I read an interesting article today which had some useful feedback on when and why WordPress users were updating to the latest major version, WordPress 3.0. Based on the comments in the article, I noticed a few trends as well as some good insight.

• Major upgrades can break compatibility with plugins and themes.
• Wait for feedback from early adopters before upgrading.
• Backup the entire website before upgrading so a rollback is possible if needed.
• Keep a separate installation of WordPress for testing purposes, and test the upgrade on this installation first, including desired plugins and themes.
• Upgrade immediately if security flaws are addressed to mitigate cyber attacks, otherwise wait for feedback from early adopters.
• Broken Website = Unhappy Client. For a webmaster who is managing a client’s website, it is generally not a good idea to jump on upgrades unless they are proven to work (use a test installation first!) or the client is pushing for them (recommend against it but let them know the risk!).

You definitely don’t want to get burned by jumping ship too early like some people:

• odtaa wrote in stating that his Viva 7 theme stopped functioning, and upon contacting the theme’s vendor he discovered the business had been sold and their website was gone.
• Mary from A-List Blogger Club wrote in stating that she upgraded right away and some of her plugins were incompatible. As a result, several pages ended up in the trash and WordPress somehow granted a newbie user admin status.

You can read the full article here.

As for my take…

I normally would have waited to see what the general reaction was from the public, but in this case I upgraded immediately, which turned out to be painless. I was too eager to implement the new menu system on my blog.

The highly customized basic2col theme I was using would no longer render in WordPress 3.0 and displayed a PHP error, so I switched to TwentyTen and threw in some quick CSS customizations. Also, the WP-Syntax plugin didn’t seem to work properly, so I switched to using basic pre tags until I discovered SyntaxHighlighter Evolved about a week later. After working through these hiccups my site was back online in about 15 minutes.

My blog is rather new and I try to keep the plugins limited by writing custom functions instead, so I wouldn’t recommend a compulsive upgrade for everyone, especially those who are using many customizations.

I’m happy to see such a stable release from a dev team.

The fact is, GlassOcean.net needs more promotion in order for my software to reach a mass audience, and one way to do this is to submit the software to various “File Hosting” websites. Download.com is the first one that comes to mind.

I submitted my personal information yesterday to Upload.com.

8 hours later I was denied.

Here’s the letter they sent me via email:

Reason: At this time we do not accept blogs.

I applaud them for using a review process to filter out all the absurd, virus filled software twinkies they get on a daily basis, as well as trying to curtail spammers and SEO nuts who submit software for the sole purpose of bringing more traffic to their own website for ad revenue and sales.

Besides writing about the things that I find interesting, my blog is a news tool that I use to guide readers towards my software, music, and services, which can all be found on the same website. Apparently I shouldn’t be doing this.

Their knowledgebase/help/faq does mention this:

“At this time we do not accept product-specific URLs or links to pages other than your main company home page.”

Nothing about blogs… Lame sauce!

In the meantime, I’ll need to rethink my idea of having everything Perry under one roof.

While it is certainly possible to host your blog for free at www.WordPress.com, what they are doing is simply providing a service for people who do not have their own web host or the technical know-how to upload and maintain a WordPress installation themselves. Hosting WordPress requires some PHP and database knowledge among other things. Furthermore, www.WordPress.com does not allow advertising for hosted blogs unless the blog attains VIP status.

Create the WordPress Database

WordPress uses a MySQL database to store all of its data and information, so you’ll need to set one up with your web host.

Important: Setting up a database can be unique for any particular web host. No matter what web host you use, you’ll need to remember the database name, username, and password for the database, because WordPress needs this information to communicate with the database and function correctly. Most web hosts allow you to specify at least your own password for the database, but some web hosts won’t let you specify any of this information, so you’ll just have to create the database and settle for whatever your web host assigns for the database name, username, and password.

Sponsored Link

In my case, the 1&1 Webhosting plan that I use for GlassOcean.net costs a mere $9.99/month and allows the creation of 50 MySQL databases… we only need 1 for WordPress!

