As I said above the big “Wow” I got after upgrading a test blog was the main dashboard view and arrangement. The first thing I thought was “I definitely will need to change most of my step-by-step guides now”. The main dashboard is arranged with the menus on a left sidebar instead of across the top and has eight available modules in the main area. The main eight modules can be arranged to your liking with simple drag-and-drop and you can use the Screen Options drop-down menu to choose what modules you want displayed.

On the left sidebar there are two modules containing the usual main menus, clicking a main menu item will expand to show the available sub-menu items under it. The first is for managing posts, media, links , pages and comments. All other menus are in another lower module. The top sidebar module menu items are listed in this order:

1. Posts
2. Media
3. Links (Blogroll)
4. Pages
5. Comments

And the lower module contains these items:

1. Appearance
2. Plugins
3. Users
4. Tools (New)
5. Settings

As you can see the WordPress dashboard changes, at least the look, is significant. Newbies may be a bit confused navigating it if reading some older WordPress guides (Mine included). But experienced WordPress bloggers should have no problem finding their way around the new dashboard.

I haven’t given the WordPress version 2.7 Beta3 much of test yet and planned to do so before writing anything about it. But with the major dashboard change I figured I could get a quick post out before doing much testing.

For more on the notable changes and a link to download WordPress 2.7 Beta 3, check out this post on WordPress Hacks: WordPress 2.7 Beta 3 Released

The first place to look for WordPress themes is the official WordPress Theme Directory. This is probably the safest place to find a decent free WordPress theme. Why is it the safest? Well all themes uploaded are subject to review and if it doesn’t cut it it will not be made available for download on this site.
Requirements for a theme on the WordPress Theme Directory are as follows:

In order to be added to the directory each theme must meet the following requirements:

1. A single zip file, with all of the files themes file included.
2. There must be a style.css file containing:
1. Name (which must be unique to the directory)
2. Tags
3. Version (in the format of x.x or x.x.x and must be unique to the theme)
4. Align classes: .alignright, .alignleft, .aligncenter (see http://codex.wordpress.org/CSS for more details)
3. The screenshot file name must be screenshot.png, and be a real screenshot of the theme, not a splash screen.
4. Licensing must be GPL compatible.
5. No hidden, paid or sponsored links in the theme. Links back to the author’s site are fine.
6. Expose RSS feeds
7. Support Gravatars
8. Support widgets
9. Show post categories and tags
10. Show the blog title and tag line
11. The theme must be your own original work.
12. Adult/mature themes are not allowed.

All themes are subject to review.

So why do these people spend all this time cranking out free WordPress themes for others to use? I am not sure but I guess one reason would be that some geeks just love to mess with code! Another is to get their website’s link on as many blogs as possible and usually have a link in the footer of the theme. So if you are using a free WordPress theme please show the geek some link love and keep his link in tact.

I try not to get political here on WordPressMax to keep from offending anyone. But I will tell you that I have the utmost respect and reverence for all our veterans. My Grandfather fought in the first World War, and I know or knew many of the Greatest Generation that have fought in the second. I love to watch old movies on AMC and TCM and I just finished watching, for the 100th time, and if you have never seen The Longest Day, or don’t know what happened on the “Longest Day” then I suggest you educate yourself about the freedom you are enjoying. No matter what country you live in, chances are that the people that fought and died on that Longest Day and the days after, had something to do with the language you speak, the life you live and the freedom you enjoy…

Thanks to all Veterans, from the beginning in a small port town in New England, those that fought to keep the union together and free all people, those in the war to end all wars, to the Greatest Generation to end genocide and world domination, Korea, Vietnam, and of course those serving right now against terror. You are the True Heroes and I thank you for your service.

I can only hope your next commander has the same sense of freedom and patriotism. May God Help Us All.

This is a common question that some new WordPress bloggers have and the explanation is quite simple. Categories will not show on the front side of the blog until you make a post within that category. So you see it’s very simple, don’t think there is something wrong with your WordPress blog when this happens, it’s by design. The same goes for Links or Blogroll categories, the link category will not show either until you have a link created within it.

Remember you can add and edit the categories any time you want. But if you edit a category’s slug and you are using category in your permalink structure you will alter the URL of the posts within the category you edit.

