure Files - manage file uploads securely

Secure Files is a plugin that aims to solve the problem faced by Registered Only plugin users. The latter plugin allows only Registered users on a particular website to view the content in it, whereas guests can’t see anything at all. Although this protects the content of your database - other files, such as images and CSS files, aren’t protected. The Secure Files plugin is developed to take care of that issue. This plugin allows users to create a directory outside of the root directory for file uploads and downloads. This is an essential plugin to have for multi-author blogs.

9. SmartVideoPlus - embed videos with ease

SmartVideoPlus is a plugin that will completely change your simple blog layout to a full-blown video website! Watch the demo of this awesome plugin here.

10. Sticky Post - no need to hack your WordPress theme to sticky a post

Sticky Post is an impressive plugin that adds the specified post or article on top of each post in the website, without having to modify the current theme that the site uses. This is quite useful, if you want to grab the visitors’ attention with an old, but still is important, blog post.

admin wordpress plug in, save time, word press

WPElegance2Col is a Free 2Column Wordpress Theme, with premium features.This Free Wordpress Theme is a neat, professional, elegant theme and highly customizable. The Footers, Featured Posts section and Thumbnails can be easily disabled or enable through the Theme Options Page.

WPElegance2Col is SEO-optimized, ad-ready, WordPress 2.7 compatible with widgetized sidebars and footer.

Wordpress Theme Features:

• 2-column Theme
• Sliding Featured Posts Section
• Multi level sliding menus
• Automatic thumbnails of first uploaded image of Posts, in Home page and other archives
• SEO optimized CSS layout
• Gravatar Ready Theme
• Social Media integration
• Compatible with most Wordpress plugins
• Compatible with Wordpress 2.7 and earlier versions
• Easily spiderable, structured navigation
• W3C XHTML and CSS Validated theme
• support for threaded comments and seggregation of comments and pingbacks/trackbacks

admin wordpress theme, wordpress, WPElegance2Col

Sometimes I get an inspiration to improve my blog with new element or plugin and that’s where problem starts. Sure I can hard code new snippet directly into template file or spend couple of hours trying to find suitable solution on Wordpress website.

There is a very good chance that feature I want to include on my blog has been already implemented by someone but I have no idea how he named this plugin or which section he posted it in.

Last time I got lucky thanks to the Pixel Shoppe with his recommendations on plugins that I can use with WordPress blog.

They were describing AdSense Manager plugin which supports multiple ad networks and that’s exactly what I was looking for. In addition this plugin gives you full control over ad placements without need to modify styles or source files.

I found more good recommendations on other WordPress plugins, tweaks and template modifications. General tips for bloggers section they have is also interesting read…

 

 

I can’t write about all the good stuff I saw on Pixel Shoppe blog but you can find articles about web design, SEO and marketing, wordpress and blogging, money making tips.

For bloggers, internet marketers and especially for newbies who is just starting out on the internet it’s definitely worth few minutes of your time to read Pixel Shoppe articles or watch some of wordpress video tutorials.

Have something to say regarding the subject in my post? Post your comment and I will be happy to thank thank most active commentators with direct link!
Did you learn something new today or like my point of view? Subscribe to my full RSS feed in the your favorite reader or get new posts delivered by Email directly to your inbox.

admin wordpress pixel shoppe, tutor, wordpress

What is cSprites for WordPress?

cSprites for WordPress plugin helps speed up your blog by reducing the number of requests made for images. When activated all images within a post will automatically be stitched up and displayed properly as compressed CSS sprites.

Screenshots

Before activating, all images within a post are being retrieved using separate requests.

After activating, all images are stitched together into one compressed image and retrieved using only one request.

The plugin then uses CSS magic to display these image sprites properly within the post.
 

Features

• Quality and style settings let you specify the compression level for the stitched up image sprite.
  
• Ability to include/exclude certain types.
  
• Cache expiration tuning.
  
• SEO Options for SEO nerds.
  

What I Like About It

cSprites for WordPress was written to do one thing (convert all post images into compressed image sprites to speed up your blog) and it does it very well.

Installation was very easy. Just download it, activate it, and all your post images automatically turn into images sprites.

Just because you use image sprites doesn’t mean that you should lose SEO. I like that this plugin does not ignore SEO and there are SEO options for displaying any ALT or TITLE text you want.

Next, this plugin supports caching image sprites, so it automatically includes external images into image sprites for you. Because of this, you are also saving external domain DNS resolutions to help make each page load even faster.

