Not ALL posts here are moving. There are a few that just aren’t really necessary, so I’m cutting them out of the move. Don’t worry - this site will still be up for some time to come (I want to be sure all of my 301 redirects are taking properly) - but the posts that *are* moving will skip this site and take you to their new home.

If you see anything you want to keep, and you notice that you’re staying on this site chances are it’s not going to move - so you can take the content and keep it if you’d like. otherwise - I’ll see you on the flip side!

For your pleasure, I have a guinea pig for this one You can thank Jacqueline for allowing me to do this for her. (I’ll pass the link later - because I’m literally moving WP for her - into a whole new directory, up one level from where it is now! So once I’m done, the link will be changed )

So I have favorite methods for moving a WordPress installation. There’s the official method, and there are other standby “absolutely safe” methods (such as using the “Import/Export feature that’s built in to the newer versions of WP), but me, I’m impatient, and I like things to be down and dirty, and fast. So I’m going to show you my favorite way of doing this.

Warning: Be absolutely sure you have a backup before you try this. I’m not kidding. If you screw up, and you don’t have a backup, you can kiss your blog goodbye. Although I can say that I have yet to seriously mess a site up by this particular method (you’re not really messing with too much stuff, but still…) I’m not taking any responsibility whatsoever for you choosing to follow this method. So play it smart - get a backup before you even try any of this.

So, here we go…

Jacqueline’s blog is located at http://ascenderrisesabove.com/wordpress. (I’m not linking it because it’s gonna be a dead link in a few minutes.) She’s decided that she wants the WordPress installation to no longer be an add-on - but have it be the site - so she wants to move it to the root, and have the url be http://ascenderrisesabove.com/.

You’re going to need a couple of things for this: 1 - a freaking BACKUP. In case you didn’t listen to me before - BACK IT UP! You can do this several ways: there’s actually a few WP plugins out there that you can install to get backups; you can log into your hosting control panel and get into the phpMyAdmin interface and export the database as an SQL file, or you can use the WordPress’ export feature.

Since we’re following “my favorite method,” and we’re staying on the same server (it’s not like we’re changing hosts here, just moving up a level), then I’m going with option #3. The fact that our guinea pig also uses GoDaddy as her web host is also an extra-great reason to be using the WP export feature. (I don’t know about you, but sometimes GoDaddy’s interface can be a headache to muck around in - so let’s avoid doing that, shall we?)

And a final disclaimer: I’m actually doing this while I type this post. This is about as live as you can get. So if I run into an issue, you’re gonna see how I handle it. I actually kind of hope I do, because then you can see how easy things are to fix - but I’m willing to lay down money that this is going to go glitch-free.

So, #1 - let’s get that backup. Log into your WordPress back-end. (oh, bad girl - she needs an upgrade. We’re just going to do that for her - but we can save that for later - it won’t be a part of this tutorial.) She’s running 2.3.3, so we’ll be navigating to “Manage>Export.” Now, you can choose to restrict your backup to particular authors - but we’re moving the whole shebang - so let’s just leave the default at “All” and click the button. Save the file to your downloads folder, and there you go - you now have an XML file of all the posts, and comments on the site.

Now, if you so desire to have a more “stable” backup, you can go into the phpMyAdmin interface and “Export” your WordPress database. Just be sure to click the “Add Drop Table” option, and check the “save as file” option before you export. Do the same thing there - just click the “Go” button and it’ll save an SQL hard copy/dump into a file on your computer. She has a “Backup” plugin here though, so I’m going to use that as a secondary backup - just to be extra-sure she’s got it secured.

