August 4, 2009
A couple of people recently have asked for "WordPress without a theme". Let's sort the jargon out first: a theme is a set of files that WordPress uses to know how to display the words you've given it. Without a theme, your blog posts, comments, links and images won't show up at all: you can't *have* WordPress without a theme. That said, just because it's a "theme" doesn't mean it has to be... Read more
May 21, 2009
Sooner or later, how much you love the WordPress theme you've chosen, you're going to want to change something about it. Maybe you'll want your post titles to be a little larger, or to change fonts or link colours, or to make your sidebar wider. If you already know HTML, CSS and PHP, then head on over to the Theme Editor and start playing. But for everyone else, this post will be a brief... Read more
May 3, 2009
I had a little argument with someone last week. WordPress is, they said, a pile of rubbish. They'd spent an hour typing up a post and WP refused to publish it! Or rather, it said it had published it, but it refused to show up on the front page except as a link in the sidebar. That sidebar link was the easy clue: what they'd written was a page, not a post. And their response, quite rightly, was... Read more
April 17, 2009
There are lots of reasons you might want to exclude one particular category from your blog's front page. Today, for example, I wanted the "Quote of the Day" on WhoTube to be only in the sidebar, not in the main column of content. In my personal blog, I want to exclude my Twitter archives from the front page. And happily, this is a very easy thing to do; you don't even need a plugin, just one... Read more
April 16, 2009
Talk about frequently asked questions: four people have asked me this one this week already! But there must be plenty of others who, like me when I first approached WP, don't even realise there is a difference, or that there are two different flavours of WordPress to deal with. The least you need to know WordPress.com is a free, hosted blog system (similar to Blogger). Your blog lives on... Read more
April 6, 2009
So you've found a theme you like, and added it to your WordPress installation, but when you go to your dashboard to activate it, it's not there. The most likely cause of this is that the theme hasn't been uploaded exactly correctly, and therefore WP can't see it. Here's how to check: Open up your FTP client. Navigate on the server side to wp-content/themes. Do you see the theme folder... Read more
December 27, 2008
I've been looking a lot at WordPress themes recently, and it never ceases to amaze me that so many people are giving away such incredibly good design work. We're lucky to be part of this community. But then there are always the ones where you think, what were they on? What were they thinking of? Inevitably, that's a personal thing: someone reading this will be thinking that this blog is a whole... Read more
November 24, 2008
If your theme isn't showing up in your WP admin section *at all*, then this post is what you're looking for. Just a quickie for anyone who makes their own WP themes I've spent an hour picking my way through forum posts, trying to find out why my theme doesn't preview through the Dashboard > Design page. It works fine, as you can see, but preview is just a blank white page. Turns out... Read more