What I like most about this plugin is that it can be used in conjunction with WP Super Cache. In that scenario WP Super Cache helps you avoid PHP execution/MySQL queries, and cSprites for Wordpress helps you reduce strain on your web server and improve front end page load time.

Possible Areas of Improvement

As of version 0.508, here are some drawbacks of this plugin:

• PHP5 with GD Library is required for this plugin.
• cSprites will not distinguish between PNG8 and PNG24 and will always sprite PNG images with PNG24.
• cSprites cannot handle dynamically generated images (e.g. “…thumbnail.php?thumb=http://example.com/myimage.jpg”)
• When upgrading via SVN, “svn up” command gives “svn: Unable to lock ‘cache’”. I have to remove the cache directory, run “svn cleanup”, then “svn up” to upgrade via SVN.
• You cannot use padding when displaying images or else it will show part of another image. It would be nice to be able to generate the image sprite with configurable padding so you can use padding when displaying images.

Final Words

If you can take advantage of this plugin (i.e. your host offers PHP5 with GD Library), then it is definitely worth a quick install.

Are you currently using cSprites for WordPress? Are you happy with the performance improvements? How much load time has this plugin saved you? What additions would you like to see in this plugin?

admin wordpress plugin, wordpress

Liveblogging may very well be the future of traditional news media and blogging. Now you can stream information live on the internet and Twitter while an event is happening using nothing more than your laptop and free LiveBlogging software.

People have been doing it on a widespread basis for the past year, thanks to a plethora of free LiveBlogging tools that have sprung up almost overnight.

Whether you are a business striving to build a name and reputation in your industry or you are a web designer or web dev pro building a reputation, you need to be aware of Liveblogging and the tools used to conduct it.

We have moved from the “I’m blogging this” world to the “I’m Liveblogging this” world very quickly. People are no longer satisfied with hearing news after it has happened - they want access to news while it is happening.

If you don’t want to commit to sitting at a conference or a lecture typing out what the speaker is saying verbatim, you can opt instead to do Twitter updates that you can send out to any Twitter users that you care to enter into your LiveBlog software package. This gives you the opportunity to get your feet wet with Liveblogging.

Do I Have to Liveblog?

Liveblogging is a great way to build up a following and to network. Invite fellow professionals who you will be attending a conference with to Liveblog with you, thus forging an immediate network and possibly making some good friends along the way as well. We don’t recommend Liveblogging a day at the office, but a day that your company spends at a trade show or a Liveblog of an industry conference are great ways to show people you are immersed and interested in your industry. By the time you’ve checked out any LiveBlogging software you’ll probably want to go to a trade show or event just so you can liveblog it.

How Will LiveBlogging Change Blogging?

A Liveblog of an event will get more hits the day of the event than any other time. Let’s face it, we are a society of instant media gratification junkies and this provides an instant fix. Liveblogging won’t replace traditional blogging, but it may encourage it to become lengthier and meatier than it has been in the past.  Instead of offering just the quick breakdown that the Liveblog offers, bloggers will have to inject more qualified statistics and observations in their post-event content to make people want to read their posts in addition to the Liveblog coverage.

My first exposure to LiveBlogging came from Stephen Del Percio, an environmental real estate lawyer who runs his own blog at greenbuildingsnyc.com. Stephen LiveBlogged GreenBuild, an environmentally friendly building conference. What I found interesting about his LiveBlog is that I kept receiving his updates real time through my Twitter feed, which was both interesting and exciting. It made me feel like I was at an event that I would have loved to have gone to.  I asked him how he was doing it and he responded with a url: www.coveritlive.com.

Cover It Live

While there are a number of Liveblogging platforms out there, Cover It Live is one of the best known and most widely used. It is also completely free. Their rationale is that they are live testing the platform before they start charging for the service. Cover It Live is far from a beta, although those at 2008’s MacWorld conference would probably beg to differ. Despite this somewhat epic fail, the Cover It Live service has worked reliably for other news outlets and bloggers quite well. Readers can post comments and questions in real time on your LiveBlog, making it a truly interactive experience.

Signing up for Cover It Live is just like signing up for any online service. Once you’ve entered your details, you’ll get a box like below giving you the code to cut and paste to put in your site. You can see that we’ve checked the Wordpress code, which simply gives you a link instead of an iframe. Note the huge warning at the top of the screen that you can only use Firefox 2.0 plus or Internet Explorer 6.0 plus to use Cover It Live; any browser may be used to view your Liveblog but Safari users must sadly switch.

