Great New Wordpress Theme

Regular readers will be aware that I’m a big fan of Brian Gardners Revolution themes – the developers package that I upgraded too has certainly been worth the money. The best bit about the package is that you’re able to download newer themes as they become available – you receive an email as soon as the newest theme is available.

The latest theme is a corker – Revolution Music (aff link). It’s using a plugin I’ve not previously come across to build some great interactivity into your homepage. Whilst the theme suggests music based content I think I’ll be using it on a travel guide that I’m starting soon (get in touch if you publish a European city guide and want to exchange links at some point). I reckon it’d be good for a phones or gadgets site too. Depending upon your skill set you could even adapt one of the other themes in the Revolution suite. If you’re a big YouTube fan (unlike me) then perhaps you’ll have heard of Marina Orlova? Well, see what she’s achieved with a little nip and tuck on her site that uses the Revolution Magazine theme … and remember you’re looking at the theme chaps!

Wordpress 2.6 Upgrade Update

I mentioned a day or so ago about the general release of wordpress 2.6 and how I was going to upgrade a little site of ours. Well I did do the upgrade (..you can guess where this is heading!) but I encountered a couple of problems. The first was nothing to do with wordpress but an issue with my host server settings that was causing my automatic backup to fail. So I upgraded to 2.6 manually and had a couple of issues. A couple of very useful plugins I use reported warnings (Joost de Valk has now addressed these). Also the wordpress admin dashboard was incorrectly reporting that I only had 1 active plugin.

I like the way 2.6 lets you activate multiple plugins in one go and also presents them in groups of active and inactive. Other than that though I didn’t get around to checking out the new features. As it was easy to do in this case I’ve reverted back to 2.5.1 for now until the dust settles.

How about you? Have you moved to 2.6 without any issues?

Wordpress 2.6 Is Released

I see that wordpress 2.6 is now available for general release. I gather that the developers have improved the way you maintain your plugins so I’m looking forward to seeing how that hangs together. You can now also track changes made to posts and pages and I think that’ll be useful too. And theme previews is long overdue!

I don’t normally jump right in and upgrade until the dust has settled but on this occasion I think I might try it out on a quiet site of mine. But first off I’ve got to resolve why the backup plugin isn’t working on my existing installation …backups being a kinda good idea. You do take backups don’t you?

Wordpress Security

One of my wordpress blogs was hacked last week – some swine had stuffed some iffy links into the theme’s header.php file.So it’s got me thinking what sensible precautions should be taken to protect a wordpress installation. Here are some things to consider/action:

1. Keep on an up-to-date release of wordpress and make yourself aware of patches by subscribing to the wordpress development blog.
2. Keep your plugins up-to-date too. Wordpress 2.5 offer automatic plugin upgrades.
3. Ensure you backup your wordpress data. I mentioned a backup plugin a while back.
4. Get your themes from trusted sources.
5. Matt Cutts offers 3 security tips here. Additionally, I think it’s okay to create a empty index.html in your /themes folder to stop snoopers seeing what’s in your theme folder.
6. Use strong passwords and change regularly.

Additionally you can modify your .htaccess file to restrict various actions, though some people may not have the confidence to change that file.

What other precautions do you take to secure your wordpress installation?

Searching In Wordpress 2.5

I’ve upgraded a couple of my blogs to wordpress 2.5 (without a hitch) and it looks good. Auto updates of plugins is an ace timesaver.

Having just read the official wordpress development blog I notice that search now works on pages as well as posts. I’ve tried it and it does of course – this is a great feature as your visitors can obviously now find text within the content of your static pages.

Must get round to upgrading my other sites, including this one – with a new theme perhaps!

Hiding Pages In Wordpress

Depending upon your chosen wordpress theme, everytime you create a new page a link to that page automatically appears in your sites navigation menus.

That’s fine if the page contains juicy content but you probably don’t want to make your privacy policy or your site credits pages too prominent – they clutter up the nav menus and detract from your real content.

Previously, I have been tinkering with the header.php code including an extra bit of code to exclude specific page numbers. But not any more! There’s a great little plug-in called exclude pages – download here – that simply adds a dialogue box to the righthand sidebar when editing pages. Just tick the box if you want the page including in the nav menus, or don’t if you don’t !

As usual, test it to make sure it’s working for you on your chosen theme.

Revolution 2 Theme: H1 Permalinks

I’ve been using version 2 of the Revolution theme (link in my page footer) on a couple of new sites and spotted an issue. When viewing archives the heading of the individual posts is not acting as a permalink to that post – not an issue in version 1 by the way.

Because I’m no wordpress expert it took me some time to find the solution in the Revolution support forum. The solution is to edit the archive.php page and replace the line referring to <h1> with this:

<h1><a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>

I’m finding that copy & paste of php code into wordpress doesn’t always work correctly – anyone know why that is? I suspect some truncation is occuring.

As always, test your changes!

How To Backup Wordpress

If you’re using self hosted wordpress you should be backing up your data (posts, comments,etc).

One easy way to do it is to use this plugin and setup an automatic backup schedule that fits in with your blog update frequency. Setting the backup manager to email you the backup is an easy way to keep chronological copies of your backups.

Another Premium News Theme

As wordpress continues to grow in popularity amongst the search marketing community more and more premium themes are becoming available. Don’t forget that premium often means pay-for.

This very site uses a premium theme and I’ve been posting about how to tweak it here for example. Fellow marketer Stephen Pratley mentions a few places that offer premium themes and I’ve just come across this new premium theme.

For other news on premium and quality free themes take a look at:

• Premium News Themes
• Justin Tadlock (free themes available)
• Premium Press (free themes available)
• Small Potato (some great free themes)

Please do comment on any other quality premium style themes that you’re aware of.

Revolution Theme Optimisation: Recent Posts Count

On your homepage you’ll have a righthand sidebar containing your recent blog posts. Once you have several posts you may find that your list of recent posts is longer than you want it to be – you don’t really want the list to be greater than the height of the main image.

You can modify how many entries the recent posts list will display. After a couple of attempts six entries seems to work for my own homepage. To modify the number of displayed posts edit the file home.php and look for this bit of code and change the default setting to your preference (I’ve bolded my setting of 6):

<div id=”homepageright”>

<h3>Recent Blog Posts</h3>
<ul>
<?php get_archives(‘postbypost’, 6); ?>
</ul>

</div>

Thanks to Melbourne, Australia, internet services company fatdog for prompting this useful post.

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