Stylehack

Did you realize that anytime you edit a post after publication WordPress pings any services you have listed in your ping settings… again?! If you’re like me, you make the odd change here and there. Or worse, you find yourself in the position I was just in where I have had to go back and edit some of my older posts after finally upgrading my blog and discovering how much I detested the Autop filter.

I was madly pinging the blogosphere every time I saved during an edit. “Hello World from Stylehack… again! Here are ancient posts I just know you want to read!” [Yeah yeah, they're old but still have some valid content so I didn't want to just delete them.]

Okay, enough said — the scenario for disaster is set (a.k.a. spamming ping services).

Fortunately, I found a great solution, the UP Smart Update Pinger plugin!

In this article we will discuss the housekeeping steps you must perform before you make any modifications to a theme — creating a copy of the theme being modified and making the files “writable” so that you can use the WordPress Theme Editor. For a general review of how your blog is generated by PHP, please read Part 1 of this Series.

IMPORTANT:   For the purpose of this series of tutorials, I’ll be using the WP 2.5.1 DEFAULT template for all examples.

Creating a Copy of the Theme

You should never make major modifications to a theme without making a new working copy of that theme! [I define major as anything other than things like font color or other minor modifications to general styling.]

The reason I say this is primarily because you need a backup copy of the theme you can refer back to if something goes wrong during the modification process. The other reason is also related to potential problems — you need a fallback, the ability to put things back the way they were with a single click “just in case”.