Adding order to posts in Wordpress

This is pretty simple to do. I added all the posts I wanted to my site then went through one by one and edited the date of publish- most recent dates appear first in order.

To do this I simply went into "edit" each post. I look at the page where I compose a post under the "Publish" section.
I look at the text that says "Published on: Aug 6, 2011 @ 18:42 Edit". I click on edit. I numbered my posts starting form 1.1.2011 all the way up to 1.21.2011. I make a note that all my posts are published at noon. If I need to add a post I can pick an hour of publish that falls between two existing publish dates and times. If I need to add a new post that shows up as the most current I can just pick the next date in my series of dates and that will show up first OR I can pick an earlier date and my new post will go way down to being the last post in the batch.

Also I went to my dashboard again and I went into the permalinks section. Here I selected the option to order my posts by day and name.

Organizing pages via Wordpress Plugin My Page Order

I've organized my pages on Wordpress using a plugin called My Page Order created by Andrew Charlton. You can look up this plugin via Wordpress, or follow the link. This plugin does a few very helpful things. After install and activation, it creates a new section in the "Pages" category of your Dashboard. Look under the "Pages" section and you will see "My Page Order" has been added.



Click on this and you find yourself in a screen that lets you drag and drop pages into the order you want. Your pages will now have a number that appears in the " Page Attributes" section of your page when you view it in editing or composing mode.... See image below.

Removing comments and Author info- AGAIN!

I previously went through my Wordpress dashboard to edit a file called single.php on my site. Herein, I commented out a bit of text that added comments and author info to my posts- I want my site to look like a professional web page and I've done a few tricks here and there to remove all of the things Wordpress adds to give a site a more news driven and blog oriented look.

Hmm. Strangely enough a few weeks later the info came back. I've tried several Plugins on the site and am using several which may have added the info back in but honestly this was a hard bug to trace. Again, I'm using the Graph Paper Press theme called Fullscreen and I'm using Wordpress version 3.2.1

I'm using these plugins through out the site:

Asticky postorder

Shadowbox JS

My page order

Web Ninja Google Analytics

Jetpack ( Automatically active with the original Wordpress version 3.2.1)


Anyone of the first four may have re-activate the comments- hard to tell really. This time I have hidden the comments by adding a new plugin called "HIDE COMMENTS FEATURE" by Vitor Carvalho.

This removes the comment section from your Wordpress Dashboard and the comments and "leave a reply" section from your post pages. If your "prev" and "next" page navigation buttons are active it does not affect them.

Make part of link menu not active: Wordpress

I'm pulling form another page.
Here's how to have a menu with part of it (parent) as non-active

"Plus with the new Wordpress 3+ menus you don't need to install the plug-in, just create a custom menu item that points to the URL "#" and position it as the parent, then arrange your pages as its children. This means you can have some parents items that aren't pages at all while others can be both parent items and pages in their own right."

Tab for custom links is on the left I literally didn't see it until I needed it. Take out the "http://" stuff and just add "#".
Here's a link to original post where I found this. Thanks other bloggers!

Removing time, date author from Wordpress Fullscreen theme

I looked high and low for some widget to do the job but it did in fact boil down to changing the core code- which I hate to do but it's worked out alright this time.

The code that adds the metadata tag of time, date, author to posts in Wordpress is different in every theme as far as I can tell. Be aware of that first and foremost. I tried at least five other ways of changing this that other people noted had worked for them but which did not work for me.

Note that I am using the Fullscreen theme from Graph Paper Press. I am using Wordpress 3.2.1

I made my change to single.php

I commented out the time, date author using the code at left:

I left the navigation for prev. and next. Really I wish I could get that on to my pages... don't know why that's not an available option but oh that's Wordpress for you: making the simple into the impossible.

Here's a img. of where I made my edits. Click on img. for a large view. Good luck!

Center a video on Wordpress

That's all!

Add PDF to Wordpress that you can download

For the sake of putting everything in one place, here's how to set up a PDF on wordpress so that you can download it.