I just had to logon to my hosting plan at www.1and1.com, click the MySQL Administration link, then click the New Database button. I provided a password of mywpdata then clicked the Set Up button. After about a minute, my database was online and ready to use! I could also see that my web host automatically assigned the database a database name of db334141650 and a username of dbo334141650.

To summarize:

• Database name: db33414650
• Username: dbo334141650
• Password: mywpdata

…and this is exactly what we will plug into the WordPress configuration file later on.

Download WordPress

Visit the official WordPress site and download the latest version of WordPress. All of the WordPress files come packaged inside a zip file.

Extract the Files

The zip file comes packaged with one folder called wordpress, and inside this folder you will find all of the WordPress files.

Extract the wordpress folder somewhere to your computer and open it. In my case I extracted it to the Desktop:

Modify the Configuration

This step is an important one you don’t want to overlook. Before WordPress can function correctly, you must provide it with information about the MySQL database that you created earlier. Particularly, WordPress needs the database name and a username/password to access the database.

Locate the wp-config-sample.php file in the files that you extracted and rename it to wp-config.php. Now open this file in a text editor such as Notepad:

Notice the underlined text, which is where you will plug in the database information that you acquired earlier when you created the MySQL database. Make sure not to erase the single quotation marks.

Upload the Files

Now you’ll want to upload these files to your web server using an FTP program. I like FileZilla since it is robust, easy to use, and of course open source and free.

Welcome to WordPress

Fire up your web browser and navigate to the install script that you uploaded under http://www.[YourSiteURL].com/wp-admin/install.php. Just follow the instructions in your web browser to finish the installation and begin pressing your valuable thoughts!

However, there is another way to this by editing the .htaccess file in your root WordPress directory.

Download the .htaccess file from your root WordPress directory via FTP and open the file in a text editor.

Here is what my .htaccess looked like in Notepad before the modification to enable Permalinks:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
# BEGIN WordPress

# END WordPress

And here is what the modified version looks like, which enables some URL rewriting that WordPress requires to make proper use of Permalinks:

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
ErrorDocument 404 /index.php?error=404
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

Just upload the .htaccess file back to your root WordPress directory via FTP, overwriting the old one.

Logon to your WordPress backend and go to Settings » Permalinks. Select the Custom option, then enter the following:

/%postname%/

What this does is effectively rewrite the URL for your posts to use the Post Name in the URL instead of the Post ID.

Using this article as an example, my previous URL of:

http://www.glassocean.net/?p=858

Would now become:

http://www.glassocean.net/how-to-enable-permalinks-in-wordpress-for-a-shared-web-hosting-plan/

As you can see, that is quite a long URL! You can shorten these URL’s by changing the Post Slug in the Post/Page editor.

Warning – backup your database now! You should always take precautions when modifying the database directly because you can really mess up WordPress if you do something wrong. You are highly advised to make a backup before proceeding, especially if you don’t feel comfortable with these instructions.

Assuming you’ve backed up your database, let’s continue!

Open up phpMyAdmin and click the wp_comments link on the left hand side:

Now you’ll see a page with a ton of information about the wp_comments table, which is a table in your WordPress database that contains all of the comments.

Scroll down the page until you locate the section that says Run SQL query/queries on database:

Pictured above is a SQL query that basically means “retrieve all comment records from the wp_comments table.”

Click the Go button to run this SQL query and retrieve the records from the database.

When the comment records have been retrieved, you will be presented with another page that shows a list of all the comments that are stored in the wp_comments table. This is where you can edit a comment to move it somewhere else.

You’ll want to locate the comment record that you wish to move, click the edit button, then modify the comment_post_ID value and/or comment_parent value to effectively assign the comment to a different post, page, or parent comment. If you’ve selected the option to Enable threaded (nested) comments under Settings –> Discussion, comment_parent is what relates child comments to parent comments so they can appear nested.

In the screenshot below, comment 122 appears nested beneath comment 120 in post 21 due to the relationship defined in comment_parent for comment 122.

Hold up cowboy, you aren’t done yet! If you were to visit the actual post/page where you moved the comment to, you would notice that the Comment Count hasn’t been updated even though the comments now appear to be moved and show up on the post/page.

