Another issue relates to what happens when you paste in content from other places. For instance, I often write posts in code and then just paste them into the HTML editor window. Sometimes when I do this WordPress will add additional linebreaks.

On my sites I solve this problem by adding

remove_filter ('the_content', 'wpautop');

to my functions.php file. This works fine for me because I write my pages and posts in HTML. But it doesn't work well for clients who are unlikely to do that. So in those cases I set TinyMCE Advanced to stop removing the <p> and <br /> elements and to show them in the HTML editor. This way when it adds such breaks you can see them in the editor and then remove them.

There are many different plug-ins available for WordPress and you may find one that better suits your needs, but TinyMCE Advanced has been able to solve most of my problems.

Change the url in the WordPress Dashboard

Go to Settings: General. In the field where it asks for your WordPress URL include the full path to the directory in which you installed WordPress. For instance if you install WordPress in a directory called givecamp the URL might be something like: http://www.yoursite.com/givecamp.

In the field for site address put your domain, i.e. http://www.yoursite.com/.

Edit your index.php file

Download index.php from the root directory using your favorite FTP or sFTP program. Note: This is a different index.php file than the one in your theme directory. The file will look something like this:

<?php
/**
* Front to the WordPress application. This file doesn't do anything, but loads
* wp-blog-header.php which does and tells WordPress to load the theme.
*
* @package WordPress
*/

/**
* Tells WordPress to load the WordPress theme and output it.
*
* @var bool
*/
define('WP_USE_THEMES', true);

/** Loads the WordPress Environment and Template */
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
?>

Change the line that begins with require to reflect the path to your directory. In our example we would change it from:

require('./wp-blog-header.php');

to

require('./givecamp/wp-blog-header.php');

Upload the edited file to your root directory.

Coventry Merchants menu

For example, on the Coventry Village Web site, I needed to add pages for each of the stores, restaurants and other merchants in the village. Originally I wanted to use posts, rather than pages, for these so that I could use categories and tags to organize them. Alas, I was concerned about the merchant categories overlapping with blog categories, especially given that the blog has multiple authors. I then thought of adding a separate blog to handle these posts, but that had its downsides as well. And then I remembered reading about custom post types. This turned out to be the perfect solution.

To make the new pages, I created a custom post type of "merchants" then added two custom taxonomies, one for merchant types such as Stores or Restaurants, and another for more descriptive tags. I could have used regular tags, but again, I wanted to keep these separate from the blog tags.

To add custom post types and taxonomies requires a bit of tinkering with your functions.php and other files. This didn't sound too complicated, but as I was reading the various instructions, I came across the Custom Post Types UI plug-in. I decided to give this a try because it would add both the post types and the taxonomies I needed. Installation was quick and easy. After a post type has been added it appears as another posting option in the left dashboard menu along with your regular pages and posts.

I quickly set to work adding my new pages and within a few weeks I was done. (There were 62 pages to build and I was working on other projects as well.) Everything looked right, and the taxonomy scheme made it really easy to browse the stores. I was now ready to add this section to the public menu and announce it on Twitter and Facebook, just as soon as I validated my pages and ran them by a few people.

Oh noes! 404 errors for custom post types: Role Scoper saves the day.

When I tried validating my pages I kept getting an error message saying the W3C couldn't validate the page because it was getting a 404 error. This left me so bewildered that after much Googling I posted a question about it on the Custom Post Type UI support forum. Then I asked my friend Jenn to look at the pages on her computer. She couldn't see them, but was getting a 404 error as well. I'd had no problem because I was logged in. Sigh. More Googling.

Then I found the problem. When you add a custom post type you are able to also assign specific capabilities such as who can edit, or view the pages. From what I'd seen the default should have been the same as for blog posts, but it wasn't. My next step was to find instructions on adding the right capabilities so that readers could view the pages. In the process I discovered that the Role Scoper plug-in could handle this for me. I'd already installed Role Scoper in order to give bloggers different privileges on the site than admins, so I just went to those settings and lo and behold, there was an option to give readers access to the merchant pages. Problem solved!

Aside from the 404 hiccup, everything went smoothly, and now that I know to use Role Scoper in conjunction with Custom Post Type UI, it will go more smoothly in the future. If you have a need for custom post types and taxonomies and don't want to be digging around in functions.php, this plug-in combo should work well for you.