The Additional Options box below the code gives you some interesting things to do. You can add Twitter users, although this is a tedious process of going in and adding a bunch of Twitter user names. Here’s hoping in the next version you can just put in your user name and it will automatically just import all of your followers. This will mean that all of your liveblogging will go out to your Twitter users as tweets, something to keep in mind when you are actually liveblogging - try to make sure some of your transmissions are under 140 characters to keep it interesting for them - if not don’t worry about it, as they can just go to your live blog to read it if they want more.

You can also e-mail your readers, enter the address of the Liveblog, and get the code for a “Coming Soon” reminder to add to your site. All very cool stuff.

Launch Your Live Blog

The interface is extremely fluid and easy to use. It has the feel of a more advanced instant messaging client.  You can go from inserting emoticons to streaming video and audio alongside your liveblog. This is how it looks to you:

This is how it looks to the world:

 

If you want to customize the Live Blog window, you can do so in the “Custom Templates” menu that you access from your Account area. You simply sign in, go to “My Account” and then click on “My Viewer Window”. This will then give you a few options, including uploading a background image (which must be 380 pixels by 150 pixels).

If you are embedding the code in Wordpress, it simply gives you a link to a popup window rather than a window that embeds the Liveblog on your site.

If I were using Cover It Live on a Wordpress site, I would take a screenshot of the Live Blog and include a thumbnail image in the link in order to make it more attractive. If you are installing it in a website, use of an Iframe makes it more accessible and readable within the site itself without needing to click on a link as you have to in a Wordpress blog. If you are planning on making extensive use of Liveblogging, you may want to consider the addition of a static page specifically for your Live blogs in order to incorporate the iframe.

Panelists

One of the more exciting features of Cover It Live is the ability to have multiple citizen journalists, or Panelists in the Cover It Live world.  ou can all contribute to the same LiveBlog without risk of anything crashing. This allows you to function as a team, with some people hopefully adding content that others may miss.  For any events that are happening live, such as the US election, this is an excellent tool to have a live conversation about an event among people in different geographic locations.

Tools & Settings

The Tools menu covers some basic items, such as getting embed code in order to embed your LiveBlog in a website or blog. It also features the important Live Edit, which lets you go back and edit items live that you feel that you made mistakes on. You can also view reader statistics in real time, which can be encouraging or discouraging depending on who shows up. You can also invite more readers via e-mail, although you probably want to do this in advance of the event.

 

The Settings menu allows you to show and edit both your Panelists and Twitter users. In both cases, you are best advised to set these up before you start, but the options are there for you to add them on the fly if you need to. You can also disable reader comments, something to consider if you want the entire LiveBlog to be about what you are writing instead of having attention drawn away to the comments of readers.

Media Library & Video

The Media Library is a very powerful tool that allows you to add multimedia to your live blog. You can insert ads on the fly, links to other sites, and create polls. You can also insert text that you have prewritten and post video and audio within your live blog. ShowPrep is a feature within the media library that allows you to create a playlist for your media prior to your Live blog and it functions much like iTunes. While the media library allows you to organize your multimedia, ShowPrep allows you to further organize it by allowing you to organize your media in advance of your presentation. Keep in mind when uploading images that you are limited to a size of 25 mb per image.

You can post both live video and video that you find on YouTube. In order to incorporate live video, you need to use one of three services; USstreamTV, Mogulus, or Qik. This will allow you to live stream an event that you are attending, if you have received the proper permissions from the people holding the event to do so. When you drop the video link into your live blog, your users will see a small window that they can move around and resize however they wish.

 

How to Liveblog Effectively

Now that you understand how to use everything and have booked yourself in at a conference or event, lets go over the ins and outs of Liveblogging:

Ensure Internet access
If you are working a trade show or attending a presentation in a cavernous building, you may actually not have wireless internet access. Contact the event staff in advance to arrange for proper internet access in order to stave off disaster - it really isn’t a Live blog if you’re not, well, blogging live. If disaster strikes, call a friend and have them put up a notice that you are experiencing difficulties on your Live blog.

Scheduling most popular events
Arrange your time at the event so that you are blogging presentations that you know will be popular. At a Search Engine Marketing event, more people are going to want to hear Matt Cutts from Google speak than Joe Schmoe from Klamath, Oregon no matter what the subject is. Treat the event like it is a collection of websites and go to the presentations that you have mentally assigned the highest Pagerank to. Then publicize the events that you will be Liveblogging on your company website or blog.

