In the short history of WordPress there are just a hand full of themes that have left an indelible mark on the WordPress community and some of those are certainly Michael Heilemann’s Kubrick and K2 themes, Chris Pearson’s Cutline theme and my favourite - Derek’s Foliage theme. Of course there are many others that have gained immense popularity.
Functionality of Themes
Now most WordPress themes end up falling under some sort of category. Tags, categories and generally taxonomy is the bedrock of blog structures. But it does breed a type of ‘box’ logic that I sometimes find contestable. Be that as it may, the classification of WordPress themes is usually based on the theme’s column count, so that Kubrick is a two column theme for example, while Cutline and Sandbox open up 2-3 column possibilities. But as the WordPress blogging platform develops and grows more complex at each new update, in line with user suggestions and demands, so does WordPress theme functionality. And while WordPress is usually associatied with ‘conventional’ blogging such as this blog for example, there has been a parallel development in using WordPress to power far more ambitious projects and this is typically the realm of Ezines or online magazines.
Magazines and WordPress
The ezine Wordpress theme category is really in a league of its own, not least because magazines using Wordpress often have to hack the coding core to distribute posts and pages in a way that rises to the layout and distribution demands of a journal but also because there are simple only a few of them around. To date, most Wordpress ezine themes have been difficult to set up and offer little in the way of customization for amateur coders. With the exception of Eston Bond’s Gridlock theme there is really only Brian Gardner’s Revolution theme, but unfortunately that is not part of the open source Wordpress adventure, since it comes with a price tag.
Holy Grail from India
But then came the Morning After! The answer to the holy grail of Ezine themes! Search no more people, it has arrived! And it’s arrived from India thanks to the brilliant work of Arun Kale. Arun delivered a theme that is suitably customizable and I suspect this will easily take top positions in the Wordpress hall of themes.
Please excuse me, i´m very late with this post. Pink for October allready started again.
Web sites and blogs are going pink for October again. And perhaps your favourite blogs and pages too, you ask why? Well it’s to commemorate Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
Facts
The objective of the month long project is to increase awareness on breast cancer as well as raise funds for further research on the subject. Breast cancer is the fifth in the list of most common types of cancers in the world and the first most common for women. And breast cancer could also affect men, albeit with a lower probability. It’s the illness, which caused 1% of all deaths worldwide back in 2005.
Designers Support
Due to this, many designers have come up with various pink for October WordPress designs. Here are some of the many:
These are some of the free pink WordPress themes released since the announcement of the event. Those who can afford to change their themes, feel free to use them as long as you comply with the designers’ specific requests and conditions of usage.
Sign Up
And when you’re done changing your theme, go to the Pink for October’s web site and sign-up to be officially part of the event. Not only do you profess your support for the project but you also get a backlink. If you don´t like to change your theme or look of your homepage, you can support this project with a logo on your blog, just visit Pink for October’s download page and be part of it.
The event was started by Matthew Oliphant of Usabilityworks.com last 2006.
Personal Note
My dad got cancer, and we know this since Xmas/06. It´s very hard for us seeing him fighting and sometimes it seems nothing helps. Over the last year he got several chemo-therapies which knocked him down - but he´s still fighting. He is so strong and sometimes we are helpless. I wished i could do more for him, for us. This year is such a blur of pain and loneliness. But my family never gives up and i´m very proud that we stay together in this terrible time.
We must support those who are affected, thats what we can do. This is what my entry here is all about. This is why I support it.
Dad i love you!
I love Wordpress no doubt, but it’s nothing without its’ drawbacks - one of which is the lack of administrative features in the default control panel. Fortunately, thanks to clever developers and witty users in general, some admin plugins have emerged which can make filling in the functionality gaps virtually painless.
Wordpress Database Backup
This is imperative if you don’t want to risk losing everything on some idle Tuesday afternoon. I speak from experience. Even if your host provides regular backups for you, it’s better to take matters into your own hands. Admittedly I’m a control freak, but in my opinion this plugin is probably more essential than any other I can name. Now managed by ilfilosofo.