Before I get into the ease of this little option available in the WordPress dashboard, I will warn some that your sites hosting account might keep you from using it. Without going into too much techno geek speak, some hosting accounts limit access to a certain setting that will not allow this option to work, some Host4Profit accounts might need file permissions changed or access to the temp folder set. Or you might need to make your WordPress plugins folder and all the folders within it writable, meaning that you need to change the permissions on them to 666 or 777 or in geek speak CHMOD them to 666 or 777.

To upgrade a plugin you need to have your hosting account’s FTP information ready, then in the WordPress dashboard click the Plugins menu. Find a plugin that needs upgraded by looking at the warning below it about an out of date plugin and click the light blue upgrade automatically link.

That should take you the the next screen that asks for the FTP information.

I know a lot of H4P people may use this guide so your settings for this are as follows:
yoursite.com (without the the http://www.) for the Hostname and the same username and password used to login to the hosting account. All others should use the same FTP information that your hosting account specifies and the Use SSL box should not need changed. Fill in the information and then click the Proceed button.

A few cautions should be mentioned here, one is if you modified a plugin by directly editing the files, those changes will be lost and need to be done again. Some plugins will not automatically reactivate and need manually activated. Some more advanced plugins may need configured again and you should always check the plugin’s settings and functionality after an upgrade. Some even more advanced plugins with multiple folders or that require files to be placed in directories other than the plugins directory will probably not work and need upgraded manually.

Keeping your WordPress blog up to date in small increments is a lot easier than it is to let it go for a long period of time. Believe me it’s a lot easier resolving issues with one plugin than it is to fix or find replacements for a bunch of them after you upgrade from WordPress version 1.5 to 2.6! Hopefully the integrated WordPress automatic upgrade option that is coming soon will work as well as the automatic plugin upgrade works!

Two points I want to make here in my rant: Recently some clueless contacted me regarding some PLR WordPress templates he purchased (or got ripped off with junk). He asked if he sent them to me he would pay me to look them over and explain to him how to “put them together”. The fist files he sent were a bunch of junk HTML splash page templates. I replied that these were not WordPress themes. He insisted they were because they used CSS stylesheets. I then took the time to explain to him that CSS is used in more than WordPress, it was a long informative email that took me some time to compose. He then sent another batch and the link to the site he got ripped off from. The link had no refernece to WordPress or how to use these PLR files.

The second batch had two poorly coded WordPress themes that were nothing more than the default theme with a custom header. I wrote back again telling him how to upload and use these files, and again that these files were all just separate templates to use or resell. The funny thing is that in all the 6 or so email exchanges he replied within an hour but after the last one with all the answers… no reply. I contacted him a few days later regarding payment he went off on me saying I didn’t help him and was rude for asking compensation. I spent about two hours messing with this idiot and since he didn’t like the fact that I told him he paid for junk he didn’t want to pay me. Lesson learned: Get paid upfront or at least partially for any free lance work you do online. I don’t always ask for payment upfront because the time it takes is unknown for some of the special requests I get.

The next point is very bothersome and has required me to password protect one of the more popular pages on this site. Recently it came to my attention that another free lancer who is setting up WordPress blogs, rather poorly I might add, has been sending people to this site to learn how to finalize and use the WordPress blogs he is setting up for less than I charge. These sites have no SEO, permalinks or a ping list (among other critical missing configurations) and his people are coming to me asking for help! Hey I don’t mind the competition at all but I’ll be damned if I let him or anyone else use my site for his support system. I spent a lot of time writing the guides on WPM to help my clients and many others, and all the content is still available to all except for the one page that has all the critical information on one page.

So beware of the cost of anything if it is real cheap there is a reason. Be careful online, people will steal from you even if they don’t take your content they can take your time or use your content for their gain. There are lazy thieves everywhere even on the Internet.

If I have setup your blog for you and you want access to the now password protected WordPress Optimization Guide, click here to contact me for the password.

I inherited the new phone from my daughter who got it just a few months ago when it was the latest and greatest. But when the next best thing came out , I think the HTC Touch Pro, she had to have it so she stole my upgrade and we switched phones.

So I am posting this with the phone and while I like all its features like getting email, web browsing, navigation and the full keyboard. My fingers are getting tired this far into this post.

Blogging from a cell or smartphone may be a decent way of making short all text posts, but some of the more advanced features on the write post menu are not usable or just too cumbersome to use. But it may be something useful when out and about and an idea comes to you for a quick post.

