talking wordpress and plugins…

I spent the last week of December immersed in a self-imposed crash course while I: upgraded to the newest version of wordpress (2.7), changed themes, customized my theme a bit, added plugins, and massaged my widgets.

Here are some things that might help someone else if they are in the same position as me… I have a Wordpress powered blog on my own personal domain and my site is hosted through Godaddy.

Moving On Up To Wordpress 2.7

My hosting is through Godaddy and, while I found lots of comments saying that Wordpress updates were very easy with Godaddy, I never found any clear instructions about how to do this ‘easy’ upgrade.

Here is what I ended up doing instead:

1. First, I deactivated all of my plugins.

2. Next, I exported my blog to my desktop. Here, I was hoping that if anything horrible happened, I could just import my old version of my blog back up to my hosting account - thankfully that didn’t happen, so who knows…

3. Then, I installed a plug in called Instant Upgrade by Alex Gunsche. From what I understand, 2.7 has the ability to upgrade built in so this is the last time I will have to do this. That said, this plug in made it very easy. It also warned me to back up my blog first and even provided a link to my next installation:

4. Wordpress Database Backup by Austin Matzko. After activating these two plug ins, I backed up my blog and then conducted the instant upgrade. All worked very smoothly and I think the whole process, minus the original hunt for instructions and painful learning curve, took me less than an hour. This meant I was ready to try…

Changing My Wordpress Theme

I loved the theme I was using but did not have the coding know-how to make the changes required. I wanted to make my blog ad ready. I also wanted to be able to use widgets and my current theme did not allow this.

1. I drew a map of how I felt my blog’s home page should look. (Example: I wanted a blurb at the top right, I wanted room for ads on the side, and I wanted my categories to be listed along the top.)

2. I made a list of everything I wanted my blog to have: a visible rss feed box, an ability to customize the graphics in the background, a ‘recent comments’ section, and accommodation for my weekly features ‘web personality of the week’ and ‘featured artist of the week’.

3. I looked at the top 100 Wordpress sites to check out their format and see what themes they were using.

4. I browsed through lots and lots of free themes looking for one that was the most like my wish list. Here are some of the free themes I checked out:

• smashingmagazine’s 100 excellent free high quality wordpress themes
• smashing magazine’s 83-beautiful-wordpress-themes-you-probably-havent-seen
• blogohblog’s latest free wordpress themes

I actually ended up going with Crowd Favorite’s Carrington theme, which was listed right on Wordpress.

5. I saved the theme folder to my desktop. Then I dragged the files from the image file that I wanted to change into Illustrator and customized them. I borrowed some of the images from my original theme (Notepad Chaos by Evan Eckard) so that my blog wouldn’t look too different to my regular readers (hopefully). I uploaded them to my content folder on my server and then clicked preview in wordpress to see how the theme looked.

6. I activated my new theme and then put the widgets into my primary and secondary sidebar, using the map I had drawn as a guide.

7. I installed plugins to help me achieve the remaining items on my wish list.

Plug Me In: Plugins I like so far

Comment Redirect

I read about this plug in at Yoast.com - a blog I subscribe to that seems to have a lot of great information although most of it is still above my head at this point. This plugin allows you to redirect first time commenters to any page of your choosing. I created a page that doesn’t actually show up on the front of my blog so it is only easily visible to people commenting for the first time. When someone leaves their first comment on my blog, they are now redirected to this page. Within the page, I have included links which I hope will encourage first time visitors to continue to browse…

CommentLuv

The other plugin that I discovered through Yoast.com, Comment Luv will show the title of a recent post written by the person leaving a comment. I’ve experienced this at other blogs and I think it’s a great way to share readers and encourage exposure to other blogs. The one thing I don’t like about it is that I don’t think it’s working on my blog! I can see the Comment Luv box in the comment section of my blog but I have yet to notice the titles of anyone else’s blogs. I need to look into this further…