After you have found your ideal domain name, go to 1and1 to register it.  All you have to do is find their “Domains” section, enter in the name you have already found and follow their instructions.  Creating an account is very easy with 1and1.

I have heard this complaint form a couple different people where all of a sudden their visual editor is gone and they only have the plain-text (HTML) version of editor.  It seems like this mostly happens after an upgrade, but in older versions of WordPress it seemed to happen almost randomly. Either way, if you are used to the visual editor, having it disappear can be quite a jarring experience.

The solution is usually pretty easy. Just click your username in the top right corner of your WordPress administration screen.  This will take you to your profile page.

The very first option on this page is a checkbox, which if checked will keep the visual editor from showing. Make sure this box is unchecked and then click the “Update Profile” button at the bottom of the page.

Now, go back to your “Add new” post page and you should see your editor. It will look similar to this:

I spent a good 30 minutes trying to figure out how to give a User administrator access throughout all of the the WordPress MU blogs.  Here’s what I found:

1) Under the Users Menu, click on the User’s name

2) Click on the ‘Grant this user super admin privileges for the Network.’ Radio button.

3) Scroll down and click ‘Update User’

That’s it!  You’re finished.

Now that user can do things like installing plugins or themes sitewide.  Slick, isn’t it?

Sometimes you want to make sure that your smilies do not get turned into graphics inside your posts.  All you have to do is change one of your WordPress configuration settings.

Here are the steps to take care of this setting:

1. Log into the backend of your WordPress site and then navigate to Settings >> Writing.
2. Once you are on this page, you will see a page like this:

3. Just un-check the box indicated in the picture above (Convert emoticons like to graphics on display).

4. Save the settings with the button at the bottom and you are all done.

Any other questions or comments? Please feel free to contact us or leave a comment for us below.

If you are not changing the domain of your WordPress site, please check out our article called “Moving Your WordPress Site to a New Server”.

We will cover both scenarios of what to do if you need to change your WordPress domain name, the first being the “right” way to do this, and the second being the more likely “oh, crap!” way to do it.

ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS backup your database before you make a major change with WordPress. Always.

The right way to change your WordPress domain

The thing that makes this the right way to move your WordPress blog, is that you are doing these steps before you move the scripts or change your domain.

Note: You will NOT be able to access your blog once you make this change, until you move it to the new domain.

Simply go to your Settings >> General administration area of your blog.

You will see a page that has your Blog’s URL on it twice, change the URL to the right one for where your blog is going, then click save.

Now you can move the database and the scripts to your new server, or just switch the domain around!

The “other” way to move your WordPress blog to a new domain

I referred to this as the “oh, crap!” way of handling this transition above, because most times if you have to resort to this, then you made a mistake or skipped steps.

This is pretty simple to do as well, but there are a few more steps involved.  You will need to get into the database to make some changes there, as the domain that the WordPress files (scripts) on your server are associated with is stored in the database.

The first step is to get to your wp_options table in your database.  The screenshots we use are of phpMyAdmin which is a great database tool that most hosts provide for MySQL/PHP.  You can always do this manually via SSH if your host allows that sort of activity.

Sometimes your wp_options table will be named something like wp_abcsde_options, but you will always be able to find it from the “_options” at the end of the table name.

Once you have opened the link for the _options table, just click the “Search” link. this will help you build the request you need so that you can change the right data.

The Search tab will show you a form like the image below, just type in your old domain into the option_value, and choose the “Like %…%” option. When you press “Go”, phpMyAdmin will generate the query and show you the matching results.

The results will show in similar fashion to the next image, you will want to click the “Check All” link, then the “Edit” button. The Edit button is a little pencil.

Once you click “Edit” you will see a screen with a box like the below image for EACH of the items that you checked the boxes for on the previous screen.  Find every instance of your old domain and replace it with the new one.  Using Ctrl + F in the browser to find these strings makes things very easy.

You will notice that some of the boxes have more than just a single string of a URL.  In these cases, it is important to make sure you find ALL of the places where your old domain was, and replace them with the new one.