The latter I spoke about is how I learned to make a 404 error redirect to a specific URL. In regard to the case I spoke about above, someone contacted me to teach them how to upload a few “custom” PLR WordPress themes they had purchased. First let me say that these themes were total junk and just a modified version of the default theme with a different header graphic (that needed to be edited) and of course the sellers links embedded all throughout the theme. Don’t get me wrong a good WordPress theme author should have a link in at least the footer in return for the free theme. But in this case it was like stealing traffic especially for such a crappy theme. It wasn’t bad enough that the links were scattered throughout the theme, the theme actually redirected the visitor away from the blog if a 404 error occurred.

Here is how easy it is to do if your theme has a 404 error template file (404.php) and you want to specify an actual URL to redirect your visitors to for the 404 error. Simply use this code in the entire 404.php file and then specify the actual URL:

<?php
header( ‘Location: http://www.ChangeToActualURL.com’ ) ;
?>

There are other methods and solutions like on this site, at the time of this post, it redirects to a page that offers to search the site, or click some AdSense ads, hey I have kids to feed! This is done using code that is actually within the main index file instead of a separate 404.php file. There are so many different WordPress themes and each author has their own idea of a 404 error page so I can’t possibly give solutions for each method in this post. But you should make sure your visitors are not getting hijacked by a pirate WordPress theme author or theme reseller!

The first step is to get a handy little WordPress plugin called Single Bookmark Category List. The one file plugin installs like any other, just upload the file to your wp-admin/plugins folder and activate it. Now here is where you see the flexibility of WordPress. Say you want to have some type of site menu on your sidebar. You can use it to link to your best posts, post categories, or pages. Or if you have a few affiliate links you want to promote and of course links to your friends or sites you want to share with others.
The next step is to add a new link category or as many categories as you need. In the WordPress dashboard, click Manage, Links Categories.

Now add a new link category, if you don’t give it one, the category slug will default to the same as the title. If you want to fill in the optional description, scroll down and click the Add Category button.

The next step is adding a link to the proper link category. Click Manage then Links and add a new link. Remember this can be anything you want, like a page, a post, an affiliate link or any other link. When adding a new link it is important to expand the lower Categories box and I suggest choosing only one category for the link to be placed in unless you want it to show in different places on the sidebar.

After you have the link categories and links added now it is time to add them to the sidebar. Click Design then Widgets. Scroll down and add as many Single Bookmark Category Widgets (up to nine) as you need.

Now you simply add the Bookmarks From Category widgets to the sidebar, click the edit link on the added widget to expand them and choose what link category you want each one to display. Drag the widgets vertically into the desired position and scroll down and click the Save Changes button.

I hope you see the possibilities here, in fact I think this is a good solution for those running WordPress for a more traditional website. Another option with this is to remove the pages sidebar widget and manually add your WordPress pages into link categories for better site navigation and a more user friendly site.

Click on Design from the main panel and then Theme Editor. On the right side you will see a list of the current theme’s templates. If you see a “Page Template” click that and the code will appear in the editor box. Copy all the code in the editor and paste it into Notepad or Wordpad and save the file on your computer for backup. Now at the very bottom of the editor box you should see this bit of code:

</div>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

That is telling the page template to get the themes footer, what we are going to do is tell the page template to also get the sidebar. Replace the above code with the following code and click “Update File”

</div>

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

<?php get_footer(); ?>

If you don’t see a “Page Template” then try the same steps above with the “Main Index Template” but be sure to copy the unedited code first into Wordpad or Notepad so you can put things back if they don’t work. Keep in mind that all WordPress themes are a little different and made by many different people so the files in them will vary.

If you managed to corrupt your theme’s templates files and it’s not displaying properly or worse you can’t even see your blog; go back and paste in the unedited text you saved and click “Update File” to put things back. What? You didn’t save a backup? Well then you will need to delete the corrupt file in your hosting account and upload an unedited version of it. Not sure what file you messed up? Man, you are a butcher! Then upload a complete unedited version of the entire template to your hosting account.

Knowing how to add the WordPress sidebar to a page template is a great way to use a specific landing page that doesn’t change yet still looks like the rest of your WordPress blog.

The final step in this WordPress guide can be found on here: Add Background Color To Single Page Sidebar On Default WordPress Theme