WordPress 2.9 Update

In case you haven’t heard yet, a new update to WordPress was recently released (version 2.9).  I’ve already updated all the demos to the new version.  I’ve also updated two themes, New Church and Company Store, to work with the new version.  There was an issue with the post template feature, but that has been fixed now (fixed the week of Christmas too).  All of the other themes are good to go.  Bottom line:  all of my themes are compatible with WordPress 2.9.

Each year WordPress tries to have three updates to the software.  Every time a new version goes to the beta testing stage, I test my themes to ensure compatibility.  If there is ever an issue, I issue an update.  All updates are included with the cost of an individual theme or theme package so there is no additional charges involved.

As for new features with WordPress 2.9 two you will most likely be excited about are an image editor and a WordPress trash can.  The image editor allows you to make some basic edits like cropping and resizing.
The trash can works like it does on your computer.  Now when you delete a post or page, it isn’t lost forever, you can recover it out of the trash.  Rather handy if you accidentally delete the wrong thing.

What feature do you think WordPress needs to add next?

New Church Instructions

Once you have uploaded and installed your theme, either using the built in uploader or FTP, go to themes and activate the New Church theme from the list of installed themes.

Main Options

Now you will two new menu items under the “Appearance” menu, theme options and front image. Let’s take a look at “theme options” first. Here you can configure most of the settings for the New Church theme. The first option is to choose a design style. Here you can select from one of the six styles that are included with the theme. Below that are options that pertain to identity and navigation. The first one is to choose between an image logo and text that displays the title of your site. If you want to use your church’s existing logo, choose image logo and follow these instructions.

To upload your logo and image for the front page, use the add media button. Copy the URL that is provided after the upload and paste it in the appropriate blanks. Save your options and you should have your own logo and front image.  There is a logo template included inside the zip file you downloaded when you purchased the theme.  It is inside the “extras” folder.  To make things fit as they should, your logo should be 113 pixels high and no more than 400 pixels long. For best results use a PNG or GIF file so you will be able to see the header through the transparent parts of the image.

You can also add a favicon (the small icon that goes next to your web address in your browser). Use the add media menu as above to upload the favicon and copy the URL that you receive after uploading the image. Past the URL into the blank and you will now have a favicon for your site. For best results use a gif, png or ico file. You can make a favicon here.

The Blog Page Category allows you to select a category of posts that will be displayed on any page using the blog page template. This will easily allow you to create a blog and place it anywhere in your site.

The Home Page Options allow you to give names to the slider tabs in the bottom right of the home page. These three tabs each feature areas for widgets that can be configured by going to the “Appearance” menu and selecting widgets.

The last area is for Google Analytics or another statistics tracking tool. To use this feature, sign up at www.google.com/analytics and paste the code they provide you into this box. Save your changes and you’re ready to go.

Home Page Slideshow

The Front Image menu allows you to create a slideshow for the front page. To use this feature, browse to the file on your computer you’d like to use and upload it. The image will need to be at least than 517 pixels wide by 284 pixels high. Once the image uploads you can add a link to that image so that when someone clicks on it, they are taken to that page. It’s perfect for announcements.

Page and Post Templates

New Church comes with three page templates, one with a sidebar, one full-width page, and one blog style page. The blog style page displays posts from the category you specify in the control panel so you can easily integrate a blog into the rest of your site.

There are also two post templates included. The first is the default, but the second is made for message podcasts. This template can be selected by choosing it from the menu right below the main post write box. Once selected, you can fill in the details in the “podcast details” box to allow them to easily be displayed on your message podcast post (listen to message link, speaker and subscribe in iTunes). This information also ties into the messages widget described below.

Read More Code and Widgets

You can also include a read more button in any text widget, page or post by using this built in code:
[button href="http://www.yourlink.com"]Button Name[/button]
Just replace the http://www.yourlink.com with the URL to the link you’d like to use (leave the quotes) and change Button Name for the label on your button. Now you’ll have a button to link to more information in any place you’d like.