::cue elevator music here while we wait for everything to back up - damn this is a huge site! LOL::

Okay - now that that’s finished, we do two simple things which will result in your site breaking (but not for long, I swear it). Now you want to go to the “Options” page (”Settings” in 2.5+), and right there in “WordPress Address (URL)” and “Blog Address (URL)” we want to change those to reflect the new settings - so lets get rid of the extraneous “/wordpress/” at the end. Keep in mind - as soon as you save this change, your site WILL break! Don’t worry though - take it as a sign that things are working as they should

Now you want to open up your FTP program. Get into your system. Now you’ll see the “wordpress” directory here (and really quickly, I’m checking the filesystem of the root directory to be sure we won’t be overwriting any important files…and no, we won’t. however she does have an “index.htm” file here - so we’ll want to rename that in a moment, because it’ll override the index.php file). You want to get into that directory and select ALL files and folders - make sure they’re all highlighted (except, of course, the very first folder - that’s the next level up), and then drag everything into that first folder. This is moving all the necessary WP files into the root directory. Now you will see that everything has moved out of the old directory and up one level.

And BAM. there you have it. Done. Didn’t even need to use the backups. Visit the page, and it’s exactly where it needs to be. How easy was that?

Now I’m going to go upgrade her

EDIT: whoops! I almost forgot! We need to give her one teensy little fix. Since the URLs have changed, we also want to stick in a 301 redirect so she doesn’t lose any ranking she might have. So I’ve downloaded and installed the Redirect plugin for her. Strike that - that didn’t work. I did two things: I edited the .htaccess file and put in a PHP redirect in her old /wordpress folder, so that Google will know everything has permanently moved. Old permalinks any still be messed up though - but to her regular readers, that shouldn’t be a problem!

I belong to a couple of awesome networking lists. On one of these lists, recently, someone was asking about a possible solution to what is truly a common problem for us designers/programmers who provide CMS solutions for our clients. The problem?

Microsoft Word.

All of you reading this…how many of you have create an awesome site design with pristine code and gorgeous formatting, and your client is all “hooray!”…and promptly starts writing their content up in Microsoft Word, and the C&P’s the stuff into the CMS you’ve just made for them? (Come on, I know you’re out there. Raise your hands.)

I have two clients, currently that do this. No matter what plugins I’ve installed, and no matter how many different ways I instruct them on how to do it correctly (even with using their beloved Word!) they don’t do it. They just keep C&P-ing from Word, and keep calling me when the site breaks because of it.

Now, to why I am evil.

When I first thought about doing this, it was over dinner with my husband. I was ranting about how - again - my clients were sending me frantic “emergency” emails because the site was broken, and what did I do? - only to find out - AGAIN - that they had used Microsoft Word to put in their content. Many times, they try to get really creative and use the “HTML” feature to created cool little things - which usually result in unclosed tags - which break the site. Let’s forget about the horrible invalid code it produces in general. They seem to live with the weird fonts and extra load times because of all the extra crap put it. It’s not until they decide to “be cool” that they break something and come crying to me.

Yes, there are a couple of great plugins out there that can help (like Tiny MCE Advanced, which is cool in its own right, and Plain Text Paste) - but they mean nothing if the client doesn’t use them.

I told my husband I was one step away from coding something for WordPress that would stop this.

He shook his head and said “no, it’s what they know. It’s really not your place to force them to use something else.” He had a point. But still.

When the question came up on the list today, I responded with that conversation. When they found out I already knew how to do this, I just haven’t yet, I had one person cheering me on, telling me she’d pay me to have something like this. So, really quickly, I just wrote it up for her.

So, I still haven’t decided whether or not I should implement these on the sites I have issues with. but I’ll put it out there for those of you who have no qualms about taking the candy form the baby. Truly, it is what’s best for them. Tough love…tough love.

Just copy the below and add it to your functions.php file. What it does is search for all instances of <p class=”MsoNormal” (note the lack of the closing “>” tag - that’s because, more often than not, there’s a bunch of crap following that tag), as well as the <font tag (lack of the closing “>” for the same reason). When it finds either of them, it replaces only those posts with a message: “Microsoft Word found!” If the crap isn’t there, the content is posted as it normally would be.

