Stylehack

If you recently upgraded to WordPress 2.6 and suddenly your pretty permalinks don’t work properly, or at all… and if your “more” or “page” features aren’t working (usually a related problem), there is a temporary fix you can put in place:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/189058

Basically, look at #2 there. I’d try it in two versions:

1. First, without “/index.php” added to the beginning of /whatever-your-existing-structure-is/ AND with “category” and “tag” in the two custom fields;
   
   
2. If that doesn’t work, add the “/index.php” to the beginning of /whatever-your-existing-structure-is/ AND leave “category” and “tag” in the two custom fields.

My experience is that adding the “/index.php” doesn’t hurt even on an Apache server, and in some cases solves a world of hurt.

Notice I said “temporary fix”? Quoted directly from the support post above:

The upcoming release of WordPress 2.6.1 will correct this issue.

When you don’t want to have long articles displayed in full on multi-post pages, like the index page, Wordpress has a nifty little “tool” you can invoke by inserting a special tag into your post content:

Inserting the <!–more–> tag into the post content in the above image resulted in this display on the index page:

HOWEVER. (There’s always a “however”, isn’t there?!) To my mind there is a problem with the default implementation of this tag… by default when you click on the link to read the rest of the post the content above the tag is hidden!

In this article, we’ll make our second modification by modifying the default footer content.

IMPORTANT:   For the purpose of this series of tutorials, I’ll be using the WP 2.5.1 DEFAULT template for all examples. Yes, I know 2.6 is now out, but for purposes of continuity we’ll stay with the same version throughout this series. Don’t worry, it all works the same way in version 2.6!

Modifying Your Blog Footer

This is a another really easy modification. Again, it requires a little pre-planning, some common sense and a bit of imagination. For purposes of this walk-thru we’ll reorganize the footer content, add a bit of PHP scripting to automate the copyright date and add an image to reflect the site’s header for a little bit of interest.

The Pre-planning Stage

Load your blog in a browser and look at it carefully. In fact, it is sometimes helpful to save the index page WITH IMAGES as a plain old HTML page on your local computer so you can conduct a quick and easy check of things “under the hood”. In this stage we’ll compare the default generated footer content to the script to get an idea of how/what/where to change things.

The footer generated by the WP default theme looks like this:

In this article we’ll make our first modification by replacing the header image with our own image.

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

Changing the Header Image

This is a really easy fix. All it requires on your part is a little pre-planning, some common sense and a bit of skill with a graphics program. Sometimes — like this example — it’s as easy as replacing the existing image with a new image of the same dimensions, sometimes it takes a bit more work.

A Little Pre-planning

Load your blog in a browser and look at it carefully. In fact, it is sometimes helpful to save the index page WITH IMAGES as a plain old HTML page on your local computer so you can conduct a quick and easy check of things “under the hood”. Basically you need to have a good understanding of how the header image fits into the design.

The header image (kubrickheader.jpg) for the WP default theme looks like this:

Notice that it is part of a series of images that add a visual frame to the blog and that it has a gray-colored area around it. We can’t just replace the image wholesale unless we want to fiddle with the rest of the design and related images; instead, we’re going to alter that image.

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”.