What you’ll need to do now is modify the post/page record, much in the same way that you modified the comment record, but instead you would select the wp_posts link on the left hand side of phpMyAdmin. Again, you’ll want to query the table, then locate the post/page that needs the Comment Count updated.

This is where things might get confusing and here’s why: WordPress stores every revision that you make to a page/post, not just the current copy, so you’ll want to locate the most recent revision (the one that is actually being displayed on your blog) and modify THAT record only. It’s easy to locate the most recent revision, just check the post_type column for “page” or “post” and not “revision”.

Once you locate the correct record, edit the record and update the comment_count value to match how many comments you actually have for that post/page.

You’re done!

Some WordPress plugins require you to add shortcodes to your pages/posts to utilize the plugin, so I wouldn’t be surprised if you were already using shortcodes. Whether or not you’ve had any experience using WordPress shortcodes, this tutorial has what you need to get started.

Step 1: Create the user-functions.php file

The user-functions.php file will contain our custom functions and shortcodes.

Create a new text file named user-functions.php and copy/paste the following code into the file:

<?php
function HelloWorld() {
    echo "Hello World! This is my custom function.";
}
add_shortcode('hello', 'HelloWorld');
?>

What we’ve done here is create one function called HelloWorld (lines 2-4), and then we added a shortcode to WordPress (line 5) named hello, which calls the HelloWorld function when we include the Hello World! My name is . shortcode in the contents of a page or post.

Save this file and upload it to your active theme folder. For example, if you are using the Twenty Ten theme, the file should be located under [WordPressDir]\wp-content\themes\twentyten\user-functions.php.

Step 2: Instruct WordPress to load the user-functions.php file

Unless WordPress loads your user-functions.php file, it won’t even know about your custom functions/shortcodes!

Download functions.php from your active theme folder.

Open the functions.php file in a text editor and add the following line of code anywhere on a new line:

include_once (TEMPLATEPATH . '/user-functions.php');

Here we are instructing WordPress to load our user-functions.php file as soon as it loads the functions.php file, which will make our custom functions/shortcodes available throughout the entire site, as long as the active theme that we are modifying remains active.

Save the functions.php file and upload it back to your root WordPress directory, overwriting the old one.

Step 3: Using the Shortcode in a Page/Post

Create a new page, then write the following text in the visual editor:

Hello World! My name is .

This shortcode will instruct WordPress to call your HelloWorld function. When you view the published page (or preview the draft), you should get a result similar to this:

Hello World! This is my custom function.

Conclusion

I’ve purposely kept this tutorial and the source code simple enough for anyone to grasp the the basics of what it takes to add a function/shortcode to WordPress. I may decide to extend this tutorial in the future and include some intermediary/advanced topics for readers who wish to continue learning the simple way, via this tutorial.

A Google search for “wordpress the_category without links” returned an article by Robert Mirabito titled How to remove link from the_category in WordPress, which led me to the understanding that I would need to use the get_the_category template tag instead of the the_category template tag. However, Robert’s example inserts a space character as the delimiter, and changing this delimiter to something else results in the delimiter appearing after the very last category. So if you used a comma character as the delimiter, you would end up with something like “Posted in Blog, Services,” which looks bad. This led to some more searching.

A Google search for “wordpress get_the_category separator” returned a question posted by nipponese to the WordPress.org forum titled Adding $separator to get_the_category. Is it possible?

I wasn’t too sure about the solution greenshady provided, so I finally decided it was time to learn how to create my own template tags. One last Google search helped me locate an article by Chris Pearson titled How You Can Use WordPress Functions To Run a Smarter Blog, which had enough information to get me started.

I ended up creating the user-functions.php file and uploading it to my active template folder as described in the article, where I included a custom PHP function that would do the work of displaying the categories how I wanted them.

Check out the code:

<?php
function user_the_categories() {
    // get all categories for this post
    global $cat;
    $cat = get_the_category();
    // echo the first category
    echo $cat[0]->cat_name;
    // echo the remaining categories, appending separator
    for ($i = 1; $i < count($cat); $i++) {echo ', ' . $cat[$i]->cat_name ;}
}
?>

What this little function does is output the first category name, then for every remaining category output a comma and space (‘, ‘), followed by the category name ($cat[$i]->cat_name). We no longer have to worry about that trailing separator character you will most likely have when providing a separator arg with the get_the_categories template tag.