Promote it
Notify the event organizers and see if they will put up a link to your Liveblog from their website, unless you are attending something like MacWorld where LiveBloggers are a dime a dozen. If there are a number of you, spread out and try to cover all of the events and presentations - don’t all blog one event or speaker. Use your numbers to cover more, not jaw about the same presentation together online.

Use images
Pictures are a great adjunct to your Liveblog. Clear the use of digital cameras and recording devices with event staff beforehand. If you can record live video or audio, that would be ideal. Don’t use live video or audio as a substitute, but post it alongside your Liveblog. You can go back afterwards and cut out the more interesting bits to post on your website later. This will also cement you as a professional in the eyes of anyone viewing your Liveblog.

Follow up
Don’t forget to go back over your Liveblog later and use it as research material to put together more cohesive blog posts for your website. It can be argued that a Liveblog may at the very least have a place as a research tool if you aren’t comfortable in broadcasting the results online quite yet. As with everything, there’s no time like the present to try it out.

The most important thing is to not be afraid to make a mistake. Most platforms feature a live edit feature, including Cover it Live. If you misspell something or get something a speaker said wrong, don’t sweat it - just edit it and move on. Once you step into the world of liveblogging, you probably wont’ be able to go back.

Written exclusively for WDD by Angela West and edited by WDD.

admin blogging, wordpress blog, blogging, live

Ready for some WordPress development on your Mac? First, you need to be running Apache, MySQL, and PHP.

Although Mac OS X comes with Apache and PHP, you don’t want Apple’s automatic software update to break your development environment by changing your working versions of PHP and Apache. Plus, do you really want to spend time tweaking MySQL?

In this guide, I will show you how to quickly install and configure a working WordPress environment including Apache, PHP, and MySql.

1. Turn off Web Sharing

First, you need to make sure the Mac OS X installation of Apache is not running. Navigate into your System Settings and check the “Sharing” settings. You want to turn off “Web Sharing” if it is currently enabled.

2. Use MAMP

MAMP is a free and ready-to-go install of Apache, MySQL, and PHP for Mac OS X. It is developed by Living-e. They also have a “Pro” version at additional expense. One of the great things about MAMP is that it includes almost every PHP option pre-installed and enabled. As a bonus, it comes with phpMyAdmin to help you work with databases quickly. To get MAMP, open up your web browser and go to http://www.mamp.info/en/download.html. Download MAMP, mount it, and then drag the MAMP folder into your Applications folder. You can safely ignore the “MAMP Pro” folder.

3. Configure MAMP

Go into the MAMP folder and then open the MAMP icon.

The status lights will tell you if Apache and MySQL are running. If the lights are red, click “Start Servers”. Next, modify the ports for Apache and MySQL by selecting “Preferences” and select “Set to default Apache and MySQL ports.” You should end up with port 80 for Apache and port 3306 for MySQL. Next, click on the Apache section and change the Document Root to a location that you can quickly access. All your websites will reside in this location, so you want to pick something that you can navigate into easily. I like to use a root folder called “webspace” that I created in the Finder.

 

4. Make a Database for WordPress

WordPress requires a MySQL database to store posts and settings. You already have MySQL running, but you need to create a separate database for each WordPress website that you develop on your Mac. From the main MAMP menu, click on “Open start page.” Your web browser should pop open up to a “Welcome to MAMP” page.

 

Next, click on “phpMyAdmin” to launch the phpMyAdmin web application. Look for the section entitled “Create new database” and name your database. As an example, enter “wp-superblog” and click “Create” to make a database.

 

5. Make a folder for your website

Within your “webspace” folder, make a new folder with the name of the website that you will be developing. As an example, make a folder called “super-blog” to correspond to the database you made.

6. Install WordPress

The easiest way to download WordPress is to point your web browser to http://www.wordpress.org/latest.zip Unzip the WordPress package and copy everything in the WordPress folder into your “super-blog” folder.

7. Configure WordPress

Navigate into your “super-blog” folder and locate a file called “wp-config-sample.php”. Open that file and change both the database username and password to “root” on lines 4 and 5. Next, make sure the name of your database (“wp-superblog” in our example) is shown on line 3. Save the changes you made to this file and then rename the file “wp-config.php”.

