Tagged : Wordpress

in Tech

Adding Crop Height Thumbnails to WordPress

Here is a quick tidbit of help if you’re looking to add thumbnails to your WordPress homepage, and are having issues with the sizing. I added the thumbnails to the homepage of this site (at the time of writing I am using the Peak WordPress theme), but had some issues with sizing. I added a new thumbnail type, but the portrait oriented photos would either come out constrained to the height parameter I set, or they would extend below the landscape oriented thumbnails. I just wanted them to all be nice and even looking!

To get past this blunder, here is what I did: Continue reading “Adding Crop Height Thumbnails to WordPress” »

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WordPress 3.2.1 Issues – Post Tags, Links, Images, Date Change Don’t Work

I tend to blindly update my WordPress installation with only the occasional database and content file backup thrown in there. While that may not be best practice, from what I can ascertain, it is common practice.

With the significant changes in WordPress 3.2 and subsequently 3.2.1 I got caught with my pants down. All of a sudden none of my post tags were working, neither was image editing, nor links. Every time I tried to enter a post tag or link I’d get bounced out of my post, or the page would refresh.

After much screwing around I came up with the following solution/workaround to the problem.

  1. Check to make sure you are running a compatible version of PHP and MySQL database. You can do this by tediously comparing version details from your web host, or install the Health Check plugin to make sure you’re compatible. Also, see WordPress 3.2 minimum requirements.
  2. If you do not have the correct version of PHP or MySQL check with your hosting provider to see if they can help you by updating, or if you provide your own hosting, update your PHP and MySQL to the current version.
  3. Update all of your active plugins. This actually turned out to my my problem. The only out of date plugin that I had was Disqus, and after I updated it, everything magically began to work again. It seems like a stupid easy solution, but sometimes all you need to do is “turn it on and off again.”
This fix may not work for your individual problem, but if you do come up with another solution or issue, please feel free to share below.
in Tech

Woo Themes Canvas WordPress Theme Review

Since my original review on WooThemes’ Canvas premium WordPress theme, much has changed on this very versatile template.

First of all, some of bugs and quirks that existed in the first version of Canvas have been ironed out, which is a testament to the Woo team as they do actually stand behind and continue to improve their product offering. Even their WooThemes back end dashboard, known as Woo Framework, continues to improve and allow for easy customization.

As the name implies, the Canvas theme is really like starting from scratch. It provides you the basic architecture and flexibility to choose roughly how you want your WordPress website to look, and leaves you to color in the details. To begin with, Canvas offers several basic layout options: Tumblog, a pretty straightforward rolling blog format; Magazine, basically a spiffy front page with feature slider and two column post headers below; and Business, which offers a completely non-blog looking front page great for showing off your business services in a professional way, while maintaining the functionality of a WordPress blog. Continue reading “Woo Themes Canvas WordPress Theme Review” »

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WooThemes Delicious Premium WordPress Food Blog Theme

WordPress is the ideal platform for food blogging and there are certainly no shortage of themes out there. While you can go with a free theme template, my personal experience is that you get what you pay for, and there are a few players in the WordPress Premium Themes arena that are doing an excellent job — one of which is WooThemes.

When WooThemes released the Delicious Magazine theme for WordPress I was pretty excited. Finally a foodie specific WordPress theme! The look is clean and magazine theme like and offers up a featured posts area at the top and a customizable spotlight area immediately below.

I like the WooThemes engine/control panel that runs their themes and this to me is the mark of a good theme maker. For this reason I tend to stick to some of the larger WordPress template makers because they have spent the time to develop the back end user interface and customization.

After using the Delicious theme I found that it mostly does what I want it to do as far as my foodie blogging is concerned and it allows me to publish a slick looking blog with little effort. There were a couple of areas, particularly the homepage section titles that required a little bit of code fiddling, but it was not a major concern. If you want to do this hopefully you have a friend that can do some basic HTML code adjustments.

The other negative is that the sidebar is slightly smaller than a typical Google 300×250 square ad. This too can be adjusted with a bit of fiddling, but be forewarned that the sidebar does not accomodate that size ad perfectly.

Minus a couple of small faults I think the Delicious theme by WooThemes is probably one of the best food blog templates going. Definitely worth the price. I personally run enough blogs and tinker in WordPress enough that the subscription that WooThemes offers is well worth it, but otherwise expect to spend about $70.

You can buy the Delicious Theme or check out a live demo here.

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WordPress Tip: Center Align Sidebar Ads

If you’re placing advertisements such as Google AdSense ads in your WordPress sidebar using the Text Widget an easy way to have it align in the center of the Sidebar is to add a paragraph tag around the ad code so your code will look like it does below. Note the coloured <p> tags at the top and bottom.

<p align=”center”>
<script type=”text/javascript”><!–google_ad_client = “ca-pub-xxgoogleadsenseidxx”;/* Wide Skyscraper */google_ad_slot = “9832035″;google_ad_width = 160;google_ad_height = 600;//–></script><script type=”text/javascript”src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”></script>
</p>

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WordPress Tip: After Moving a WordPress Site the Pages Don’t Show Up

I recently moved a WordPress site from one web host to another for a client. The site seemed to be up and running fine, but the pages and posts did not work and I received a “Page not found” notice. Troubleshooting the problem I came up with the following workaround after making sure that my wp-config.php file settings were correct:

  • Login to your WordPress site and go to the PERMALINKS setting under the SETTINGS menu.
  • If your Permalinks were set to anything under default set them back to default noting what the previous settings were.
  • Go back to your PAGES section and view some of the pages. They should show up, however, if you’re using custom menus they may not work. Test to verify. If your menu links don’t work don’t sweat it.
  • Go back to the PERMALINKS settings and change them back to what they were before. My sites are all setup to be Month & Name.

Everything should work now. If not you may have another problem. Be sure that your wp-config.php settings are correct and start the troubleshooting process again.