New Church also includes two custom widgets. The first easily displays your contact information (name, address, phone number and email link) where ever you’d like it to go. You can see it in use on the homepage in the bottom left corner. The email link is encrypted so spam bots can’t steal your email address. The other widget is a custom widget for displaying your recent messages. You choose the category and it will create a dynamic list with the number of messages you specify.

You are not required to use the podcasting widgets or templates with this template. They are available if you’d like to, but in no way are they required. If you have a plugin you’d like to use to augment these features or replace them entirely, there is no editing required to do so.

Thank you again for choosing New Church for WordPress. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at www.organizedthemes.com/support for help.

Single Posts by Category

Several of my themes use a handy plugin called Single Post Templates which allows you to choose a template for any post just like you can for a page.  It’s a great feature that I think WordPress should roll into the core.  One thing I’ve noticed is that many people use the post templates on a category basis.  On my site, I have post templates for blog entries, theme information pages and then general posts.  Since the templates are based on categories I use the following code to make the post templates work instead of the plugin.  Here’s how it works.

If your theme already has a single.php, rename it single-original.php and create a new file called single.php.  Now into this empty file, paste the following code:


<?php $post = $wp_query->post;

  if (in_category('9')) {
      include(TEMPLATEPATH.'/single-9.php');
  } elseif (in_category('4')) {
      include(TEMPLATEPATH.'/single-4.php');
  } else {
      include(TEMPLATEPATH.'/single-original.php');
  }
?>
<?php get_header(); ?>
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Here’s how it works. The code checks to see if what category you’re in (in this example the category id is 9). If the post is in that category it will display the single-9.php template for that post. After checking to see if it is in category 9, then it checks to see if the post is in category 4. If it is then it displays single-4.php. If not then it displays our original post template single-original.php.

The big advantage that the plugin provides is the ability to choose a template on a per post basis regardless of category. However using this snippet takes care of things automatically and that can be quite useful too.

5 Plugins to Enhance Your Site's Form and Function

Virtually every WordPress site out there uses at least 1 plugin with most of us using more than a dozen. Here are a few that I’ve uncovered recently that will help your site in form or function.

  • Background Control: This is a handy plugin that enables you to change the background image and color of your site. I uncovered this plugin because I was considering making one myself, but this one already had the features I thought users would want. It includes a built in file uploader, the ability to select the image properties (repeat, fixed, and position) plus color. If the only thing you don’t like about your theme is the background appearance, then this is all you need to change it. Download it here.
  • Cute Profiles: This stylish plugin allows you to easily add links to your various social media pages right into your WordPress site. There are several existing plugins that do this so what sets Cute Profiles apart? For starters it is very easy to set up. To include a profile, all you have to do is enter the corresponding URL and the icon link will appear automatically. Some other plugins require you to uncheck lots of boxes unless you want 50 little icons on your site. There are styling and placement options, plus all the images are contained in an image sprite. This allows the browser to load only one image instead of several individual ones which will make your site much faster. You can download Cute Profiles here.
  • Tweet Blender: I’ve been a Twitter Tools user for some time now and it servers my needs quite well, but it isn’t the best fit for every situation though. Tweet Blender gives you the chance to show tweets from multiple people or hash tags and place them into one stream. So say you have a company site, you can list all your employees tweets in the stream and display them along with their Twitter avatars. Or if you are hosting an event that people will be tweeting about, you can set it to display a common hash tag so someone can easily follow the conversation via your site. You can find Tweet Blender here.
  • Ultimate Automatic WordPress Translation Plugin: Obviously the internet is global so shouldn’t your site be too? There are other translation plugins out there–WPML.org has a great plugin for you to translate your site, but you have to do the translating yourself. The Ultimate Automatic WordPress Translation Plugin uses Google Translate and language detection to automatically deliver a version of your site to an international visitor. So say your site is in English and someone from France visits. The plugin can detect the location of the visitor’s IP address or the language settings on their computer to direct them to the French version of your site. You have the ability to control which pages and posts are translated as well as which languages to include. It’s rather easy for the user, and while Google Translate isn’t perfect, it’s better than having a site that is impossible to read. This plugin is available for purchase for $9.95 from here.
  • My Snippets: This is a simple plugin with a great idea behind it that will soon grace Organized Themes. It allows you to display custom snippets in any widetized area of your site on a post-by-post basis. Here’s how I’m going to use it. I’m adding instructional videos to all my themes, but I can’t complete them all at once. I’d like the videos to appear in my sidebar on theme posts below the price, demo and purchase links. I can hard code this into the theme and use conditional logic and custom fields to make them display when I have a video, but now I don’t have to. I can use the My Snippets plugin to handle this for me. I just paste the code into the snippet box and now my video is present. Simple and effective like all the best plugins are. You can find it here.

