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Making a child theme to preserve the changes you have made in the WordPress theme

ashish — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 08:37:12 +0000

Rare is the case when people do not make a change to the WordPress themes that they have installed. They may fiddle around with the .css files, changing font sizes / font colors, etc to customize it as per their own preference. So, you have a theme that looks somewhat good, but then you realize that it needs some work; you fire up your text editor, open up the css files and the functions file and make some changes. Or you could add some new php code to your functions file and use it within your themes to add some functionality that was missing. You could even go further and add new template files, over-ride some of the templates that are being used in the theme, and so on.
And then, you know how important it is to upgrade your plugins and themes in order to ensure that the security levels of your blog remains high. So, you see a theme upgrade, and go ahead for the upgrade. What you did not really think through was that the theme upgrade replaced the files in your theme, including the changes that you had made so lovingly, and some parts of your blog get affected. That is bad, but there is really nothing you can do about it. But, there is something you can do, although it requires some effort. WordPress gives a functionality called ‘Child Themes’, that allows you to make changes, and these changes are preserved even when you upgrade your themes. Here are some tutorials that allow you to learn the scope of what you can do through Child Themes, and the process of doing so.
Child Themes on WordPress Codex (link)
Introducing Thirty Ten, my guide to creating a Twenty Ten Child Theme (link)
How to make a child theme for WordPress: A pictorial introduction for beginners (link)
Ten Good Reasons to use WordPress Child Themes and Template Parts (link)

The name of the URL should be as descriptive as possible – primarily for WordPress

ashish — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 16:15:35 +0000

You would have done many steps / tips to ensure the optimization of SEO for your blog, to ensure that you get as high a place in search engines, including Google Search. But this quest to further optimize your blog needs to be an ongoing quest, and since search engine placement is an evolving art (especially since people keep on working out how to game the search engines and the search engines keep on evolving to ensure that the results are as accurate as possible, free of influences such as people twisting their login by tricks and tactics). As a part of this quest, I was reading about more tips on how to ensure that your blog / post gets that slight extra bit of promotion.
This tip was something that was a bit surprising, and unexpected, but now that I think of it, it seems a continuation of making content more relevant. You would have known by now that tricks like keyword stuffing, using more keywords the same color as the background, etc, do not work, and in fact result in the search engines enforcing penalties. Further, you would also know that it is important to ensure that you do not have copied content, that you do not indulge in tricks such as buying links (since search engines also have people who know these tricks and enforce penalties).
You would started getting used to the fact that you need good unique content, that is one of the most critical tricks needed to ensure that you get a higher boost in search engine rankings, and cause more people to link to your content (as well as send your posts to more people on their own – something called viral marketing).
But, you can do this:
Make sure that your URL’s also have some unique nomenclature, rather than be some default numbering scheme. If you are running a WordPress Blog, then you need to go the following option:
Login into your account -> Settings -> Permalinks.
The default selection is the one where your final post URL ends up in something called

http://earn-cash-tips.com/?p=987

This is not a URL that is guaranteed to be very attractive, and does not let anybody know what the URL contains. However, if you select the “Day and Name / Month and Name” option, then you get a URL such as this one:

http://earn-cash-tips.com/2010/01/the-name-of-the-url-should-be-as-descriptive-as-possible

Anybody who sees this URL will be able to easily figure what this URL means, and what kind of article will be at this location. Apparently, search engines also value this extra bit of nomenclature. You also need to apply this to images that you post, where you need to name the images before they are posted.

WordPress Plugin: Adding Google Analytics functionality to your pages

ashish — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 08:00:11 +0000

For those of you who do not know of it yet, getting data from Google Analytics is an important of your overall strategy. By integration of the code from Google Analytics, you are able to get a lot more information about your visitors, and do the analysis about which techniques work, and which techniques don’t work. Given all this, people find the process of installation still tough enough that they keep on putting off installing the code. How about doing the installation of Google Analytics via a plugin ?
Well, here is a solution. Refer to the “Google Analytics for WordPress” Plugin for WordPress available at this page.
What does this plugin do ?
This plugin easily adds your Google Analytics tracking code (the new ga.js one!) to all pages within your blog.
This plugin adds the possibility to tag and segment all outgoing links, so you can see whether a click came from a comment or an article.
It also adds the possibility to track just the domain, instead of the complete link, so you get a better view of how much traffic you’re sending where.
By enabling AdSense click tracking, your AdSense clicks are tracked to /outbound/asclick.
By default Google Analytics only tracks a select group of search engines, which might not include your local big search engine. With this plugin, you can add extra search engines to those Google Analytics tracks by default!

