This video screencast is a quick tutorial for how to set up WordPress 3.0 in multisite mode. The WordPress codex has written instructions if you want to use those as well.
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Signing up With BlueHost
PostedI use BlueHost for all my personal website hosting. In the last six years I’ve received excellent customer support and rarely had downtime on my site. At $6.95 a month it’s one of the cheapest options out there, it’s great for WordPress, and it should cover the needs of most small to medium size companies. Also, if you sign up with BlueHost, they give me a $65 referral fee which I credit towards your bill.
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How to Add Content in WordPress
PostedHere’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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Screencast Tutorial for Gallery Shortcode
PostedA lot of people rely on plug-ins like NextGen to display images on their website, but the built-in WordPress gallery actually works quite well for most situations. Here’s a short video tutorial explaining how to use it. I recommend checking out the codex for deeper explanation of the shortcode and the jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries if you want a better presentation for clicked images.
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Dashboard Support Widgets
PostedWordPress loads a number of dashboard widgets by default when an admin logs into the site. Some of these are incredibly useful, like the comments widget and incoming links. But others aren’t really necessary for the standard user, such as the WordPress News and Development Blog feeds. For the majority of my clients it just clutters up the dashboard and slows down the page load.
On WordPress Weekly a few weeks back, Jacob Goldman mentioned that he removes all these unnecessary widgets on his client’s sites and replaces them with the contact information for his company in case people need support. I thought this was a brilliant idea, but didn’t realize how easy it was until I read an article on dashboard hacks by Cats Who Code.
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5 Reasons to Kill the Splash Page
PostedSplash screens and intro pages are a remnant left over from the early days of the web. It’s typically a flash animation or an introduction graphic that users need to skip past in order to view the actual content of the site. They’re becoming extinct because of SEO reasons, but I’d say at least 50% of my clients still request one.
On principle I won’t do it. I’ll politely refuse and give my reasons. And so far I’ve never had a client turn down a proposal down because I wanted their site to rank better in Google, or because I wanted their users to have a better experience . Here’s five reasons to drop the splash page and make the web a better place:
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Optimize Plug-in Scripts for WordPress
Posted
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
PostedI 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
PostedI’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
PostedI’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
PostedThe 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
PostedI 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.