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Celebrating Two Years: A Month of WordPress Tips

WordPress.com 2 year anniversary partyAs part of my two month-long party celebrating the two year anniversary of WordPress.com and this blog with guest bloggers, we’re just finishing up month one of non-stop blogging about blogging, and tomorrow begins a whole month of non-stop WordPress tips.

To help get you in the mood, here are some of the tips for WordPress and WordPress.com I’ve covered in the past.

WordPress Help

The most important help I can give to WordPress users is knowing where to go for help. The resources for finding help for WordPress issues are:

  • : For problems and issues for dealing with the full version of WordPress.
  • WordPress.com Forums: The support forum for issues dealing with WordPress.com.
  • WordPress.com Support Contact: If you are unable to contact WordPress.com support through your blog’s Feedback form, you can contact WordPress.com Support via their contact form, open Monday – Friday 9 AM – 5PM PDT.
  • WordPress.com FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions about WordPress.com features and tips.
  • : The online manual for WordPress Users, WordPress.com, and other versions of WordPress.
  • WordPress Lessons: Tutorials and Lessons on how to use and customize WordPress.
  • Reporting Bugs: Information on how to report bugs in WordPress.
  • IRC Chat: An on and off again live chat channel for help with WordPress issues.

Some articles I’ve written in the past on how to find and get help with WordPress include:

WordPress.com Tips and Tricks

For two years, I’ve been a fellow blogger, learning how to work within the limitations of the free blogging services. Here are some tips on how to use WordPress.com.

WordPress.com Blog Bling

WordPress.com blogs are limited to what can be done within the post content area, the only really “customizable” area users have access to. I popular series, called WordPress.com Blog Bling, was a challenge to myself and others to push WordPress.com’s post content area to its creative limits. It covered fonts, lists, blockquotes, images, video, lines, smilies, podcasts, writing code in your posts, adding a signature, and how to ad other graphic and visual design elements.

WordPress Tips

I love the full version of and have several WordPress blogs that I’ve dug into, fully customized and tweaked – and broke – too many times to mention. Here are some tips for full version WordPress blogs I’ve written over the past two years on this blog.

Installation and Upgrading WordPress

WordPress Administration and Publishing Tips

WordPress Publishing Tips

WordPress Themes Tips

WordPress Themes offer quick and easy application of “pretty” to your blog, but they are so much more.

The hardest part of WordPress Themes is finding one that suits your blog and blogging style, then tweaking it to fine-tune the Theme for your blog. Here are some tips:

Finding WordPress Themes

Choosing a WordPress Theme

Choosing a WordPress Theme isn’t just about the “pretty”. A WordPress Theme is a dynamic creature, with the potential for every page on a WordPress blog to look and feel different. The most simple WordPress Themes have a “look” for the front page, single post page view, and the category and other multi-post page views at a minimum. More complex Themes change depending upon the request the visitor makes on the blog. It opens up a wide range of possibilities, and makes finding the right WordPress Theme for your blog a little more difficult.

Designing a WordPress Theme

Designing WordPress Themes for Public Release

A WordPress Theme you design for yourself meets your needs and is as good a Theme as you are a designer. A WordPress Theme released for others to use has to be more. It has to be checked, tested, and rechecked so it will work within all circumstances and situations. It has to be safe from security vulnerabilities and flaws. It must be supported, and it must be updated as web technology and WordPress changes.

Here are some tips specifically for those who want to release their WordPress Themes to the public:

WordPress Theme and Template Files Tips

Custom and Advanced WordPress Techniques

WordPress and SEO Tips

Feeds

WordPress Widgets

WordPress Plugins

I love WordPress Plugins, and their creative authors. What they bring to the WordPress table is the ability for our blogs to go beyond just the basics – they allow us to customize and tweak them infinitely.

I’ve written a lot about various WordPress Plugins, but here are some tips for installing and using WordPress Plugins.

A Month of WordPress Tips

This seems like a lot of WordPress tips, leaving nothing left for the next month, but trust me, I have a long list of WordPress tips to bring to you, and I know my guest bloggers have even more.

That’s the joy of WordPress. It is infinitely flexible, customizable, and tweakable. What you do with it is up to your imagination and ability. Hopefully, with all these great WordPress tips, your abilities will improve and your imagination will be stimulated with the possibilities.

Enjoy!
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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network, and author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

This entry was written by Lorelle VanFossen and posted on August 31, 2007 at 10:22 am and filed under WordPress, WordPress News, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips with tags , , , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

19 Comments

  1. Carl Coddington
    Posted August 31, 2007 at 10:36 am | Permalink

    Whoa! It almost seems useless to do a “wordpress” month after all those links.

    Reply
  2. Lorelle VanFossen
    Posted August 31, 2007 at 10:52 am | Permalink

    Actually, when I look at the list, I see that I haven’t covered WordPress Tips as extensively as I thought I had. There are SO many tips I wanted to cover, and now this whole month gives me and others the chance to tackle my favorite subject. 😀

    Reply
  3. Barbara Rozgonyi
    Posted August 31, 2007 at 1:38 pm | Permalink

    Thanks for the colossal collection! Great idea and example of a round up publishing format to work towards. This list widens the scope of what WordPress can do – amazing. Looking forward to the series.