//strip Word!
function stripword($content) {
$find = array( '<p class="MsoNormal"', '<font' );
foreach ( $find as $f ) {
if ( ( $pos = stripos( $content, $f ) ) !== false ) {
$content = "Microsoft Word found!";
}
}
return($content);
}
add_filter('the_content', 'stripword');

Of course, you can add extra search strings to the array, and you can change the message that is seen. I bet, eventually, I could take this a step further an search for the stuff and just *strip* it - leaving only the content behind. But that’s an experiment for another day.

And, I’m sure you’re asking yourself “Yeah, but if that happens, the client will be calling you and saying things don’t work - it doesn’t change anything.” Well, the idea is more psychological, I guess, than anything. Right now, as it stands, the font weirdness seems to not bother most clients that insist on doing this. (They don’t even notice what it’s doing to the validity of their content, or anything else really.) They don’t even notice until the site actually breaks.

What my evil conspirators and I were planning - if we chose to do this - was to tell the client that the “new upgrade of WordPress is necessary, because it’s a major security fix.” and then proceed to tell tham that Matt, in all his wisdom and glory, got sick of telling people to stop using Microsoft Word and took matters into his own hands - and made it impossible to use it anymore. This would serve as a visual reminder that if they use it, the posts won’t post. So they need to clean up their act.

We figured after a few of these messages they’d get the idea and stop using Word LOL

So there you have it. Totally useless, and really only for psychological value. But hey - maybe it’ll work!

Now, I’m gonna give you something good. Are you ready? You’ll love this.

Through the course of my business, I have been asked more and more often to do custom WordPress themes for people. In fac, the last year or so of my business, that’s all I’ve done. As I’ve said before, each client brings unique challenges and puzzles for me to try and muddle through, and when I figure them out, I file away my stuff (and plan to post it here to share, but I’m bad about that) for later use.

One of the BIG things that has helped me a ton for the last few months is actually having a base set of files that I work from. I wouldn’t exactly call them “templates”, because they are literally blank. They are simply a listing of my WordPress theme files that I use most often, with edited code in them. They are completely blank, save they have the base WordPress code - so it’s a great starting point. When it comes time to start a new site for someone, I can whip out these files and edit as needed - I don’t have to start over each and every time.

I am willingly making these public. I hope that a lot of you get some help from these when you want to create your own custom themes. I could be a miser and keep them all to myself, or put some kind of restriction on them - but in truth, I never would have come up with this stuff if it weren’t already available elsewhere. I just put them all together in a neat little package so you don’t have to go sniffing around, trying to find things that will work.

So, no restrictions - just don’t take the zip file and try to sell it anywhere. If you do do that, I’ll have to come kick your ass. That’s really scummy - selling something that I’m giving away for nothing. You should be ashamed for even thinking it. But other than that, have at it.

NOTES: I’ve tried to comment these out for you, so if/when you need to make changes, you can. But I’m only putting in extremely basic notations that have to do with the WP code itself.

Okay, so you can download the files here. I’ve used these exact files for WP versions from 2.0.x on up - so yes, they work for 2.6.x.

Enjoy!

So. I decided a smaller step would be to show you how to get the most out of your widgets. You can choose whatever you want - what I’ll be touching on is how to make more than one “sidebar” and apply widgets to them.

“Sidebar” is in quotes because - you won’t believe this - you don’t HAVE to put them in your sidebar. You can put those suckers anywhere you damn well please. How cool would it be to have your site’s content separated by a widget that would hold - whatever you’d like it to hold? Or Widgetizing your footer? or you header? Or how about having a different set of widgetized sidebars based on what page you’re on?

You can do that?

You bettah believe it, suckah!