8. Take a Test Drive

Open up a web browser and navigate to “localhost”. You should see a folder for each website you are developing. In our example, you should see a folder named “super-blog”. If you click on it, you should instantly get to your new WordPress website.

9. Turning MAMP on and off

When you are not developing and testing a website, you may want to turn off Apache, PHP and MySQL. MAMP comes with a dashboard widget that will turn your environment on and off instantly. You can find the widget in the MAMP folder.

admin Programming, wordpress easy, quick, wordpress

We’re currently being featured in the design category at Wordpress.org

If you enjoy the work we’re doing at WDD, and would like to rate us based on our implementation and use of Wordpress which we currently use to power our blog, please head over to Wordpress.org and make your voice count by giving us a good rating.

Thanks in advance for all your support, it’s very much appreciated and they keep the blog going!

admin wordpress showcace, WDD, wordpress

WordPress is a great tool for creating blogs. It works well most of the time, it offers automatic updates, and it offers the numerous benefits of open source software … including the fact that it’s free to use.

WordPress certainly isn’t perfect, though. (Then again, what software package is perfect?) Fortunately, most WordPress problems can be solved with a few tweaks.

Here are nine common WordPress problems and solutions.

1. I’m receiving a “Cannot modify header information - headers already sent” warning

This error message typically specifies a problem with stray characters, some of which are not visible, in front of the opening tag or after the closing tag of the file. Check the error message to find the particular file name that’s generating the warning. (The file name usually is at the end of the error message.)

To fix this problem, you have two choices. The easier choice, if you haven’t made any significant editing changes lately, would be to replace the file that’s causing the error message with your backup copy that was working correctly.

If a working backup copy isn’t available, you’ll need to download the file that’s causing the problem. Open the file in a text editing program that doesn’t create hidden characters; Windows Notepad is a great choice. Do not use a word processing program, such as Microsoft Word, because it sometimes will insert hidden formatting characters in the file. Make sure the first characters are <? and the last characters are ?> in the file. Check for any hidden characters at the end of the file, such as spaces, by moving your cursor to the end of the file and deleting any spaces.

2. The backups of my WordPress database files are way too large

Making regular backups of your database is an extremely important process, one that most people don’t perform often enough. For additional peace of mind, it’s probably best to keep three or four copies of your database backup file, just in case your primary backup file is corrupted. That can be difficult if your backup files occupy a lot of storage space, however.

Most of the time, a large database backup file is caused by certain plugins storing a significant amount of data. Plugins that block spam or that collect statistics on your blog can generate a large amount of data that really isn’t necessary to store in your database backup file.

If you’re using a common backup tool, you should be able to select the specific tables included in the database backup file. Just include the tables that are important to your blog’s data in your backup file; leave out tables that generate interesting data, but that don’t contain the core information for your blog.

Image files can add require a large amount of storage space, too. If you have some image files that you’re no longer using with your blog that are being backed up with your database, try deleting the old image files.

3. WordPress doesn’t appear to be saving my changes

Sometimes, this problem carries an easy fix: Just force your Web browser to reload the page from the server. The Web browser stores copies of Web pages in cache, or a memory area, on your computer. Upon subsequent visits to that Web page, the Web browser loads the page from cache, which allows it to load faster.

If your Web browser is loading a stored copy of the page from cache, it might not be showing your latest changes because it’s an old copy. To force the Web browser to load the page from the server: In Firefox, hold down Ctrl and Shift, and then press the R key. In Internet Explorer, hold down the Shift key while clicking the Refresh button. Depending on your browser’s setup, though, these key shortcuts might not work.

You also can try visiting a proxy site, such as guardster.com, and load your page from there. Because it’s a proxy site, it won’t use cache and will always load the latest version.

4. WordPress STILL doesn’t appear to be saving my changes

Sorry to deliver bad news, but, most of the time, if your browser isn’t causing the problem, user mistakes are to blame. Rarely, you might experience this problem if you’ve downloaded a plugin for WordPress that changes the way your browser cache behaves. If you suspect a plugin problem, you’ll have to check the documentation for that particular plugin, looking in particular for how it clears the browser cache.

Otherwise, common problems that might cause WordPress to appear as though it isn’t loading or saving your changes include making sure that you’ve uploaded the latest version of WordPress and you haven’t make a mistake in the actual coding. You might have to go through your coding line by line to look for mistakes.

5. I cannot delete old posts or pages, I just receive an error message

Users have reported this problem sporadically on message boards over the past several months. Although narrowing down the specific cause of the problem has been difficult — in part because of the sporadic nature of the problem — it appears that certain plugins interfere with the deletion option.

