It would be easy to assume that everyone on the internet speaks English. The majority of software is produced in English simply for the reason that doing so gives it a larger potential audience (or, maybe more appropriately, gives it access into the American market). However, you shouldn't assume this means everyone reads and writes English at the same level, or that non-native speakers wouldn't want software in their own language. There is a world of speakers outside of English and now is the time to tap into them.
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This guide is another in the Inside WordPress series and attempts to show how to produce a translation for an already-prepared theme, plugin, or WordPress itself. Even if you have little PHP or HTML skills you can still contribute to making WordPress a truly international experience by providing localizations for existing themes and plugins.
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Pings and trackbacks are a way for weblogs to communicate with each other and say 'hey, I talked about your site'. They allow you to see how far your site has spread, and exactly who is reading your content. By default, WordPress mixes pings and comments together, clogging up the conversational flow and making it hard to follow what people are saying.
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In an effort to remove all invalid links and redirections from my site I've been paying very close attention to my access logs. Courtesy of the list that Redirection maintains I've noticed that my site has been under a prolonged attack.
No, there's no panic just yet, and so far this is not something I'm worried about. The attacks appear to be part of a general 'find any weakness in any website' method, rather than a specific and directed attack.
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An attempt to give my website a bit of spring cleaning has resulted in several new WordPress plugins.
The first is Tidy Up, which adds the ability to run HTML Tidy through all your posts and comments and produce a report on the quality of your HTML. If you're feeling brave you can also have the plugin automatically fix any problems.
Next is Search Regex. As the name would suggest, this is a search and replace plugin. It allows you to search and replace phrases inside posts, pages, comments, and meta-data. In addition to plain text searches, you can also use full PHP regular expressions. This makes it very easy to bulk-modify a WordPress installation, should you decide to move directories. Several other similar plugins exist, but I couldn't find one that provided the regular expression capability that I needed.
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We generally become WordPress users to create a blog for everyone to see. This can involve the purchasing of a domain name and web hosting. These we treat as black boxes on which the WordPress software is installed, and everything magically works. This is exactly how it should be.
Although WordPress provides a comprehensive management interface, there are times when it would be better to have our own local copy, running on our own machine. There are several reasons we would want to do this:
A working backup of our online site A development site to develop plugins and themes without affecting our online site A testing area to try out hacks and new versions of WordPress without fear of corrupting the live site A staging area to create and verify posts, before releasing them live
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In previous guides we have concentrated on the building blocks of creating a WordPress theme. A basic design structure has been defined, followed by enclosing header and footer elements, and finished off with a navigational guide. While important aspects of any blog, they are secondary to its main purpose: the content.
In this fourth and final part we carefully dissect the process of taking the content from WordPress and arranging it on screen. Attention is paid to the many alternative methods of grouping this information, from the many posts of the front page to search results and archives.
We will look at how WordPress distributes the responsibility for this work, and how everything is tied together with the all-seeing all-knowing construct known as ‘The Loop’.
By the end of this guide we will not only have a fully working theme, but we should have enough experience and knowledge of WordPress to be able to extend our theme beyond the basic design presented here.
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Personalising a blog can require patience and perseverance. There are times when it seems a fruitless task and the blog absolutely refuses to do what you want, despite your best efforts. There are many sources of information on the internet, but it can be hard to locate exactly what you need.
One of the simplest solutions is to look at other people’s work and see if you can make use of their ideas. This is the third part in a series of articles concerned with the dissection of the default WordPress theme, Kubrick. The hope is that walking through this theme may provide help for your own blog or, at the very least, open up new areas of research. After all, there is no shortage of information out there.
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Web design is a notoriously tricky subject. Often we give up any thoughts of innovation when the process of realising them is such hard work. Part two of this WordPress dissection continues to try and explain the basic workings of the software, how this relates to the layout, and how anyone can personalise their blog.
The focus will be on finalising the basic layout from part one, and then finishing the header and footer sections. Both of these are important as they stylistically define a blog and act as visual focal points – do it well and people will want to read your blog, do it badly and they may not even bother.
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Life as a WordPress blogger has become remarkably easy. If you can hold a mouse and follow instructions then you're most of the way towards carving out your own niche on the internet. A fresh installation gives you a powerful and attractive system with minimal effort, and with a little luck you can be blogging in under half an hour.
Despite the availability of hundreds of themes, and the general goodness of the default Kubrick theme, sometimes you just want to give your blog that personal touch, and the only way to do this is by going under the hood and having a look around.
A month in to running a WordPress-based website and I find myself doing the very same thing. None of the themes were exactly what I was looking for, and after investigating the internals of WordPress I realised it was a lot more involved than it initially appeared. I could certainly imagine a beginner being overwhelmed by the mass of acronyms and incongruent technologies.
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