WordPress Theme + Plugin: Making your site more iPhone friendly – use WPtouch

ashish — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 19:16:16 +0000

The iPhone is a revolution in the mobile market, leading to its becoming the top selling product in the SmartPhone market. There are a huge set of users out there who use the iPhone for navigating to different sites and consequently form a market for your blog. It would be a mistake to ignore all those users out there who use mobile browsing, especially when people who are your competitors are reaching out to all these users. Hence the quest to reach to out this market, and ensure that your site has a mobile version that will appeal to such users.
There is a counter argument that most sites appear fine on the iPhone browser, but you should think about this question only if your site is a plain site that does not have heavy graphics, or does not have Flash (the browser on the iPhone does not support Flash), or uses a lot of Javascript for rendering the menus, background, or other fancy stuff.
If you want to render your blog / site to iPhone users, you can find a lot of options on the internet, but you will need to evaluate them through actual use to ensure that you are getting the required speed and efficiency.
Here is another plugin + theme that does the same, it’s called WPtouch (site).
Read more from the site:
WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch or Android touch mobile device. It comes complete with all the standard WordPress blog features: search, login, categories, tags, archives, photos & more. WPtouch also offers many customization features through a beautifully designed WordPress admin panel.
Not all websites are created equal, with some sites failing to translate well in the viewport of a small mobile device. Many WordPress sites today make heavy use of different javascripts which significantly increase the load time of pages, and drive your visitors on 3G/EDGE batty. So we’ve come up with WPtouch, a lightweight, fast-loading, feature-rich and highly-customized “theme application” which includes an admin interface to let you customize many aspects of your site’s presentation.

WPtouch comes with a host of built-in features. Some notables include:
User-selected theme toggle (between WPtouch view and your site’s regular look)
iPhone-like application appearance, functions
AJAX, jQuery & JS effects
Full WordPress search, pages, archives, categories, tags and links support
Theme native social bookmarking support
iPhone/iPod touch native post e-mailing support
Ajax comments, posted in real time
Ajaxed pagination (users can browse posts like YouTube videos)
Admin selectable custom icons for pages, logo, bookmark icon
Manually edit your site’s title to fit WPtouch
Show / Hide post excerpts, customize style in different ways
Easily add your own icons to customize menu appearance
Admin inclusion/exclusion of site pages shown in the theme’s menu
Compatibility suite in admin to inform of add-ons, WordPress version support
Automatic Archives page layout (if you have or create a page called ‘Archives’)
Automatic Photo page layout with Flickr (if you have or create a page called ‘Photos’ and have the FlickrRSS plugin installed)

Learn more about hardening WordPress at Codex

ashish — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 19:14:50 +0000

As part of a security policy for your WordPress installation, you should learn about hardening of the installation. The Hardening WordPress page at the Codex (link) contains a lot of information about how to harden your installation, getting rid of security risks and making your blog more secure. The entire process is geared towards not only increasing the security of your WordPress, but also ensuring that you have a regular backup, as also to increase the number of security compartments in your installation such that even if you have a security breach, you are able to prevent the attacker from going through your entire installation.
The process starts with ensuring that the computer from which you operate your account remotely is secure, free from viruses and other security risks; that the host which runs your site can be trusted to deploy the latest patches and other such updates; using a more secure network connection to the admin section of your blog and being careful about where all you sit down to administer your network from; having a good and safe password; locking down your file permissions.
The page also explains about ensuring that your wp-admin folder is properly protected, including adding a second level of protection; it is also important to protect your wp-config file.