January 14th, 2012 by Mike
Well, I am finally going to do what I preach, and be more active in posting. It is time that I walk the talk so to say. As this site is to promote “Blogs” and Guarantee success the the task at hand is to provide great information that is helpful and useful to my readers. However, there is a problem with that, if I give away all the tips, tricks and how-to’s then why would anybody need to hire me? I will tell you because time is money and someone who wants or needs to get the job done, isn’t going to pour over my site and try to figure it on their own. And if they do, and succeed, more power to them as they probably would have driven me crazy. But the real reason that I doing this is to help those that I have taught over the years to be better at what they can do.
So, here’s the plan. I am going to start off with working with the Twentyeleven theme. Not only using it, but how to upgrade to it. Then I am going to start discussing the ‘core’ plugins that I find most beneficial from my clients sites. My guess is that at some point I may see the Twentytwelve theme pop into existence. If so, I guess that will give me more to discuss.
July 9th, 2011 by Mike
With the release of WP 3.2 came the release of twentyeleven. Heck, I was just getting twentyten under the belt. So, I figured no time like the present to try it out. I didn’t do it here however. I used it first on a clients site and then on my main bread-winner imaSupport. Whereas that required more work in that I was converting from an old ‘theme’ to twentyeleven.
Unfortunately, even the new site did not have its issues as I quickly found that moving my default core twentyten child theme to twentyelven requires some tweaking. Twentyeleven has a slightly different structure, and from a overview look, the #wrapper in twentyten is replaced with #page in twentyelven. Also, twentyeleven has adopted a new page size, 1000px (max) and a header of 1000px x 240px. Too Big. So, with a few css style changes, and some quick changes to the child functions.php file I was ready to use the new theme.
I quickly found another problem…. The default page template, does NOT include the sidebar. Simple fix, wrong! Simply adding the get_sidebar to page.php adds the sidebar, but all formatting is whacked. I spent the better part of the day trying to work through this and find a solution.
That, along with the other tweaks, I will leave for another post.
February 13th, 2011 by Mike
If you have, manage or support multiple WP sites then you should look at www.managewp.com. It is a free service that provides you a clean management interface to all your sites on one page. You can view version info and daily stats. It displays available plugin updates as well as for WP itself. You can push the updates directly from the interface – totally sweet. You can view/edit/create pages/posts. You can manage users, backup and clone sites. The service requires a plugin (worker) be installed on each site you wish to manage and again, any updates can be pushed once activated. The only thing I found it didn’t do, was if you wanted to access the site, it open a new tab to the Login page for the site, but, didn’t populate the UN/PW for you. This info was necessary to bind the interface to the site so it would save time if it simply populated the un/pw and landed you at the dashboard. This would eliminate the need to remember all the logins for each site. Maybe it will happen on an upcoming update.
February 13th, 2011 by Mike
If being able to post on the fly, or when you have down time away from the computer, the WP plugin is great. In fact I am using for this post while I sit on the mall bench as I candy shop and the wife is shopping. Setup is a breeze, allowing XML-RPC (settings-write) inside WP site and entering blog info on the app. The app provides the basics for mobility. No plugin functionality, or update capabilities, but having the ability to view and edit post/pages and moderate make it a great tool.