Note on using Text Wrangler with Graph Paper Press Themes

Just a note that on using Graph Paper Press themes with wordpress I had issues with Text Wrangler adding some extra code to my php and sabotaging my whole set up to produce a syntax error. If you're editing a theme produced by this company or editing Wordpress in general be wary of this text editor. If anyone has better luck please post comments...

Brighten images on Fullscreen, Graph Paper Press, Wordpress 3.2.1

I changed the mouse-out brightness for thumbnails on Fullscreen theme from Graph Paper Press. My site is hosted on GoDaddy.com so I was able to go in and directly open the file and edit it. Direct editing isn't always the best idea, but if it's a simple one word or number edit you can try it from time to time. Please note it's best to try edits offline I'm simply telling you how I did it:

Went to GoDaddy. Went to account summary. Went to hosting. Clicked on my site and "launch" button. That put me in the "hosting control center". Clicked on expanding "content" tab. Selected "FTP File Manager icon".

Went to Wordpress folder. Went to wp-content/themes/ fullscreen/ js

You want to edit the //Fade section.
You want to edit the 1st and last ("slow"0.3"); section to ("slow"0.6");

You're changing the values under fade from 0.3 to 0.6. Click on the image below so you can see everything in greater detail.

Then clicked on top left icon of disc to save file.

Done.

Linking wordpress gallery thumbnail to page or post...

I'm using WP 3.2.1.

Putting this post up after spending almost 2.5 weeks looking for some easy way to add a link form gallery thumb to page or post. Gallery has default settings that are very hard to work around and I crashed my site once in the process of trying to make some magic happen.

Simply putting this post up to steer people in the right direction: you will find that it is much easier to tinker with the style.css section of your site and adjust image postings. Here you can change the border width, margins and alignment. You can very likely get the look and feel that you are after without ever tackling the monster that is Wordpress's very klunky gallery.

There is a little wiggle room to be had ( though not enough to make me happy) that you can find by using plugins:

file gallery ( best gallery add on I've found so far. it is a student project and I have not tested it in depth simply loaded it and explored the options which I found impressive.)

and

NextGEN gallery ( which seemed to meet my needs but had lots of features that were not applicable to my goals).

If anyone finds a quick and easy way to add the feature of links to pages from thumbnails rather that the default gallery set up that WP has or file url please add a comment and link. What I'm looking from is something really simple. No deep php edits--- no creation of new editing elements unless it's some amazing plug in: simple simple simple which is what Wordpress is supposed to be all about.

Wordpress Gallery: No borders no margins: ditch the gallery

After doing a million things to try and adjust my wordpress gallery I've ditched the gallery. I went in and made changes to my template style css. I'm using Wordpress 3.2.1 and I'm using a Graph Paper Press template called Fullscreen.

I first went into my style.css in the "editor" section of my dashboard. If you're lost, the "editor" section is found as a sub-category in the "Appearances" section. This section appears in menu on the left side of your dashboard.




Okay back to editing...


I changed all the border values to zero. No need to add a unit of measurement here so you can ditch the px or em unit as you adjust.

Then I went into the "Floats and Images" section of my style.css and changed the align values to not just left, but top left.




That did the trick!

Add Wordpress to GoDaddy Hosting (after MYSQL database is installed)

How to Install WP on Go Daddy Hosting. Please note you'll have already needed to set up your MSQL database in order to move forward with this. If you haven't set up the MYSQL database here's how you do it. Wordpress brags about a "famous 5 minute install" and that's after you create the MYSQL database which can take upwards of a half hour:). ( yes I have watched this video and I think it's reasonable.)


After you've got the MYSQL database here's what you do:


1) Log in

2) Go to "My Account" tab on far right and select Account Summary.

3) You'll get a menu on the left that looks like this. Select "hosting"

4) From here the page will load and the site your working on will pop up with a list of a few others. Click on the "Launch" button.

5)Now you'll be in the "Hosting Control Center". Look to the right and see a menu that says APPLICATIONS: install and manage. Click on the WP icon....







