So here’s a few of my favorite examples of custom WordPress sites that break the mold.

Twisted Sista

A slick showcase of hair products :: Visit Site

Moment Church

A beautiful design and unique layout defy all WordPress expectations :: Visit Site

Wolverine Worldwide

Wolverine represents some major, worldwide shoe brands such as Cat footwear, Merrell, Harley-Davidson Footwear and more. If WordPress is good enough for these guys…. :: Visit Site

Think Space Gallery

A brand new WordPress site for Culver City’s Thinkspace art gallery provides a fitting showcase for great art :: Visit Site

Trevor Hoehne

Awesome portfolio site :: Visit Site

GETideas

WordPress site featuring a BuddyPress communit of over 2700 members. Check out the AWESOME rolloevers on the navigation as a way of presenting a lot of information in an organized way. :: Visit Site

The Kitchen Community

Beautiful full screen site featuring sticking photography for a Colorado-based restaurant :: Visit Site

If you have come across any ground-breaking WordPress sites, please leave them in the comments!

Backing up your WordPress site is a necessity, but it can be hard to find an affordable, easy-to-implement solution that covers all the bases. I’m always on the hunt for the best solution, and the method presented here is just one of several possible solutions.

Here are some of my ideal criteria for a backup solution:

1. Ability to back up both database and files
2. Ability to schedule these backups separately – I haven’t found too many situations where a full file backup is needed as frequently as the database backup
3. Offers backup to an off-site 3rd party. You don’t want to keep backups on your server because if something goes wrong with the server, your backups could be screwed.Backups sent via email are usually only realistic for the database, full site backups tend to get too large to email.

One of my newest favorite solutions is to backup to a free DropBox account. With Dropbox you can get 2GB of storage for free which will keep you going for a while, and should you run out, you can easily delete old backups.

I’ve been using a free plugin called Back WP Up  to accomplish this. It meets all three of my criteria above. The options panel may look a bit overwhelming to newbies so here’s a brief walk through it.

So first of all go to Jobs > Add New

This is a bit of a scary looking screen, but do not fear – the main things to pay attention to are:

1) Job Type, most importantly “Database Backup” and “File Backup” – these are the 2 core areas you want to include in your backup. If you want them both to be backed up at the same time, on the same schedule, you can create one “Job” that will cover both, in which case you want to keep both these boxes checked.

If you want to schedule them separately you will create 2 Jobs – one where the database is checked and another where only the files are checked. You can name your jobs appropriately so it’s easy to identify which is which in your dashboard.

2) When first setting up your jobs, you will need to allow the plugin to connect with your Dropbox account. This plugin also offers numerous other 3rd party cloud storage providers so you can use any of them, but I’m using Dropbox because it’s probably the easiest for newbies to get up and running with. So you’ll go create your Dropbox account then press authenticate to connect the accounts.

3) Job Schedule – select how often you want the backup to run. If you blog frequently you may want to do a daily database backup. if you don’t blog that much, weekly may be more appropriate. the hours/minutes are on a 24 hour clock system. Don’t forget to click “activate scheduling”.

4) Backup File – I like to add a prefix to the filename so that I can differentiate in my dropbox which are the database backups and which are the files backup so I use: file_backwpup_   or db_backwpup_

5) Send Log – I recommend you UNCHECK the “only send an email if there are errors” box at the beginning so that you get the logs emailed to you and you can make sure it’s running smoothly. Once you know it works you can then select to only get errors. Generally speaking, if backup plugins of any kind don’t work properly, it’s GENERALLY due to a server issue, so you want to know right away if it’s not working so you can talk to your webhosting company and see if it can be resolved. Once there’s a track record of the plugin working, you only need to be notified if there is a problem.

6) File Backup – The plugin can also backup other folders you may have on your server besides core wp folders so you can use this area to specify which folders you want to backup, such as only your current theme folder. You may want to exclude theme folders of inactive themes because it may be a waste of space to back them up. If you’re not using them, for secuirty purposes I’d recommend deleting old themes you’re not using.

Once you’ve configured these options you can click “save changes” and you should be good to go!

If you are not averse to paying a little money for a backup solution there are a couple of really good paid options.

Automattic’s VaultPress is an awesome solution for corporate or enterprise sites. It’s like running time machine for your WordPress site – it backs up incrementally as you change things and has other awesome features. However for $15/month for one site, it might be overkill for small sites or non-money-making bloggers.