Now, first you should keep in mind that, to keep your code valid (and your mind sane) you should be careful and plan this out accordingly. For example, it would be seriously cool to divide each post in your theme with Zombie Robot’s Random Quotes plugin. However, his plugin is written to spit out code using ID’s - not classes. So you could feasibly end up with 10 quotes on your page - but ALL of them have an ID (instead of a class) rendering your code invalid, which eventually leads down the path of insanity. To fix that example, you’d actually have to wade through his plugin code and edit it to change everything from an ID to a class. And don’t get me started on the possibility that looping something like that (which has database calls) over and over again might be a bad idea - I can think of many things that could go wrong. So just be careful what widgets you plan to place *within* the Loop.

However, you *can* put them pretty much anywhere. And if you stick with certain stuff, you can do pretty much whatever you want. And truly, it is really easy.

First, you want to open up your functions.php file that associated with your theme. (It would be located in wp-content/themes/YOUR THEME/functions.php. If you don’t have one, just create a new file with that name.) I recommend you open it up in a plain text editor (and how many times do I need to say that Microsoft Word is NOT a plain text editor! Just a reminder, folks.) and edit from your desktop, rather than directly fro the admin panel - because if you mess up anything, it’ll render your WordPress useless, and you’ll have to open it up on your desktop anyway to fix it

So open that puppy up, and you want to add this:


<?php if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'name'=>'Sidebar',
'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</div>',
'before_title' => '<h2>',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));
?>


Now, save and upload to your themes folder. If you navigate to Design>Widgets, you’ll now notice that you have a sidebar titled “Sidebar” to which you can add widgets to. So, when you want more than one, simply copy that and paste it again, and give the second one a new name. Like so:


<?php if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'name'=>'Sidebar',
'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</div>',
'before_title' => '<h2>',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'name'=>'Footer',
'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</div>',
'before_title' => '<h2>',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));
?>


Now, when you open up the “Design>Widgets” Section, you’ll see a dropdown list which contains “Sidebar” and Footer”. Two sidebars to add widgets to your heart’s content.

However, you’ll notice that when you add said widgets and save your changes, they won’t appear on the site (of course if you already have widgetized sidebars, they probably will, depending on how things are set up) - so now I’ll show you how to get them to show up on the site.

You’ll need to open up your sidebar.php file and add the following where you want the widgets to show up:

<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('Sidebar') ) : ?>
Vote or Shut Up!
<?php endif; ?>

The “Vote or Shut Up!” section can be replaced by whatever you want. Basically what that little piece of code says is If there is no “Dynamic Sidebar” function, or there is no Dynamic sidebar named “Sidebar”, then display the following:. So if you don’t have dynamic sidebars, or you “Sidebar” has no widgets added to it, then it’ll display “Vote or Shut Up!” instead. If you leave it blank it’ll display nothing.

You can do the same thing anywhere. Since I called the second sidebar “Footer”, let’s put it in the footer! So open up your footer.php file, and somewhere in there, stick in the code:

<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('Footer') ) : ?>
I'm a lumberjack, and that's okay.
<?php endif; ?>

And now, anything you place within the “Footer” sidebar (under Design>Widgets) will now appear in the footer of your site. You can do this anywhere - but it’s always a good idea to name your “sidebars” appropriately, so you know what widgets you’re sticking into what section.

As I said before, you can place different widgetized sidebars on different pages. For example, say you want a sidebar for your “Home” page, and a different one for your “About” Page, and a third for your “Archives” page. This is a matter of using WordPress Conditionals to determine what page you’re on. So, using the information sidebar above, you would add this to your functions.php file:


<?php if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'name'=>'Index Page',
'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</div>',
'before_title' => '<h2>',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'name'=>'About Us',
'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</div>',
'before_title' => '<h2>',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'name'=>'Archives',
'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</div>',
'before_title' => '<h2>',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'name'=>'Default',
'before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</div>',
'before_title' => '<h2>',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));
?>



<?php if(is_home() || is_front_page()) {
if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('Index Page') )
} else if(is_page('about-us')) {
if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('About Us') )
} else if(is_archive()) {
if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('Archives') )
} else {
if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar('Default') )
} : ?>
Have fun storming the castle!
<?php endif; ?>


