Moving a WordPress install cleanly

This is a real simple process and but if you don’t take the right steps it can get ugly quick.  In my case I staged the site in one spot then moved it to deploy, and these are the steps I took.
1. In the admin interface at the current blog location navigate to the Settings->General section.  You’ll want to be here so that when you have moved everything over to it’s new location you can change the ‘WordPress address (URL)’ to it’s new address.
2. Copy over the whole files structure to its new location (leave a copy in…

Converting Blogger (blogspot) to WordPress

I just recently made this switch for a number of reasons but for this post I want to concentrate on the exact steps taken. I thought the switch was going to be a huge task but in the end I found out that most of it is automated and the whole switch took less than a couple of hours (creating a custom theme and tweaking all the settings and plugins much much longer). I had some pretty good page rankings with Google and a week later I can now confirm that my blogs search rankings converted over cleanly.

Fixing broken WordPress image upload

Just a quick post on this cos I just went through it and eventually I worked it out but I lost a little piece of my sanity there for a while. This probably only applies if you have set your WordPress up in one location and then moved it. I set mine up to stage it and then I moved it into a different directory to deploy live.
Basically in the admin interface you just have to go into Settings->Miscellaneous and change the ‘Store uploads in this folder’ setting to wherever the new path is, or just setting it to…

Blog Relaunch

So I finally managed to find the time to relaunch this blog. When I first started the blog it was somewhat of an experiment so I didn’t spend much effort on its design, but unlike other failed blogs I’d started over the years I’ve really been enjoying writing these posts and I think this time around it’s got some staying power. This relaunch is really intertwined with my online rebrand I’ve been talking about… lately, this blog plays a big part in my online image and it was important that I spend the time to focus on fixing its issues.

My Site Added to the WordPress Showcase

This was a pretty cool thing that happened to me this week. A site I built earlier this year www.thefordstory.com got added the the WordPress Showcase! See for yourself – http://wordpress.org/showcase/the-ford-story/….
This is especially cool for me for two reasons. Firstly it talks about how it recognizes Fords choice to use WordPress a social media medium, which is something I myself fought hard to make a reality – PHP is not a language we have previously supported as an agency and in the short time we had to build the site some questioned whether we were biting off more

Customizing WordPress as a CMS finishing touches

My last couple of posts I’ve talked about how to customize Wordpress to create your own theme and templates. As I talked about in this post I feel that Wordpress is a hugely powerful CMS admin system but falls behind with its front-end publishing capabilities. I don’t like how it publishes the HTML and in this post I will give some hints as to how to completely abandon the Wordpress front-end for your own.

Create a custom template in Wordpess

1. Open up a new file and add the following:

<?php
/*
Template Name: My Template
*/
?>

2. Save the file in your theme folder with the name of your new template, the filename doesn’t have to be an exact match for the template name, e.g. ‘mytemplate.php’.

Create a custom WordPress theme in one minute

Creating a custom Wordpress theme is damn easy. So easy in fact that when I was originally researching how to do this I didn’t find anything out there that relayed exactly how easy it is. You can find detailed instructions at the official Wordpress documentation, but if you are an experienced web developer and php coder this will give everything you need to immediately hit the ground running.

Using WordPress as a custom CMS

I recently had a crash course in WordPress when I had to build a very custom website from scratch in two weeks from start to finish. It needed to be WordPress because this site will contain a blog that will be handed off to a third party to maintain, and WordPress is arguably the industry standards for blogging software. I wasn’t overly familiar with WordPress, I’d setup a blog or two in my time, but never anything as complex as building a custom theme or plugin. But I basically knew everything I needed to do was possible, I’d read up…