    Reply
  4. Douglas Bell
    Posted August 31, 2007 at 1:40 pm | Permalink

    Still, I can see what Carl means. With all of these, one would think that the only tips that haven’t been covered are the monetary kind that you drop in a Tip Jar. 😉

    Reply
  5. pelf
    Posted August 31, 2007 at 6:22 pm | Permalink

    Seriously, Lorelle, by the time I finish reading all your previous articles highlighted above, and finally sit down with my own tips, September would be gone!! LOL.

    Reply
  6. Lorelle VanFossen
    Posted August 31, 2007 at 6:44 pm | Permalink

    Geesh, you guys. Tips are like breath mints. You only use them when you need them. You don’t go through the whole list like a book.

    You all are too funny. 😀

    Reply
  7. Mohsin
    Posted September 1, 2007 at 11:38 am | Permalink

    Lorelle, Lorelle, Lorelle.. you know why I don’t visit your blog so often? because I know I’ll be sucked in and I’ll have to spend hours exploring this information treasure chest.

    *settles down for a whole night of reading*

    Reply
  8. Chess Teaching
    Posted September 1, 2007 at 11:46 am | Permalink

    Thanks for all these links and for your two years of wordpress tips.

    Reply
  9. Lorelle VanFossen
    Posted September 1, 2007 at 3:36 pm | Permalink

    Ah, Mohsin, I’m so glad I’m better than sleeping pills. 😀

    And thanks, Chess and everyone, for being the most important part of my anniversary party! Without you all, those of us standing around in party hats would sure look stupid. 😀

    Reply
  10. Kirk M
    Posted September 2, 2007 at 8:23 am | Permalink

    Hi Lorelle,

    I am very glad you, your tips and your guest authors have been around for the past two years. Although I haven’t left a comment recently, I’ve always found you and yours one of the very first sources of WordPress info that I turn to when I hit a snag, when someone else hits a snag or needs info and just for great reading.

    Many thanks for all your work. perhaps someday I can make it to an SOB convention and thank you personally.

    Enjoy the day.

    Reply
  11. Lorelle VanFossen
    Posted September 2, 2007 at 9:53 am | Permalink

    Thanks for the kind words. As for meeting up with me, I attend and speak at a lot of conferences besides SOBCon. Were you at WordCamp? 😀

    Reply
  12. Иван
    Posted September 3, 2007 at 1:25 pm | Permalink

    Happy anniversary (and hanukah when it comes :))

    Reply
  13. lyn
    Posted September 17, 2007 at 9:36 am | Permalink

    I am fairly new to wordpress, and am struggling with some of the plugins. Can you provide some explanations on how to make adsense deluxe work, and amazon? also ultimate tag warrior. generally their pages either assume the user is already expert, or are written in jargon….

    Reply
  14. Lorelle VanFossen
    Posted September 17, 2007 at 4:19 pm | Permalink

    These Plugins come with fairly good documentation, but you can learn more on installing them from How to Install, Configure, and Use WordPress Plugins. The Ultimate Tag Warrior Plugin does not work for current versions of WordPress and has stopped being updated as the next version of WordPress will include tags built-in.

    Reply
  15. Guyver
    Posted February 15, 2008 at 8:03 am | Permalink

    Many Many Thanks! It’s like an encyclopedia.

    Reply
  16. Brian
    Posted June 2, 2008 at 4:49 am | Permalink

    Is this updated for the new WordPress Dashboard?

    Reply
  17. Lorelle VanFossen
    Posted June 2, 2008 at 9:02 am | Permalink

    @ Brian:

    Is what updated? The articles referenced? This was published and many of the articles written during the month celebrating the two year anniversary of WordPress and this blog in August of 2007. WordPress 2.5 was released at the end of March 2008. Do they still apply. Yes. For the most part they do. The changes to the WordPress Administration Panels (the Dashboard is just one of those panels not the whole thing) were mostly cosmetic.

    But if there is a specific article you are concerned about, let me know or try it and see if it works for you in the new version.

    Reply
  18. Brian
    Posted June 2, 2008 at 9:26 am | Permalink

    I was thinking along the lines of the Media Library, the uploading of photos and the like. Little things would be page slugs, adding tags and changing and editing widgets. All those have changed from the old dashboard.

    Reply
  19. Lorelle VanFossen
    Posted June 2, 2008 at 10:05 am | Permalink

    @ Brian:

    The Media Library is new, but also new cosmetically. It still works much the same as the old version, just more visual. I do like the easier ability to add CSS align classes, though the linking aspect has confused many, as it did in the old version. The gallery feature is fun, and I’ll have more on that soon.

    Tags are tags, whether or not they came with Plugins or the native tagging in WordPress. They don’t change. The ability of automatic redirects with post slugs is nice, but the same as it just skips the redirect codes in the .htaccess file. So most of the tips within this month long article series, as with all the articles on my blog, continue to be fairly up-to-date, and I’ve written a lot about the new version as well.

    Articles that are drastically changed by the new version that I’ve written I’m slowly going back and adding notes and updating them, and I’m constantly adding new documentation and information here and on the WordPress Codex. Living and working with an evolving program is just part of life. Things change, but the old stuff is still valid. 😀

    Reply

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