And there you have it. You can literally Widgetize Anything (which, by the way, is one of my favorite plugins…)

So, you’ll notice that right now, there’s a couple of changes. The blog here has been inundated with tons of spam comments - it drives me insane. So I’ve dis-enabled commenting for now (unless you’re a registered user) - if you want to leave a comment, you’ll have to “subscribe” to the site *and* I have to approve every comment that comes through before it’s displayed. Sorry to do that - but for now, I just can’t keep up. For the record, however, I don’t spam, so your emails won’t be used for anything other than letting you log in to leave a comment. (I don’t have *time* to spam anyone even if I wanted to! LOL) If I decide to change this at a later date, I’ll be happy to delete your “subscription” from the database if you so desire - in fact, I’ll probably do it by default, and you’ll have to tell me that you want to stay in if you want to stay.

All right - so there are some plans for the next phase of stuff. yes, I’ve been promising updates on old articles, and promising to put reinstate the pics and such - but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. The good news is, my schedule has *finally* loosened up enough to allow me to return to this site and do my thing. So starting soon (like the week after next - around Sept. 22) you’ll start to see some changes take effect, and new stuff finally come back up on the site.

Oh, I get to return to the fun of messing with things for experimentation again! And I think one of the first things I’ll start with (which seems to be the most often-requested articles) - is how to convert your already-existing design into a WP theme. Trust me, it’s easier than you think

I’ll take bets - I bet you all think it’s gonna be a HUGE long article, too, with tons of information that has to be printed out in pages. But I’ll tell you this much, if you can follow this tutorial (which is actually my most popular post here), then you’re more than halfway there.

I found out about Mr. Pausch when my daughter asked me back in October of 2007 to download the “Alice” program for her, so she could learn how to program her own little movies. I was all excited that she was taking an interest in programming, so I went to the Alice Project website to do so. While I was there, I saw mention of Mr. Pausch, and something called “the Last Lecture”. (I will post the link here - which is on Randy’s page at Carnegie-Mellon University - but the server goes down sometimes. But if you can - you really should watch this.)

I watched this video, and I was utterly amazed. From that moment on, Mr. Pausch’s words inspired me to be better than I thought I was. The video took off, and soon, it was on the news everywhere, and Mr. Pausch was asked to speak at a Congressional hearing - it was just amazing at how fast this this went.

Mr. Pausch has a personal page that I’ve been checking through the months to see how he was doing. I’ve always felt for his wife, Jai, and their three young children - I cannot possibly imagine what they are going through. Living past the “death sentence” was amazing to hear, but when I saw today that he had died this morning, my heart really broke for them.

Mr. Pausch was a very good, and very strong man, and I hope that, when he went, he realized how much he touched other people’s lives.

Goodbye, Randy - you will be missed probably more than you ever know - even by people who have never met you.

For a long time, people have wanted to move away from he “standard” fonts found in a particular browser, and use a nice font for headings, titles, and such on their sites. Usually, the way around this was to create said text as an image file, and plug it in on the site. But oh, how lovely would it be if this could be done dynamically, rather than creating an image for every single piece of text you wanted to replace?

I’ve done it before, using dynamic text replacement, which creates PNG images on-the-fly. This is a popular method for people who want to have this ability, but don’t have access to Flash. But I’ve noticed if you use it for a lot of different things (like a recent client who wanted EVERY link replaced, as well as headings and certain pieces of text) you’re gonna back things up like eating a pound of cheese on constipation day. (yes, as if we all have a “constipation day”. Mine’s on Friday. LOL)

Ahh, how I wanted to use sIFR. And now that I have my shiny new Mac with CS3, I can finally do it. So last week, I started to try it out for the first time. And I failed. Miserably.

No matter what I did, I couldn’t get the damned thing to work. The closest I ever got was not by using the wiki, but by using this tutorial. But still, I failed miserably. I just couldn’t get it to go.