  • What other undiscovered plugins have you found recently that are useful to you?

    Theme Package

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    Backups: They Really Can Save Your Site

    It’s one of the computing mantras that you hear over and over again–keep regular backups. But how many people do that despite hearing the occasional horror story of losing everything with a hard drive crash or a virus. I’ve always been someone who has good intentions of keeping things backed up, but if I’m left to myself to do them regularly, they often get overshadowed by the more exciting aspects of running my design business. Two weeks ago, I had a personal experience with why having multiple backups can be essential to ensuring your site stays up and functional.

    Here’s what happened. It started after I purchased a new plugin for WordPress that allows your site to automatically translate your pages and posts and display them to a user based on their browser’s language settings. Since I get approximately 40% of my visits from countries that are not primarily English speaking, I thought this would be a fantastic way to server my customers. I knew this plugin would make some significant changes to my WordPress database, so I backed up my site with the WP Database Backup plugin, and I used the export function built into WordPress to export my site’s content in case things went wrong. On a Friday night, I set my site to translating, and hit the bed.

    When I woke up the next morning, I discovered that all my site’s traffic had been redirected to a non-existant French version of my site. I tried adjusting settings in the plugin, but to no avail. Deactivating the plugin didn’t fix the problem either.
    Since I knew I was missing out on sales, I knew I had to act quickly, so I opened up the MySQL admin on my server and tried to restore the backup I had made before using the plugin. It wouldn’t take. I tried two more times, but to no avail. This would have been the simplest way to get things back up and running. All of my site’s settings were contained in that file–widgets, plugins form set up not to mention all my posts, pages and comments. If the backup had restored as planned, then all of this would be instantly corrected and it would be “like it never even happened” to quote ServPRO.

    But I wasn’t out yet. I still had the export XML file that I had made. This is a bit different from the database backup in that it only has my site’s content–no settings are included. I created a new database on my server and ran WordPress’ famous 5 minute installer and then imported the XML file. All in all, it took about 20 minutes to get everything back as it had been before the incident took place. It may not have been ideal, but I was able to get my site back up and allow customers to resume purchases in less than a half hour. So what did I learn?

    1. Regular backups are a must. I have the WP Database Backup set to email me a copy of my database every day. I’ve been doing that for as long as I can remember. Now I periodically check the backups to make sure that I can use them. If I can’t import them, then they are pointless for me.
    2. Multiple backups are necessary. I now export my site’s content via the tools>export command after I publish each post. I actually did lose one post through this whole process. I still have the text in my feed reader, so I will publish it again soon. This was just a lesson learned–if it isn’t backed up, it may not exist anymore after a failure.
    3. Test plugins before you use them. When I first discovered WordPress, I made the mistake that lots of people do, in that I used too many plugins. They can be great, but if you mix too many plugins together you can expect trouble to creep in somewhere. There are exceptions to this, but my experience in helping hundreds of people with WordPress related issues tells me that this is the norm. I used to be good at testing a new plugin on another site to ensure that everything worked properly before I moved it to my main installation. This time I didn’t do that and a plugin cost me my site being down for about 5 hours. Lesson relearned. Unless you mind potentially having to rebuild your site, test a plugin someplace else before running it on your own site.
    4. Don’t forget to backup your local computer too. I’ve been using Time Machine on my MackBook Pro since Leopard came out, but now I use Sugar Sync to maintain an automatic off site back up as well.

    I think we all sometime or another will have a loss of data. If you are good about maintaining a backup routine that includes verifying your backups, you’ll be in good shape when disaster strikes.

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