WPatch.com – Page 2 – Simplifying Your Digital Life One Simple Step at a Time

My Number 1 WordPress web development tip

Here’s my number 1 WordPress web development tip — install WordPress locally.

Want to develop websites faster? Start using WordPress. Maybe that should be my number one tip. But in my opinion, to best build and prepare a website for deployment you’ll be much happier working on the site if it’s running an a WordPress install that’s running on your own machine.

If you’re using a Mac check out this very thorough and helpful tutorial over at WPCandy.com on How to install WordPress locally on a Mac.

If you’re using a PC then I’d suggest using this BitNami WordPress stack to install WordPress locally.

When you’re ready to move your WordPress site to the web server WPCandy.com has help for that too.

Loaded and free WordPress User Guide

Here’s a loaded with detail WordPress User Guide updated for WordPress 3.2 made available by interconnectit.com for free in PDF format. Whether you’re an end user of WordPress or have clients who need help harnessing the power of WordPress this is a rich, handy and free resource.

WordPress visual cheat sheet

There’s a new and very handy WordPress Visual Cheat Sheet available for download at woorkup.com. One can never have too many WordPress cheat sheets.

Hot new WordPress theme – Mystique revisions

Mystique is a powerful new theme that gives you so many reasons to love it. This is one of the most feature rich GPL theme’s I’ve seen in a while. Go take a look at the demo site to discover all the features, page layouts and included options. Nicely done.

Theme author | Download

Need proof WordPress works?

Need proof WordPress works? Check out 30 Great Sites Using WordPress as a CMS.

WordPress tutorial videos

Need help learning some of the basics or even more advanced features of WordPress?

Here are two resources for tutorial videos:

Customizing WordPress page and post titles

I have previously written about customizing WordPress using a custom field function to change the title that displays at the top of a page allowing you to have, for instance, a link in the side bar to the home page called “Home” but a different title on that page such as “Welcome” instead of “Home”.

That was handy but took some modification of the theme template files. If you changed your theme you had to carry over those changes to the new theme to retain the custom page titles.

Now there’s a simple plugin that does all the work for you and adds the ability to customize the display titles of posts as well which I had not included in the original method and makes changing theme template files unnecessary.

The plugin is called WP-Title-2 and is one more tool in my WordPress as a CMS tool box.

For more plugins that help transform WordPress into a more powerful CMS platform you may be interested in my post: WordPress as a CMS and plugins that help.

A proper fix for PodPress in WordPress 2.6

The powerful PodPress plugin for WordPress seems to have a problem with the new post revisions feature of WordPress 2.6. For many the solution has been to disable the post revision feature — but I happen to think that the post revision feature is a good thing.

Go here for a post by Andrew Ozz that explains how to fix the problem. Note that if you’re using PodPress version 8.8 you’ll find the fix in the comments section of that post.

PodPress in WordPress 2.6

WordPress 2.6 gallery shortcode

One of the things that so nice about WordPress 2.6 is the ability to easily insert a mini photo gallery into your post. There’s also some handy gallery shortcode that give you options for the number of columns, the size of thumbnails and more.

WordPress 2.6 released

WordPress 2.6 has been released with several worthwhile improvements. Check out the brief tour video.