When you are all done, just click “Go” and your information will be saved. If your site is already on the new domain, you should be able to use your blog immediately.  If not, you can move your site after these steps.

When you get your site set up, or you have your site set up and you have found a theme you like and that fits your website’s purpose, you need to install it.

Just about the only way to install your theme is to use an FTP program to push it to your server into the /wp-content/themes directory.  So, if your theme comes in a directory called “MyTheme”, you will push that entire directory up to the server.  You will now look in the themes directory and see “MyTheme” as a directory there.

Once the files are all up on the server, login to wordpress and choose the Design Tab.

You should see something similar to this:

As you can see on this screenshot, the default “Kubrick” theme is chosen for my blog because it is at the top left corner under the “Current Theme” header.  Also, you can see that there are two other themese available to me.  The “WordPress Classic” theme, and the “SilverLight” theme.  I have uploaded the silver light theme to my server just the way I talked about previously in this article.

WordPress is smart enough, and the designs are built to specification, so that you can see a preview of the theme from this page.  More importantly, you can click the preview to make that theme the current theme on your site. This is particularly handy, when you are a picky person about the themes you use and can’t make up your mind until you see it on your own site.

My suggestion for you is to open one tab of your browser to the Design page on your wordpress admin and open a second tab to the front page of your WordPress site.  (If your browser doesn’t have tabs, download firefox – you will be blown away at what you were missing).  This way, when you change the them from the Design picker, you can go to your live site and refresh the page to see what it looks like.  If you like the one you are looking at, you are done picking your theme.

Next Article: Writing Posts and Pages

———–  Happy 4th of July!! ———

When you first install WordPress you will find that the theme is, well, bare.  While some famous blogs like XKCD (also one of my favorite webcomics) choose to leave their blogs with the original theme, this sort of thing only works for people who already have TONS of traffic coming to their site.

The theme is the first thing that people are going to see of your site, besides the header text.  The reason is that for the most part colors jump out of the page faster for the eye than the text, except for the unfortunate minority of people who are either completely or partially colorblind (I am sincerely sorry about this, but this is the reality of the world).

You can seriously turn away people from your site if you have a theme that either has colors that clash, that is poorly implemented in XHTML & CSS, or that is just plain ugly.  I am one of those people that is picky about a site based on how ugly it is, or how poor the interface is.  My friend even has a site to feature some of the “worst of the worst” in web design that we come across: Who did this Crappy Website. (You don’t want to end up there, even if you just chose a theme from a list…)

When you are choosing your theme there are a couple things you have to think about (I will explain each later):

1. How proficient am I with XHTML/CSS?
2. What are my company’s colors?  What are my colors?
3. How do I want my page to be laid out?  Does the layout I chose make sense for my project?
4. What do I want my site to “say” to a user who is just seeing my site at a glance?
5. Is the template I chose readable?
6. Does the template work in all browsers that I expect my visitors to use?

Questions To Ask Yourself – answered

How Proficient am I with PHP/XHTML/CSS?

• First, the reason why I asked this question: If you like a template but want the color changed, or something moved, you need to know at the very least some CSS.  If you want something to be moved, you might have to know XHTML (if you are lucky) or PHP.

What are my company’s colors? What are my colors?

• I know that second question sounds silly, but really think about it.  You may LOVE the way a theme does its layout, but the colors are hideous.  Are you willing to deal with the ugly colors?
• Also, if you don’t like a certain color scheme, you should be pretty confident that there are other people who don’t like it either.

How do I want my page to be laid out? Does the layout I chose make sense for my project?

• This is important, because you want the most important information available to your visitors to be “above the fold”.  This means, that when the page loads, the important information should be available without scrolling. Think about it this way: when you search Google for a specific keyword, how likely are you to click one of the first 4 links on the page?  How likely are you to scroll?  How likely are you to go to the second page?

What do I want my site to “say” to a user who is just seeing my site at a glance?

