I’m also hoping this will be a community gathering hub for ProPhoto users and me, it’s creator, where we can interact through the comments. So don’t be shy! Comment early and often!

You won’t want to miss any of these tips, so check back often or even better yet, subscribe to my RSS feed right here.

I’ve never been before.  Do you guys go? Should I go?  Do you think I should get a booth? Is there any kind of cool WordPress or ProPhoto or Blogging event/meetup I could put together you think might be fun?

Thoughts?

I’m really pleased to announce that next week I’m going to be ready to start beta-testing my new theme for photographers with a few select users.

I’ve been working almost non-stop on the darn thing for about 5 months, and it is truly a beast. For some of the truly awe-inspiring features, I got help from WordPress super-guru Ozh.  Maybe I’m a bit biased, but I honestly think it may be the most powerful WordPress theme ever created in the history of the galaxy.

So here’s the deal: I need about a dozen people to test the theme for me, use it on their blog, report bugs back to me, tell me things that are confusing, stupid, sweet, or broken.  In return you get to keep the theme for free, and to be one of the first people on the planet to use the thing.

Qualifications:

1. You must be confidently able to backup your blog before and during testing in case anything goes wrong.  I can’t imagine why anything would, but I’m trying to cover my a** here — I’m releasing this thing into the wild for the first time and it might eat kittens and other small mammals.
2. You must be confident with uploading themes and files to your blog using FTP.  You’re going to have to install the theme yourself (which just means uploading a folder to the right spot on your webserver), and upload patch files as I squash bugs over the course of a few weeks.
3. You must be willing to send me an email now and then with clear descriptions of bugs, features you think need to be added, things you love, etc.
4. You must agree to write a couple of posts about it on a Photography forum where you’ve been a member for a while — one or two short posts when you start to get things looking sweet, and then a brief, objective review of the product (I’m not mandating what you say at all, just tell the truth) at the end of the testing period.

So, if you’re interested, please leave a comment on this post. Please leave all of the following info:

1. email address in the comment form (don’t put it in the comment itself, just in the form so that only I can see it)
2. name of photography forum where you post and how long you’ve been a member
3. name of your web hosting company (I want to be sure to try this on a few different setups)

Please note: I will only be able to choose a dozen at most, so I apologize in advance if I don’t pick you.  Stay tuned, there will be a couple other ways to get the theme for free over the course of the next couple weeks.

Also note: anyone who has purchased the original ProPhoto theme will be eligible for a pretty deep discount on this new theme, so if you’re reading this and worried about not wanting to buy too early, it might be wise just to go ahead and buy the current ProPhoto.  The discount you will receive when the new theme is finally releasedthe difference in price between the two or less. And it might still be a ways before the new one is released.

Contrary to the appearance I like to create, ProPhoto is pretty much a one-man show.  My friend Matt helps out with installations and some support, but he’s crazy busy this next week, and I value his family life too much to make him take on more while I’m gone.

I’m going to be in a rural cabin with no internet access (maybe my iPhone will be able to get a data signal out there?).

What happens is, while trying to import a blogger blog (from blogspot.com, not custom domain or ftp/sftp) to a self-hosted WordPress blog, the importer just hangs at 1 post/ 1 comment and then says “set authors.” Except there were way more posts and comments than that, and the 1 post/comment that supposedly imported didn’t even come through.

I tried a ton of things, but finally this is how I got it to work: I created a free blog at WordPress.com and imported into that blog successfully.  Then I exported all the posts out of the wordpress.com blog, and was able to import that file as a WordPress blog import.

Hopefully this saves some other poor schmuck a bunch of time.  Cheers.

WordPress now has this nice feature that notifies you if there is a newer version of a plugin available and allows you to install the update automagically.  You may have noticed a little red bubble over your plugins tab and a small yellow notice under Ajaxed-WordPress that there is a new version available.

For now, I recommend not upgrading the plugin.  There is no functionality in the new versioin that is used by the ProPhoto theme (so you won’t notice any difference) and there appears to be a pretty substantial bug that affects people with an older version of PHP on their server.

So, resist the urge, and don’t upgrade just yet.  Sorry Aaron!

I’m running trunk (this basically means I’m running the next version of WordPress as it stands today, while it’s still being coded by the developers) on my development blog right now, and the feature is already there.

So, all you have to do is get yourself updated to 2.7 when it comes out (probably 3 or 4 months away) and then your golden.

2.7 is going to be seriously slick.  It also is going to have automatic installation of plugins and free themes (why use a theme besides ProPhoto?), plus way better comment managment, a redesigned (again) admin interface, and a whole bunch more.

Comments please!

However, if you are still running 2.3.x or lower, you REALLY should upgrade.  That is all.

I always assumed the fact that the center button (or the align right and align left buttons) didn’t work when inserting an image into a post was a WP bug, but, I was wrong.

For some reason I never took the time to look at the code WP generates and see that they expect the theme writer to define the CSS for these classes.

Sorry, sorry. My bad.

I’m going to fix it for everyone who buys the theme from now on, and if you’ve already purchased, just go into your “Stylesheet (style.css)” from “Design” => “Theme Editor” and go to the very bottom, and on a new line paste in the following code:

img.aligncenter {
display: block !important;
margin-left: auto !important;
margin-right: auto !important;
}
img.alignright {
margin: 0 0 10px 20px !important;
display: inline;
float: right;
}
img.alignleft {
margin: 0 20px 10px 0 !important;
display: inline;
float:left;
}

Now your align left, right and center buttons will work.