I finally found a WordPress plugin that worked, but then the links wouldn’t. Turned out the plugin used sIFR 2.0 - which has a known bug for failing when using on links. (I will say, though, I found a useful tidbit of information that may help fix this - but I haven’t had the chance to try it and see. Apparently, sIFR works on the content of whatever you’re calling in. So if you have a link within a list, then you want to call in “li”, not “li a”. When I did that, I got my little hand cursor over the links, and the links worked again. BUT - like I said, I haven’t had a chance to try this for the WP plugin, so I don’t know if it’ll work.)

So, I was stuck.

Of course, I HAD to get it to work, and I finally did.

You can follow the Design Intellection tutorial. For the most part, that sucker is right on. The things that actually got me were the following two items:

1. Put in a full path to the .swf file. I was using a relative path to the file, because I was inserting it into a theme design - so I needed something relative. But it didn’t work until I had a full path. Once I did that, it worked. I just need to remember to change it when I pass it on
2. Don’t use the configurations used in the tutorial. Okay, I know them’s fightin’ words, but I’ll explain why I say this. This didn’t work FOR ME:


css: [
'.sIFR-root { MAIN CSS PROPERTIES }'
],


No matter what I did, when I formatted my styling in this manner, it refused to work. I looked at some older stuff on sIFR, and found that when I applied styling via the old method, I had no issues.

Don’t ask me why.

So when I changed the above to this:


css: {
'.sIFR-root': {
MAIN CSS PROPERTIES
}'
}


It was all good. So if you want a more particular example, say you wanted to replace a list item link in a menu.


sIFR.replace(avenir, {
selector: '#menu li',
css: {
'.sIFR-root': {
'text-transform': 'capitalize',
'font-size' : '18px'
},
'a:link': {
'color': '#CCCCCC'
},
'a:hover': {
'color': '#000000'
},
},
wmode: 'transparent'
}
);


Bam! All of your list items links now have the text replacement and the right color, and the links work. Notice that the styling is very much like CSS - with just slight differences. For the most part, you can apply any CSS styling in this method, and you’ll be all good.

Ahh, sweet sIFR. Oh, how I love thee.

I also had to stop my experiments with spammers - meaning leaving uncoded email addresses on the site. Not for any other reason than the fact that I haven’t had the time to re-create those addresses that would get spam (yes, they were real addresses, and I did check the mail!) But I may recreate them and activate that experiment again in the future.

What else…oh yeah - my images apparently didn’t come over. Ugh. So a lot of the older posts are missing all of my images - gotta find all those and put them back in.

But I just wanted to let you know I am aware, and I am fixing - slowly but surely.

Oh, and unfortunately, I’ve been inundated with spam comments. (Spammers piss me off. I swear.) So, I’ve implemented a new rule. I LOVE getting all of the “thank you” comments - I really do. But I’ve noticed that many, MANY of these are people just checking to see if I let them through so they can spam me like crazy later on. So the new rule for he site: if a comment you leave me contains a question, or information that pertains (and will enhance) the discussion at hand - feel free to contribute - negative or positive, it must be constructive and helpful to others, and on topic. That’s the point of having this site - to help others. However, if it’s just a blip on the radar, with nothing that really contributes, I’m going to have to mark it as spam and delete it. (If I know you, and I won’t mark you as spam, but I will delete it. Trying to cut the clutter, you know?) I do appreciate all of you who take the time to contribute here, and stop by to show your appreciation - but it’s really getting out of hand, and I’m afraid I gotta stop it and cut it off at the root - and that means I’ll probably be cutting out some “legits” as well - and I apologize in advance for that.

I have had a lot of comments that my tutorials are stagnant and rotting with age - so “the Next Big Thing” will be redoing those tutorials for 2.5.

So there you go - a little update on what’s happening here!

Still working out some bugs like missing images and stuff - but it’s all there.

That is all