• When someone sees a screen shot of your site, or they have a browser window open, or if they are searching for a specific thing on the internet they are going to scan your site quickly.  It is important to take this into consideration.  When someone visits your site, and they leave after viewing one page, this is called a bounce.  You want to prevent people from bouncing off your site.  The more they bounce, the less they read and the less money you can make with your site (if you have monitized your site).
• You want to figure out what the “feeling” is that you want from your site.  It might be serious, fun, exciting, happy, whatever.  You need to consider this feeling when you choose a theme.  When I choose a theme I might pick 10 different themes that I think will work, and then put them on the server.  I will make them active (more on this later), and then decide which one I like when my content is displayed in the theme.  Very rarely do I get it right the first time.

Is the template I chose readable?

• You may have a template that you think is perfect for your mission.  It might be.  But you need to make sure that the widest number of the type of people you will attract can read your site.  If the site uses fonts that are too small, or the background color is too similar or clashes with the text colors you may drive visitors away.  Would you go to a site that was un-readable?

Does the template work in all browsers that I expect my visitors to use?

• Most if not all template sites have a “preview” or “test run” of the templates they have in inventory. Look at your templates in different browsers (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari).  You might find out that a specific browser does not work well with your template.  This gives you two options 1) find a new template or 2) Fix it (requires XHTML/CSS knowledge).

The next thing you need to do is install your theme, and see if it looks right with your content.  If you use a host that does the 1-click installs like Dreamhost, then you will already have a bunch of themes installed fore free.  Keep in mind though, everyone who uses that host has those installed for free as well…individuality is a good thing to have on the web.

Next Article: Installing and Changing your Themes

From WordPress:

Permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories and other lists of weblog postings. A permalink is what another weblogger will use to link to your article (or section), or how you might send a link to your story in an e-mail message. The URL to each post should be permanent, and never change — hence permalink. (From WordPress Permalinks)

This is enough of a reason to make sure that you are using permalinks and not wordpress’s default linking structure (yourdomain.com/?p=100 — which means post 100).  Another really good reason to make sure that you use permalinks is for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes.  Any bit of information that can be used to rank your site will be, including your url.  If you url can include information about the page, in this case the post title, it will help your page rank for those keywords.

Breaking Down the Permalink

I’ll break down the permalink structure. The URL for this article that you are reading is:

http://www.wp-relief.com/13/2008/06/23/permalinks/

Base url: http://www.wp-relief.com/ – this is the domain name of this site.

Post ID: /13/ – this is the auto-incremented ID that WordPress gives to posts, as they are created.

Date of Post: /2008/06/23/ – The publish date of the article

Name of Post: /permalinks/ – The post title changed to all lowercase, with spaces replaced with “_”.  Another example of this is /installing-wordpress-to-your-server/.

How to set up your permalinks

If you login to wordpress, and go to “Settings”, then “Permalinks” you will see options for managing your permalinks. It should look similar to this:

The first section on this page will allow you to choose how you want your permalinks to be created.  Once you make your decision and hit the update button, your permalinks will be recreated.  My suggestion is to make the decision as to how you want your permalinks to be created as soon as possible in your blog’s life.  The reason is that search engines will have the original link and the content on that page associated with your keywords.  If you change the link, you are effectively removing that page from the search engines.  The other problem you could have, is that if a search engine pulls up the page using the new permalink before the old one is de-listed, then you could get in trouble for having duplicate content.  Search Engines are smart, but they don’t know that you changed your permalink structure, so they assume that every new URL they come across from your site is a new page.

Custom Settings: You can customize the links for posts on your site by choosing one of the pre-defined settings, or a custom built setting.

The tags that you can use to formulate your permalinks are:

%year%

The year of the post, four digits, for example 2004

%monthnum%

Month of the year, for example 05

%day%

Day of the month, for example 28

%hour%

Hour of the day, for example 15

%minute%

Minute of the hour, for example 43

%second%

Second of the minute, for example 33

%postname%

A sanitized version of the title of the post (post slug field on Edit Post/Page panel). So “This Is A Great Post!” becomes this-is-a-great-post in the URI (see Using only %postname%)

%post_id%

The unique ID # of the post, for example 423

%category%

A sanitized version of the category name (category slug field on New/Edit Category panel). Nested sub-categories appear as nested directories in the URI.

