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Posts Tagged ‘wordpress’

Free 2Column WordPress Theme – WPElegance2Col

May 27th, 2009 No comments

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

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

WordPress extras and tutorials from Pixel Shoppe

April 7th, 2009 No comments

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…

 

pixel-shoppe

 

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!
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Plugin Review: cSprites for WordPress

March 30th, 2009 No comments
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.

screenshot1
After activating, all images are stitched together into one compressed image and retrieved using only one request.
csprite_after
The plugin then uses CSS magic to display these image sprites properly within the post.
 csprite_post

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

Categories: Others, Programming Tags: ,

Quick and Easy WordPress Development on a Mac with MAMP

March 18th, 2009 No comments

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.

system-settings-sharing

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.

mamp-website

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.

webspace

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”.

picture-3

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.

picture-2

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.

WDD WordPress Showcase

March 18th, 2009 No comments

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!

Wordpress

9 Common WordPress Problems and How to Solve Them

March 18th, 2009 No comments

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.