• WordPress Plugin Directory: Custom Post Type UI
• Custom Post Type UI support forum
• Role Scoper Home Page

Custom Post Types UI

Custom Post Type and Taxonomy Resources

• Custom post types in WordPress
• Create your first WordPress Custom Post Type
• First Impressions of Custom Post Type - WP Engineer
• The Essential Guide to WordPress 3.0 Custom Taxonomies
• WordPress Codex: Custom Post Types
• WordPress Codex: Function Reference/register post type

This is particularly useful for organizations who want to assign maintenance of different sections to different people without worrying that they'll edit things they shouldn't. Role Scoper is also useful for sites implementing custom post-types and taxonomies. When you add custom-post types to a site, they can only be viewed by the administrator until you define who else can view them. While this can be done manually, Role Scoper makes it easy to give readers permission to view such pages.

• WordPress Plugin Directory: Role Scoper
• Role Scoper Home Page

When I was first asking people for ideas on what I should include in the presentation a few asked if there would be a way to see it later. Sometimes when I do presentations I'll use Keynote or PowerPoint then save the slides to Slideshare. But in this case I knew I'd be showing a live site and various example files, so I knew that wouldn't work.

Instead I made a video recording of my screen using iShowU and the built in microphone on my MacBook Pro. I then split the video into 7 parts—to fit YouTube's 15 min. maximum length requirements—and added them all to a playlist. So if you watch the video below it should automatically take you to the following segments.

I don't do a lot of video, so I've yet to figure out the best way to optimize these for YouTube, thus the video will not look as crisp here as it did before I uploaded it. There will also be some sections during which audience members were speaking that you may not be able to hear as well. But hopefully it's sufficient to get the gist of it. There are more details here on the site, but for those who would like to watch the presentation, here it is.

Some of you had asked about WordPress books, so I put together a Recommended Reading page to get you started.

This includes the O'Reilly book that Aoirthoir suggested as well as a few others on related topics. If you've read others that you think would be of interest, please add those below as well.

These days there is more and more demand to produce mobile versions of Web sites. WPTouch creates a mobile ready version of your site for smart phones such as iPhone, Droid, Blackberry and others. It also includes an option for users to switch back and forth between mobile and regular views.

WP Touch seems to be optimized more for blogs. In mobile view you are taken to a listing of posts that you can click through for easy reading. To view regular pages you can navigate via a drop-down menu. In your settings you can decide what pages to include and whether to list them in order by name or page-id. Unfortunately you can't order the pages manually so if you've arranged pages into parent child relationships, as I have on this site, they won't show up in those related groups. So generally I find it makes more sense to view pages in regular mode while reading blog posts in mobile mode.

That said, I've not spent a lot of time experimenting with mobile options for WordPress pages, so I still need to explore other solutions. If you have other suggestions please add them via the comments below.

• WordPress Plugin Directory: WP Touch
• WP Touch Pro Homepage

Examples of this site as seen on Droid X using WPTouch

Blog home page as viewed in normal mode on Droid X in Dolphin Browser

List of blog posts viewed using WPTouch in Mobile mode

This blog post viewed using WPTouch in Mobile mode

List of pages viewed using WPTouch in Mobile mode

If the above ideas sound daunting, there are many plug-ins that will take care of this for you. WordPress Database Backup has a pretty good reputation and is very easy to set-up. It also allows you to schedule your periodic back-ups and to choose whether they should be saved to the server, to your computer or sent to you via e-mail.

• WordPress Plugin Directory: WordPress Database Backup
• WordPress Database Backup
• WordPress Codex: Backing Up Your Database

You can let the plug-in handle everything or you can manually code your comments.php form to include the Twitter field. For this site I did that by adding the following code immediately below the code for the Web site field.

<p><input type="text" name="atf_twitter_id" id="atf_twitter_id" value="
" size="22" tabindex="4" />
<label for="atf_twitter_id"><small>Twitter ID</small></label></p>

• WordPress Plugin Directory: TwitterLink Comments
• TwitterLink Comments Home Page

The default icons that come with Sociable are somewhat small, so I replaced mine with different icons. To do that just find some icons you like, name them to match the ones that come with Sociable and replace those with your new ones. Your icons are stored in the Plugins folder. Go to Sociable-30 > images > default > 16 to find them.

• WordPress Plugin Directory: Sociable for WordPress 3.0
• Sociable for WordPress 3.0 Home Page

Easy Websites with WordPress - Adding the Sociable Plugin