Here’s a short video tutorial explaining how to add content to your WordPress site. It includes an explanation of the difference between posts and pages, how to paste in content from a Word file, instructions for uploading photos, how to create a link, how to bold or italicize text, and how to add categories.
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Category Archives: Tutorials
Optimize Plug-in Scripts for WordPress
If you view the source on a WordPress site, you’ll likely see a lot of javascript and css files that are loaded by plug-ins. In most cases, those files aren’t needed on every page and can be removed.
For instance, the styling and javascripts for a contact form is usually only needed on the page where the actual contact form is. Or styling for something like WP-PageNavi might as well go in your own stylesheet rather than being loaded separately by the plug-in.
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Theming Process
I just finished building a WordPress website for a local artist in Portland. Instead of just adding another screenshot to my portfolio, I thought I’d make a video showing my process and how the site will actually be used by the client.
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Dynamic Body Classes for WordPress Styling
I’ve been using the WordPress theme Thematic for the last few months and have become spoiled by dynamic body classes. Thematic automatically appends about 20 classes to the body tag which allows a great degree of control over the styling of the site based on who’s visiting, what page they’re viewing, and what browser they use. This post is about how dynamic classes work and how you can add them to any WordPress theme.
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Podcasting with Feedburner + iTunes
I’ve spent the last week working on a podcast project using WordPress, Feedburner and iTunes. In my numerous searches of the web, I never found the silver bullet tutorial that explains how to do this well. And perhaps most people, after wading through the thicket of Feedburner options, just give up. I wouldn’t blame them. But it is possible, and here’s how it’s done.
Useful Thematic Filters
The learning curve on Thematic is a bit steep if you’ve never used filters and hooks before. The Thematic guide is a great place to start, and by looking at the functions files of other released themes I’ve found most of what I need. But here’s my growing list of Thematic filters for easy reference:
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Memory Size of 33554432 Bytes Exhausted
I got the following message when I tried to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress through the dashboard:
Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted
Thankfully, it was an easy fix. I simply added the following line to the wp-config.php file:
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');
If this doesn’t fix it on your site, you may also have to adjust the php.ini files. If so, read this post about the php.ini memory limits.
As always, thanks to the good people in the WordPress forums for discussing this topic.
WordPress and SEO
Matt Cutts, a software engineer for Google, gave a talk at WordCamp San Francisco 2009.
According to Matt, “WordPress takes care of 80-90% of (the mechanics of ) Search Engine Optimization (SEO)”. So by using WordPress, you are already better positioned for search than the majority of websites. But what else contributes to page rank and search optimization?
I would highly recommend watching Matt’s presentation in full, but if you don’t have 45 minutes to spare, I took some notes:
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Increasing the upload_max_filesize in WordPress
The default upload file size for WordPress is 2 MB, which is a problem if you want to upload a large media files. If you get this error, “The uploaded file exceeds the upload_max_filesize directive in php.ini”, follow these steps:
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