Until more information is discovered about which collection of plugins are causing the deletion problem, you can try a workaround solution: Just deactivate all of your plugins, make the necessary deletions, and then reactivate your plugins.

6. My version of WordPress doesn’t seem to allow workable permalinks

Permalink problems can be especially difficult to solve. Here are a few common potential issues related to permalinks, but, if these tips don’t fix your particular problem, you may need to check WordPress forums for information on your specific problem.

If you recently installed or upgraded WordPress, the software might not have correctly created the .htaccess file, which is key to creating permalinks. (You might even see an error message during WordPress installation related to the .htaccess file.) Such problems can occur because some hosts do not allow WordPress or you to access or edit the .htaccess file, which can cause permalink errors. Most of the time, you can check your Control Panel to see whether your host allows .htaccess file editing.

If you suspect this problem, contact your host to see what types of permissions you need to set on your server to allow WordPress to gain access to the .htaccess file.

7. I can’t seem to block spam from my comments section

WordPress has a few good automated tools for limiting the amount of spam that appears in comments. Blocking spam permanently, however, requires stringent moderation on your part.

To control the WordPress features related to managing comments, click Administration and Settings Panel. You can control all aspects of discussions here. To help in limiting spam, try these tips.

Click the A Comment Is Held For Moderation box if you want to receive an e-mail each time a comment is made, thereby giving you the option of accepting or denying the comment. Of course, if you receive dozens of comments each day, this option will generate an overwhelming number of e-mail messages.

Click the Comment Author Must Fill Out Name And E-mail box, which forces anyone making a comment to provide the necessary information. Some spammers might be deterred by this extra step.

Because spammers sometimes include multiple hyperlinks in their messages, you can tell WordPress to hold comments that have a certain number of links through the Content Moderation section. In the same section, you also can enter keywords that you think you’ll see in spam comments. WordPress will flag any comment that contains these words.

8. A WordPress plugin that has always worked OK in the past suddenly isn’t working

The first potential fix of a plugin problem is the easiest: Make sure that you’ve downloaded the latest version of the plugin. New releases of plugins add features, but they also often fix bugs, including the one you might be having. To check for new versions of your plugins, just click Administration and Plugin. WordPress should list all of your plugins, along with notifications of any that have upgrades available. Click Upgrade Automatically, and you’ll have the latest version. (In fact, checking for the latest versions of all of your plugins is something you probably should do on a regular basis, perhaps two to four times per year.)

If that doesn’t work, you have a few other options. You can try reinstalling the plugin from scratch; perhaps the plugin software became corrupted. Try to remember if you made any other software changes or installed other plugins between the time the problematic plugin was working correctly and the time that it failed. You could have an incompatibility issue between the malfunctioning plugin and the software changes you made. See if the author of the plugin has a blog where you can report your problem. It’s possible others are having the same issue, and the plugin author will create a fix or knows a workaround.

Occasionally, if you upgrade your version of WordPress, you could end up with multiple plugins that stop working correctly. You’ll just have to deactivate the malfunctioning plugins until the author comes up with a new release that will be compatible with the new version of WordPress.

9. I’m trying to delete a WordPress plugin I no longer use, but it’s not working and it’s causing errors on my site

Before uninstalling a plugin, it’s a good idea to visit the plugin author’s site, just to see whether the author has created any specific instructions for uninstalling the plugin. If you remove a plugin incorrectly, it could cause multiple errors.

You’ll also want to make sure you didn’t make any changes to your template files based on the plugin. Some plugins require such changes upon installation. If you can’t remember whether you made such changes, read through the installation instructions for the plugin and see whether the instructions called for such changes to your template.

Once you’ve checked for any problems related to deleting the plugin, take one final step before deleting it: Make sure you open the Plugin Administration screen and deactivate the plugin before deleting it. Trying to delete an active plugin could cause error messages.

Finally, we offer two important tips related to troubleshooting:

At some point, you may encounter a problem that cannot be fixed or that corrupts your data beyond repair. There’s only one solution: Reloading your data from your backup source. Backup your database on a regular basis. Better safe than sorry.

Second, make sure you always have downloaded the latest version of WordPress. Version updates will fix various bugs and security problems as users report them. Some new releases might seem minor, but that minor tweak might be the one that fixes your perplexing problem.

admin wordpress problem, solve, wordpress