%author%

A sanitized version of the author name.

This information comes from WordPress’ Permalinks Page.

The main idea that you HAVE to make sure you remember about a custom permalink structure is that you want every post URL to be different.  This is easily accomplished by making sure that you:

end your structure with either %post_id% or %postname% (e.g. /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/) so that each permalink points to an individual post.

This information comes from WordPress’ Permalinks Page.

Optional: This area lets you customize the base “folder” that will be in your links to categories and tags.  There is a good example on the admin page for how to use this feature:

If you like, you may enter custom structures for your category and tag URLs here. For example, using /topics/ as your category base would make your category links like http://example.org/topics/uncategorized/. If you leave these blank the defaults will be used.

Save your changes and check the front-side of your blog, you will find that your permalinks have been updated for your posts and categories.

Suggested Permalink Structure

The most basic permalink structure that I suggest you use for a regular blog is:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

This permalink structure will almost guarantee different links for every post unless you post the same name post on the same day.  If this happens, WordPress will automatically append a number to the end of the %postname%.

There are more ideal permalinks for specific instances.  For example: If you are a news site and you want to be included into Google News, you have to use a three digit unique id in every post.  This is easily done with the %post_id% variable from above.  And you can put it anywhere in the permalink, I suggest at the beginning.  So your permalink would look like this:

/%post_id%/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

Next Article: Choosing Your Theme

The title of your blog is the first thing that your users are going to see.It will more than likely be the  most prominent thing at the top of any page on your site. Think of this as how you are branding your site.

The biggest and most prominent things on a Coke canis the bright red color and the silver lettering. Most people can tell you someone is holding a coke can from 100 yards away, just by the distinctive red color. You need this sort of branding for your site as well.

Some people have a logo, some people just have text. It is possible to have both!

When I am setting up a WordPress blog in my hosting environment, I admit, I get to skip steps. They have what are called 1-click installs. In reality, there is more than one click involved, but it saves me tons of time when I am setting up WordPress or other Open Source software. When I go through the process, I end up with something similar to what you see in the picture below, a blog with a title and the generic WordPress subtitle “Just another weblog”.

Unless you are “just another weblog”, you probably want to change this text. If you just installed WordPress from scratch, without “cheating” like I do, you will probably see:

Blog

Just another Weblog

This is ok, because we will be making the change for both items in the same place.

The place where we make these changes is in the admin side of the site, where you make posts, and manage users (see Logging Into WordPress ).  Go to the “Settings” tab on the right side of your admin header:

Settings Page

Blog Title:  This is the title of your blog, in many themes this text is actually displayed in the header of the public side of your blog.

Tagline: Your tagline gives users an idea of what to expect from your blog, at a glance.

WordPress address (URL):This is the actual address of your blog, it is very important to make sure this is correct.  If it is not correct, you may not be able to log into the admin side of your site.  Also you may run into problems with images and links being incorrect on the site.  I would suggest that you never change this, unless you plan to move your site.

Blog address (URL):This is where you have located your WordPress files, if that is different from where your wordpress address (above) is pointing.  This lets you put all your WordPress files in another directory so that you keep your root directory free from files.

Email address:This is the address that your system will use to notify people, and that it will use to notify you of comments, trackbacks, etc.

Membership:The membership setting can make or break your interaction with your own site.  The reason I say this, is that if you make your commenting open to everyone without registration, you can end up with some very … erm  … interesting comments.

New User Default Role:When a user registers, the system will give them a user type. This determines what their permissions in the system are.

Timezone: Make this match the timezone you are in, don’t worry about your readers. It is important that your timezone matches you.  You can use this chart to match the GMT syntax to your time zone.

Date Format: This is the setting that determines how your dates are displayed on your site.  The letters you can use to format your date can be found here (top of chart): PHP Date Format.

Time Format:This is the setting that determines how your times are displayed on your site.  The letters you can use to format your date can be found here (bottom of chart): PHP Date Format.

Week Starts on:Simple, the day of the week you like your calendar to start on.  Be an individual, start your week on Wednesday.

Next Article: Permalinks