My other recommended backup system is Locker by CodeGarage. They do daily site backups as well as security scans and uptime monitoring. You get a better bang for your buck here especially if you have multiple sites.

What is your preferred WordPress backup method? Share it in the comments!

Since I’ve had a few clients that have been using the Thesis theme, I’ve learned a thing or two about it, and have written a couple posts in the past. On one of those posts I received a question about changing the color of the comment box in Thesis and thought I would respond with a screencast. You’ll find the code snippets mentioned in the video,at the bottom of the post.

/* This changes the background color of the comments box */

.custom #comment_list {
background-color: #ccc;
}

/* This changes the text of the comments themselves */

.custom #comment_list .format_text p {
color: red;
}

I used “red” as a shorthand here just for ease and simplicity. But you can use one of many websites to find the exact color and hex code you need.

Do you have any other customization questions regarding Thesis or other WordPress themes? Post them in the comments!

Many WordPress themes do not yet provide a way to have totally different sidebar content on different pages of your site. Some may provide a little flexibility with, for example a sidebar for the blog and a different sidebar for static pages, but sometimes you need more comprehensive control – for example you may need an additional set of navigation on a certain set of sub-pages. There’s several different plugins that help you gain this type of flexibility with your site.

Display Widgets

The Display Widgets plugin is perhaps the simplest and most user-friendly option. After activating the plugin you will notice that when you add a widget to your sidebar, there is a system of checkboxes whereby you can easily tell the widget to show up, or not to show up on certain pages/posts or types of pages/posts. In addition you can choose to display a widget based on whether a user is logged in or not, which would be handy if you have any kind of membership site or protected content pages. This plugin is easy enough for beginners to use!

Dynamic Widgets

The Dynamic Widgets plugin does a very similar job to Display Widgets, but  adds a couple of extra controls for widgets which you may find useful. The interface is perhaps not as immediately easy to use as Display Widgets, becuase it actually takes you to a separate page to control the settings for each widget, but the extra features, provided by checkboxes are:

• Display widget according to the user’s role, including any custom roles you have created
• Display according to date – this could be really handy if you want to run a promotion of some kind – you can specify the dates a widget can be shown
• Display according to browser – not sure how you might use this (other than telling people on Internet Explorer 6 to upgrade…) but it sure is cool!

Widget Logic Plugin

This was one of the original plugins I used for controlling widgets and I’m including it in the list for more advanced users who don’t want to deal with checkboxes and are comfortable with WordPress conditional tags. This plugin adds a simple field to each widget which requires you use a conditional tag to control where the widget displays.  It’s not too hard once you understand it, but definitely not user-friendly off the bat.

For example, to make the widget show up only on single post pages, you would enter the tag:  is_single()

To make it show up on a specific post or page you need the ID number of the page which is not readily available on any admin screen. You need to actually look in the url when editing a post/page to look for the id number. Or you can install this handy plugin called Reveal IDs which will conveniently show the IDs in a column inside the admin area. So you identify a page/post that you want a widget to display on, locate the ID and use the following tag:  is_single( ’106′ )
where 106 is the ID of that page/post.

You can do all sorts of combinations to test for things like sub-pages etc. Anything you can do with a conditional tag, you can apply to a widget.

These three plugins so far have given you control over where and how individual widgets show up in the existing sidebars your theme already provides. So this means that when in your Widgets screen, you’ll see a sidebar are with several widgets inside, some of which show throughout the site, and some that show only on certain pages. There’s nothing wrong with this set up, although if you have a lot of widgets it could be confusing to keep things organized and to determine at a glance which widget is going to show up in which sidebar.

So another approach is to use a plugin that enables you to create entirely new sidebar areas that appear on your Widgets screen.

Custom Sidebars Plugin

With this plugin you can create new sidebars to use in your theme and you can then designate which sidebar shows up on which page. The interface is not particularly user-friendly, but once you get how it works, it does do the job nicely. It’s a 4-step process.

1. You have to specify which of your current sidebars are “replaceable”. This means you can choose to replace one of your theme’s default sidebars with a custom one.
2. After you have selected one that can be replaced, you can then make a new sidebar.
3. Now when you are on your page editing screen you’ll have a box and drop down where you can specify which sidebar will show up on that page.
4. You add widgets to that particular sidebar on the Appearance > Widgets screen as usual.

