A customer asked me to make a bunch of changes to the theme of a very active web site. Since I couldn’t risk breaking the site or having it look strange for any amount of time, I had to find a way to work on a new set of header and footer files without disrupting the active theme. I found the simple answer here:

WordPress support – How to swap a theme

Basically you’re just adding a test to the page template which tests what page you’re on, and shows a different header and footer for that page. Here’s the little code snippet from the page:

<?php
if(is_page('somepagename')) {
get_header('test'); // Looks for a file called header-test.php
}
else {
get_header(); // Looks for regular header - header.php
}
?>

If you wanted to make the home page have different header and footer files, you could use the is_home() function instead of is_page.

Recently I set up a blog which has a bunch of users who will be posting articles, and I wanted the page which lists the author’s posts to have the author’s name in the link. The solution is to Add User Profile Fields and substitute user_nicename for twitter in the code. Thanks to Change the WordPress Author Archive Permalink by Kyle Eslick for the idea of getting it fixed up!

Sometimes people ask for more information to be stored about their WordPress users. Today I found a very nice solution!! I used this technique on the Career Thought Leaders Blog, for storing author bios.

Justin Tadlock on Adding User Profile Fields

It’s as simple as adding two things into your functions.php theme file. Then you have access to that info in your theme. Sweet!

I just signed up with Contextual Partnership, a site which offers a WordPress plugin to link your blog to thousands of others, automatically. You set up keyword phrases and landing pages, and the plugin does the rest. I’m currently waiting for the account to be approved. I’ll post again about it when I have some results to report. Should be interesting!

One of the great improvements in the new version of WordPress is the handling of pictures and other files… it’s pretty easy to insert a picture or link to a document into a post or page. One feature that’s lacking (for now) is the ability to overwrite an existing file with a new version, like if you want to replace a picture. And of course, ta daaaa! A plugin to the rescue.

WordPress Attachment Extender Plugin from Benjamin Sterling

The plugin adds a file upload field to the media editing page. I wonder if they’ll integrate it into the next version of WordPress?

Here’s a series of great video tutorials from Yaro Starak which shows you why and how to start your own blog.

Become a Blogger

In 10 short videos, they’ve outlined the steps you need to take to get started with your own WordPress blog, and I highly recommend giving these videos a look. And of course, if you need any help implementing any of these ideas, we’re here to help.

There’s a new version of WordPress which fixes a very serious security flaw… one that could enable one user to change other user’s posts – not good! The latest version is 2.3.3. If you need help checking your version or upgrading, please get the update here, or contact us for installation – we’re happy to help!

There’s a new version of WordPress hot off the presses! It’s a good idea to upgrade to this newest version because there are some serious security flaws in 2.3.1…

Download WordPress 2.3.2 or contact us for upgrade assistance.

We’ve been setting up a lot of WordPress blogs lately. It’s very powerful and makes web page editing easy. While researching how to make a page to show the latest blog posts, I found this great tutorial on making WordPress do your bidding:

WordPress Theme Hacks by WebDesignerWall

These tips highlight what makes WordPress so great – solutions are simple and elegant.

I’ve been working on an interesting new project involving WordPress, and while I was looking for a plugin to display theme thumbnail images, I found a whole bunch of very cool stuff! Here’s a list of what I found, in no particular order:

• All in One SEO Pack – A simple and very powerful plugin to manage all the items that make your site attractive to the search engines. You can set the meta tags for your blog’s home page and for any individual page.
• Sabre – To protect your signup process from automated signup bots. You can enable captcha (where the user types in a security code) or a math test to verify the visitor is human.
• WassUp – Peek at what your visitors are doing while they visit your blog. This is a supplement to a normal statistics program (like Google Analytics) and has some really nice features, such as who is on your site right now, and what pages have been viewed recently.
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade – Makes a backup of your blog files and database, downloads the latest version of WordPress, and sends you to the upgrade page for completion. Updating doesn’t get much simpler than this! It’s important to keep up with the latest versions, so this is a really great tool to have!
• WordPress phpMyAdmin – Gives direct access to all of the contents of your database. Very useful, but also a potential disaster… don’t use empty, drop, or delete unless you mean to do it and know what will happen!

So there you have it, some very useful plugins. As always, let us know if you want one of these or any other plugins installed. We’re happy to help!