How To Choose A WordPress Theme – Free, Paid or Custom?

One of the biggest sources of frustrations I hear from clients when using WordPress is choosing a theme that looks good and does what they want it to do.  The next couple of posts will attempt to provide some guidelines to help make this process easier.

Selecting a theme is about more than the way it looks. Functionality and the ability to control options from your WordPress dashboard can be just as important. Many people choose a theme on looks alone and then become frustrated because it doesn’t work the way they want it to.

Generally speaking, there’s 3 types of themes available – free, premium and custom-built. To help decide which category you might be in note down your answers to the following questions:

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Mobile Blogging With WordPress

Mobile networks are finally getting fast enough, and smartphones nimble enough to enable you to do some real stuff on the go. WordPress now has apps for the major players so you can have ready access to your blog away from your computer.

WordPress for Blackberry
The new WordPress app for Blackberry allows you to write posts, upload images, manage comments and more. You’ll need to enable the XML-RPC setting in the Writing submenu of Settings in your WP admin. This allows for remote publishing.

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Microkids Related Posts WordPress Plugin Review

Microkids Related Posts WordPress Plugin

Why you need it
Related post plugins allow you to present your reader with other content they may find useful or interesting. This helps keep your reader browsing your site and also provides additional internal links, which help search engines discover all your content.

Microkids Related Posts plugin provides a simple, effective solution.

Ease of use
The options are very easy to configure but has advanced capabilities for those that need them.

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Notes & Resources from WordPress for Business Meetup

The Southern California WordPress Meetup was a lot of fun as usual. Natalie Maclees was our gracious host and even provided dinner for everyone. WordPress provided swag, and Packt publishing gave away a free copy of their “WordPress for Business Bloggers” book. We had a full group of awesome WP lovers at various levels of experience, and with a diverse range of businesses.

We covered a variety of issues under the umbrella of ‘WordPress for Business.’ Here’s some of the resources that came up during the course of the evening. If you’re in Los Angeles and using WordPress, you’ll find this group to be a great resource for information and networking.

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How To Get Rid Of Captions In WordPress

In version 2.6 WordPress introduced the captions feature which meant that when you uploaded an image, the text you entered as the ‘alt’ text, previously only visible to search engines, was now used as a caption under your image, visible to all.
I personally have found this quite annoying and should you agree, here’s a couple of ways to end the madness.

1) Permanent Caption Disabling.
The plugin I use is called, surprisingly enough, ‘Caption Disabler’. At my last check I did not find it when searching in the plugin directory within the WordPress dashboard. So you will have to download it here then upload it to your Plugins directory. It’s a very small, simple php file and will permanently remove the caption feature from future posts. Phew.

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