So now when you go to your Widgets screen you will see a dedicated area for the new sidebar you have created:

Per Page Sidebars Plugin

This plugin does the same job as custom sidebars but has a little better workflow. On your page editing screen you will now see a box where you can enable a custom sidebar for that page, and choose which of your current sidebars you would replace.After you make your selection and save the page, when you head over to the widgets screen you’ll see a new widget area labelled with your page name.

Both plugins seem to work equally fine – the only difference would be your preference for which workflow you prefer.

END USER TRACK:

Start-Ups and WordPress
Chris Lema
WordPress can be used for more than just your Blog or your Web Site. It can just as easily power a variety of other parts of your business model – including validating your product concepts, supporting existing customers, capturing feedback, and more. Here’s the scoop on how to use WordPress for landing pages, project hubs, support systems, video membership sites, and surveys.
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SEO With WordPress
Gary Magnone
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Custom Goals and Custom Themes
Cody Landefeld
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WordPress as your Publishing Hub
Andrew Spittle
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Formula For a Successful WordPress Project
Wes Chyrchel
If you build WordPress websites for a living, this presentation is for you. We go through why you are in business and then steps through the process of handling your project Before, During and After. A great compliment to any developers reference materials.
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WordPress MultiSite
Brad Williams
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Planning & Prepping A Design For Development
Robert Nienhuis
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How To Fix Broken UI
Steve Zehngut
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Information Architecture for WordPress
Chris Ford
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DEVELOPER TRACK:

Accomplish It With Core: Galleries, Sliders & More
Andy Stratton
“Building custom theme/plugin functionality using powerful built-in core API’s / libraries. Thinking about things in terms of core functionality and rolling your own.”
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Premium Plugins & Adhering To The GPL
Brandon Dove
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Playing Hooky with Actions and Filters
Jeffrey Zinn
Basic to intermediate skills for WordPress hooks (actions and filters).
Get the slides
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Integration of WordPress With External APIs
Aaron Campbell
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Custom Post Types and Taxonomies
Jared Atchison
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Using Git: Case Studies & Workflow
Joachim Kudish
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Theme Busters “R” Us
Lance Willett
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Stay Classy, WordPress
Andrew Norcross
Get the code
Slides will be posted here

Caching for Coders
Zack Tollman
Get the slides

Many WordPress users like to use a custom permalink structure  which includes the blog post category in their url for additional SEO value. If you create relevant, keyword-rich category names for your blog, having them in the permalink can be useful. If you are one of these people, you NEED this plugin in your life!

If you want to utilize the category name in your urls, you would use this custom structure in your Permalink settings:

So your url for a blog post would look something like this:

www.yoursite.com/seo-tips/how-to-rank-in-google

Where Seo Tips is the category assigned to that post.

However, if you’ve been using this structure you may have noticed that if you select multiple categories for a blog post, WordPress does not give you a way to select which category shows up in the url, therefore potentially foiling your SEO wizadry. According to the Codex:

When you assign multiple categories to a post, only one can show up in the permalink. This will be the lowest numbered category

This is not very helpful. But what is helpful is a nifty little plugin called Hikari Category Permalink

This is a very simple plugin with the sole purpose of letting you choose which category appears in the permalink when you are using multiple categories. After installing it, you will see that when editing a post, as you mouse over your categories, the word ‘permalink’ will appear next to each category (see below).

Simply click that link to designate the permalink category for that post. That category will then appear in bold after you update the post.

Voila! You may now proceed with your SEO wizadry.

*header image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stickergiant/3769771267/

One of the reasons why WordPress is so awesome is because it makes building powerful websites pretty easy. Pick a theme, add some content, hit Publish and there you have it. Lack of technical know-how is no longer a barrier, and the array of shiny, sexy themes that are available along with the inexpensivenss of it all can make it dangerously easy to under-think the process of building a website. But while WordPress and its eco-system have made many parts of the process simple and taken the grunt work out of making a site, the one thing that YOU still have to do, is the analytical thinking and planning behind your site.

For your site to be an effective business tool, it must reflect the core goals and missions of your company. Whereas many of us start the planning of a site by looking at the available WordPress themes and letting those designs sway our decisions, we really need to be starting from a more strategic point of view and making decisions about themes, plugins etc, based on the bigger picture.

So before you put pixel to screen, or start buying themes, consider the following.

1) What are the values and overall mission of your company?

For your website to ‘feel’ right at a fundamental level it must be a reflection of the driving force behind your business. What are the values that you want to convey? What is it about your business that keeps you motivated to run it every day? What is it about your business that your customers connect with?