6) Find the page w/ multiple applications. Click on the WP.









7) You'll be walked through a 4 step process to set up word press. You'll complete the process and you may have to wait somewhere in the ballpark of a half hour for the process to be complete- I think it's taking me about 15min.

Lighten Menu in Fullscreen Graph Paper Press theme for Wordpress 3.2.1

Change the color of menu items in Fullscreen theme from Graph Paper Press on Wordpress 3.2.1

Go into Style.css section... Go to menu bar on left and go to "Appearances" section.

Select sub-category "Editor". Go to Style.css file and open it.

There is a section near the top titled: /* Home Thumbs & Nav*/

Below this you will see several tags that say this:

Because the background in Fullscreen is so dark it's hard to see the menu at top unless you lighten it. It fades out when you move away from it and it's easy for a new user to get lost.

Change the color codes to #CCCCCC and your menu will pop out.

Maybe pop out too much :) Choose the menu color that's right for you.

Wordpress 3.2.1 with Graph Paper Press Fullscreen theme

NOTE: A CORRECTION HAS BEEN MADE TO THIS PAGE!!!

Next I'm going to make it so that the home page of my blog pulls images to display not just from the posts I put up but form the pages too. I'm actually all together going to ignore the use of post for this site ( unless I can think of a reason to use 'em later).

To make images form pages visible I'm going to go to the "Appearances" section again. I'm going to select the sub-category "Editor", and tweak the code a bit. I need to look for the bit of code that tells the template to pull from posts. For some people the code that affects this element may occur in other places ( I've seen other tutorials that list it elsewhere) so check around before you do this if you can't find the string of code I'm using and if you aren't using the Graph Paper Press Fullscreen theme). See below the code before I edit it:

.... see example.

so cut and paste this:

new WP_Query("post_type=page&showposts=5");

It's a one word add but I have to do it in two spots. That's it! Don't forget to go to the bottom of the page and hit the blue "Update File" button.

Creating Menu in Wordpress 3.2.1

Alright now I'm going to create a menu. I've gone into my dashboard and I'm looking to the left. Under the category titled "Appearances" I'm going to select the sub-category of "menu". On the right I'll get a box prompting me to add a name and then I'll hit the blue "create menu" button at far right. I've named my menu "Basic"

Ta da! My basic menu is created. But there's nothing on it yet.

Now look to the lower left side. There are a number of boxes and one of them has all of my existing pages listed in it. Then I'm going to check the "add to menu" button below. Here I'm going to go in and add check the box: these pages will be added to my menu.

To add a drop down element with sub-categories to any of your pages drag and drop the sub pages under the lead page and pull the bar a little to the right. sub-category pages are offset a little to the right. Drag and drop the other pages in the order you'd like them to be listed. Don't forget to hit save menu when you're done!

Add Menu and Pages to WP template

I'm going to add pages and a menu to my WP 3.2.1 website. I'm going to go to the Dashboard of my site, select "pages" from menu bar at left and then will select "add new" from top of page.

For now I'm just adding a title so that the page is created. I've given my page the title of "ABOUT" and then I'll look to the right side and hit the blue "publish" button. And...then my page is created!

Then I'll click on the "pages" section at left and I can see all of the pages I've created. When I hover over the title of the pages it gives me the option to " edit/ quick edit/ trash/ view". I'm going to go to the sample page and just select "trash" since this page was in here automatically just for filler.

That's it! My core pages are added.

Working With Wordpress

I am working on a website with Wordpress 3.2.1. ( refered to from here on as "WP") I am making a variety of changes to the WP set up and I am using a template from Graph Paper Press called "Fullscreen".

I am making use of the following plug-ins:

Unattach: unattaches files from original URL

Easy Fancy box: WP version of shadow box/ lightbox

Pagemash: File management interface

and a few things that came with the WP install:

Askimet: prevents spam

Jetpack: interface for cloud support ( not gonna use it)

In following posts I'll detail how I made changes to the blog. I'll include links and tutorials.