Advanced WYSIWYG Editor
Save yourself loads of time in formatting posts… add headings, anchors, horizontal rules, sub/superscripts and even special characters right from the visual editor. I don’t mind code at all, but without this plugin, you have to switch to code view and hand-code the HTML for any of the above, and it just gets old. Still can’t figure out why these features aren’t part of the core WYSIWYG. Oh well, Labnotes trac can fix that.
Contact Form II
A basic drop-in contact form, customizable via template page. Offer visitors a way to contact you from anywhere on your site, without ever having to publish a mailto link. Not only will you be providing readers with a user-friendly way to contact you any time, but it prevents those damn harvesters from getting hold of your email address, helping you minimize the daily onslaught of spam you’ll eventually get.
Smart Update Pinger
Wordpress by default allows you to ping any update service you wish. Notification takes place every time you publish or update a post. The concern here is possibly flooding the update services and getting banned for “ping spamming”. I don’t know if that’s really worth worrying about, but I’m listing Smart Update Pinger because of its log. You can see exactly which services are pinged and when. Out of the box, Wordpress offers no such information.
Maintenance Mode
This begs to be included due to the sheer volume of WP updates rolled out. I have a small panic attack every time I have to upgrade, and I’d be willing to bet a lot of others do as well. 
If you tend to screw things up in the process, and you don’t want the world to know you sometimes annihilate your blog, this has you covered. Activating it displays a short message informing visitors of maintenance downtime. Everything is still accessible to administrators while in maintenance mode.
FeedSmith
Originally developed by Steve Smith, this plugin was recently adopted by Feedburner (who were themselves recently adopted by Google). With it, you can provide format-independent “smart feeds” to your audience, and effectively track and manage your readership. Incidentally, signing up with Feedburner offers a great number of benefits aside from FeedSmith, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.
Akismet
This extremely popular plugin bears mentioning just in case someone missed it. It’s a comment spam catcher, and a very effective one at that. If you don’t already have it running on your blog, you can learn more and download it from the official Akismet site.
Each of these plugins are recommended because they’re simple to install, configure, and use. Independent of your blog niche, work-flow or site design, these all do their small part in enhancing the functionality of the Wordpress admin, and for you, that means working smarter and happier.
The guys over Xyberneticos.com have collected over 2400 Wordpress Themes, packed them in a .zip-file (251 Mb!) and offered them for free download. Impressive, really.
Prosite was so kind to send me a backup from my database back from the year 2005/06. In this year the archiv grown to 251 posts and gave gave 901 comments. So, its very late to thank you all for supporting this old project and pushed me forward. When i received this email i wasn´t sure what to do with it.
I could setup the complete blog again, but i decided to republish some shit from the past posts in an updated version the next coming days, maybe weeks. For my new readers it might be interresting what happened in the past and hope you enjoy the archives. My problem now is, i received this backup in a .txt file.
So how to import my old ramblings? A solution could be a new niffty feature WordPress has implemented since version 2.1, the XML support.
XML Import / Export
You can now import and export your entire blog and comments as an XML file that WordPress.com will generate for you. You’ll find the export and import options now under “Manage” in your blog admin area. The XML format is an extended version of RSS 2.0. Sounds great, but….
Pro / Contra
The export is mainly useful for moving content between WordPress blogs that you run, whether it’s moving from your self-hosted blog to the convienence of WordPress.com or the other direction. What i´ve seen so far is, it includes posts, pages, comments, drafts, private posts, categories, and more. It’s very resource intensive to dump all the content of a blog out, so i only do an export if i really need it.
Solution
From now on i do on-site and off-site backups hourly and daily, so my data is already very safe against service failures and dumbness. The solution in my case will be:
- setting up a new WP installation
- configure the database with my old settings ( saved in this .txt )
- get in use with this XML thingy and export the content again
- update and sort the content
- get in touch with Misa
- inform all that vErSaUtEs is back and party 3 days!
So visit and check up this page daily for new updates. If there is faster or a smarter solution please drop me a comment.
Now it makes not just easy - but very nice too to publish to WordPress from the desktop. A very nice feature is the Drag and Drop Support for the media (pictures, sounds, videos, flash animations…) you want to insert in your post. It´s worth to take a look.