2) What are the business goals of the company?

This is a key point that should influence everything from site development to marketing strategy . Get clear on what the specific goals of your company are. Sure, everyone wants to increase sales and profits but perhaps there are specific areas of your business that you are trying to grow, or areas you are moving away from. Your goals may change over time, so it’s good to review them periodically and make sure your site is still in alignment with your business goals.

3) Who is your desired clientele?

Do not try to be all things to everyone. Just because you CAN provide a certain service or make a certain product doesn’t mean you should prioritize it on your site if it’s not what you ultimately want to do. So focus on catering to the customers you really want to attract to ensure you are building a business that will serve you financially and emotionally.

4) If your site was an employee, what would its job description be?

In order for you to know whether your site is successful, it has to have a clear purpose with defined outcomes. How will you know if your site is working for you? What would the results be? More product sales? More leads? More email subscribers? etc Outlining clear goals and benchmarks will help craft the site and provide focus for design, content and tracking results.

5) What do you want visitors to do at your site – what are the actions that count?

Considering points 1 – 4 above should have brought you clarity on the purpose of your site, and therefore what steps you actually want your visitors to take upon arriving at your site. Your website should always be guiding your visitor toward what you want them to do next. Knowing what actions you would consider to be significant and tracking them, will help you understand if your site is effective or if it needs tweaking.

6) Your homepage is only one page, not the entire site.

Your website is more than just your homepage. Your homepage should provide guidance for those who land there, but it is not the be all and end all of your site. Not everyone will come to your site through your homepage – internal pages will act as landing pages for search engine visitors, so make sure that no matter what page people land on, you are providing the appropriate message and information for that visitor to take the next step.

Once you are clear on these points, the theme, graphics and text that you use will end up serving your purposes precisely. The more clear your sense of direction, the better result you will get out of your site.

*header image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bluekdesign/4890727263/

I teach people on a daily basis how to use WordPress, from the ground up. A few face-smackingly simple issues come up time and again.

1) Pasting from Word will make your posts look funky

Anytime you copy and paste directly into the WordPress editor, from Microsoft Word, another website, or any other outside source, you run the risk of it looking, well,  a bit funky ,when you publish it. This is because other applications, especially Word, have their own set of formatting that gets carried over when you copy/paste. Usually this ends up conflicting with the formatting and styling of your theme. You may not realize there is an issue until you publish the post and something looks off – the fonts don’t quite match, or the spacing is strange. 9 times out of 10 in these cases, it’s because you copied/pasted from Word. To avoid such issues, simply use the 2 clipboard buttons on the second line of the post editing toolbar with the T and the W on them.

Wait, you only have a single toolbar? Make sure to click the “Kitchen Sink” button – the last button on the right of the toolbar.

Ok, now in the middle of the brand new toolbar you will see the 2 clipboard buttons I am talking about:

The “Paste from Word” button (clipboard with a W on it) will attempt to strip away any junk and leave you with clean text – it will generally retain basic formatting you may have done, such as bold, italics etc. If you still have problems when using this, then try the Paste as Plain Text option (clipboard with a T on it). This will strip away all formatting from the source, so you will need to re-format your text using the WordPress editor.

2) “How do I make a line break dangit?”

When you are typing in the WordPress editor and you hit the Enter key, WordPress will create a Paragraph break (the equivalent of <p> in HTML), which means it will leave an empty line between the place where you hit Enter, and the new cursor position. Sometimes this is infuriating when you just want the cursor to go to the next line. This is a regular line break (<br> in HTML) rather than a paragraph break, and is easily accomplished by holding down Shift when you hit Enter.

3) “My homepage is a static page, so where do my blog posts go?!”

When you use a static page as your home/front page in WordPress, all you have to do is then create a new Page called Blog. Leave this blank – it basically just acts as a container in the WordPress system to indicate where your blog posts will be displayed. In the WordPress Reading settings (Settings > Reading) , choose this Blog page under the Posts page dropdown menu. Then add the Blog page into your menu bar. Magically, this will become your blog homepage and when you click on “Blog” WordPress will automatically display your blog posts.

One caveat to this, is if you are using a Premium theme which has a special homepage layout, which you configure in the theme’s options panel. In the WordPress Reading settings, it will still show that your homepage is showing blog posts, even though it may not be, depending on the theme. In this case, the theme probably provides a Blog page template, so you would again create a Page called Blog, and make sure to select the Blog template under Page attributes.