To use this, all I have to do is include this line in my single.php template file:

<?php user_the_categories(); ?>

And what you end up with on the page looks like this:

Posted in Blog, Services

Following the simple upgrade instructions at WordPress.org, I backed up the GlassOcean.net website and database, deactivated all plugins, then performed the automatic upgrade from the WordPress admin interface. About 15 minutes later and GlassOcean.net was running on the new WordPress 3.0!

The only problem I ran into was with the highly customized basic2col theme I was using. Upon visiting the newly upgraded GlassOcean.net I was presented with a PHP parsing error, so I switched over to the new Twenty Ten theme. This is the default theme that comes with WordPress 3.0, which likely means it is easily customizable for newer 3.0 features. Twenty Ten is actually a nice theme that closely resembles the minimal black-on-white style I was going for with the customized basic2col theme anyway. I’m happy with the switch.

GlassOcean.net will be undergoing many changes over the next few days while I continue to customize the appearance and layout to compensate for all of the WordPress 3.0 changes. I’ll be tweaking the “Twenty Ten” theme to match what I had with the “basic2col” theme, re-activating plugins and finding alternatives for those that are not yet supported in WordPress 3.0, as well as tinkering with all of the new features.

It’s an exciting day for WordPressers!

First off, you’ll notice that I’ve created a new navigation menu and static pages for all of the main categories: Blog, Services, Music Productions, and Software Development. Previously, I was using the WordPress “Categories” widget as my navigation menu, and clicking into one of these categories provided a neat listing of all the posts related to that category. However, I soon discovered that the block of text which appears before the post listing on a category page was not very customizable. Unfortunately, the WordPress category editor is not up to par with the rich-text editing capabilities seen in the WordPress post/page editor, so I needed a way to work around this.

What I decided to do was create a static page for each category I was using on the website so I would have the rich-text editing capabilities I needed to provide a decent “intro” on my category pages. Combining this idea with the List category posts plugin by author Fernando Briano, I could now produce exactly what I wanted by designing a page, then using the List category posts shortcode to display a customized category post listing wherever I wanted to in the contents of the page.

Looking forward to WordPress 3.0, these problems might be eliminated entirely with the new menu system, post templates, and multi-site. WordPress design specialist Brian Casel reviews these features in a Mashable article titled: WordPress 3.0: The 5 Most Important New Features.

My migration plan back to WordPress was fairly simple: I had Joomla installed in my website’s root directory (glassocean.net) and I installed WordPress in a subdirectory (glassocean.net/wordpress) where I could begin setting up, customizing the theme, and migrating articles from Joomla.

While the Moving WordPress instructions in the WordPress documentation were easy enough to follow, it wasn’t until I noticed that the SexyBookmarks plugin wasn’t rendering properly in my articles that I must have done something wrong. I tried reinstalling the plugin, but it kept hanging up during the “Unpacking contents of package” phase.

The WordPress documentation does make some mention of the .htaccess file, but it doesn’t state that WordPress requires this file to be in your website’s root directory even if WordPress is not installed to the root of your website. The reason? For people like myself using a shared web hosting plan, you do not have full control of which version of PHP the web server is running. The alternative is to explicitly instruct the web server to use PHP5 instead of PHP4 (if available) to process all .php files on your website by including a .htaccess file at the root of your website containing the text: AddType x-mapp-php5 .php. Not knowing this myself, I removed the .htaccess file along with the rest of the Joomla files as I was migrating the WordPress files into the root of my website, which broke the WordPress plugin installer. When I restored the .htaccess file to the root of my website, WordPress started working normally again and I was able to get the SexyBookmarks plugin reinstalled.

In case you need to recreate the .htaccess file, just open a text editor and save the file as “.htaccess” without an extension. If your operating system gives it an extension anyway, just rename the file and remove the extension.

Here’s an excellent explanation from 1and1 (the shared web hosting provider that I use) on why this .htaccess file is necessary.