4) “I tried to install a theme I bought, but I’m getting an error message that the theme is broken”

The most common cause of this I have seen is that theme developers have hidden the actual theme folder within another folder in the zip file you purchased. When you purchase a premium theme, you download a .zip file. If the theme developer is being user-friendly, you would simply upload this same zip file into your WordPress dashboard. However, what frequently happens is that, if you open up the zip you downloaded, you will find another zip within that main folder. THIS is the .zip you need to upload. WordPress cannot detect it if it’s hidden in this way. In the first image below you see the initial .zip file I downloaded upon purchase. If I uploaded this as-is, I would get an error message.

In this second image, you see why. I unzipped this folder and you see that there are several other files in there, including another zip called ‘striking’ (the name of the theme) – this contains the actual theme files and is what you would need to upload.

5) “How do I turn on/off the comments for a certain page/post?”

In one of the recent versions of WordPress, they decided to clean up the writing interface. In reality, what happened is that they hid a bunch of stuff under the obscure label “Screen Options” at the top right of your screen. The ability to turn on or off comments for a particular page/post, stumped newbies and experts alike for a while – where did that control go? So if you are missing this feature, try clicking Screen Options and then check the box for Discussion. This will reveal the box to control comments. Note that the box called Comments, doesn’t provide access to control the ability to comment – it only shows what comments if any, exist for that post/page.

6) “There are things showing up in my footer/sidebar but I can’t find when to change them!”

If you seeing what appear to be widgets in your footer, sidebar or any other widget area – ie. Category lists, Recent posts etc, but when you go to Appearance > Widgets, those sidebar areas appear to be empty, you are most likely seeing default fallback widgets set by your theme. Some themes are set up so that if you have not added any widgets, it will automatically display a Category list or some other default content. All you have to do is add a widget to that section, and it will override the default, and you will only see the widget you have set.

Are there any other apparently simple but infuriating WordPress issues you have come across?

*header image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/striatic/2192192956/

I had a client recently who needed to create private, password-protected sections on her WordPress site. She wanted each of her clients to have a private page with information related to what they were working on together. Easy! Password-protection is an in-built feature of WordPress, in case you didn’t know.

When creating a page, you simply click “Edit” next to Visibility in the Publish box on the right. Choose “Password protected” and set the password as you choose.

But what if you want to create a series of pages for the same client to access? This would mean you would have to create a password for each new page which seems a little cumbersome.

Fortunately there’s a handy plugin called Password Protect Children Pages which will automatically password-protect the Child pages, ie. sub pages, of any password-protected Parent page. Additionally, if the correct password is entered on the parent page or any of its children pages, all related pages will be viewable to the user, so the experience is smooth for your client.

So the next question is, how to provide an easy way for your client to navigate the private area you have created for them?

A simple solution I found is courtesy of another plugin called List Pages Shortcode. As the name suggests, by placing a shortcode in any page or post, it will display a list of your pages.

If you were to use the basic shortcode:
[list-pages]
You would display a list of ALL your pages. Of course you only want to display the pages for that particular client or section.

So instead use the shortcode:
[child-pages]

to output the subpages you have created. You can also modify the order the pages are displayed in. For example, the following will output the child pages with the newest first:
[child-pages sort_column="post_date&show_date=created"]

As an example I created a main/Parent page for Client A, with 2 subpages. On the Parent page for client A, I use the short code plugin:

And the result is a simple way for my client to navigate their private section on my site:

In addition to private client pages, what else might you use this for on your site?

*header image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/holster/195031415/

Tweet Blender is tag-aware and has support for multiple authors, lists, hashtags, and keywords all blended together. The plugin can show tweets from just one user or a list of users (as all other Twitter plugins do); however, it can also show tweets for a topic which you can define via Twitter hashtag or keyword. But there is more! It can also show tweets for multiple authors AND multiple lists AND multiple keywords AND multiple hashtags all blended together into a single stream.

The output is pretty slick looking too….

After you install the plugin you’ll find a pretty comprehensive set of options under Settings> Tweet Blender, but the real action happens on your Widgets screen. You’ll find several new widgets available that have Tweet Blender functionalities, as described above. Another widget not mentioned above is one called “Tweet Blender For Tags”, which “Shows related tweets by searching Twitter using tags of your post as keywords.”

Find out more at: WordPress › Tweet Blender « WordPress Plugins.

What are your favorite Twitter plugins?