One thing I’m really glad to see is the change with permalinks. /%postname%/ will no longer be a custom setting that you manually enter. It will be a selectable option. This one is big because the performance issues associated with using /%postname%/ has been fixed.  For those who may have shied away from using that in the past: if you’re considering changing your permalinks, make sure you have redirects in place – test and make sure things are working if you change your permalinks.

Other improvements: drag and drop to upload media like images, pdfs, etc.  – this one will help lots of people.

See Mashable’s great in depth writeup. As always, when a new version drops, be sure to upgrade your WordPress site.

The Aussie X launched their new site just in time for their appearance on the Dragons’ Den. An HTML to WordPress conversion, we used StudioPress’ Genesis and the Associate child theme as the basis for the site and customized from there. The site is also using Gravity Forms and Cart66. W3 Total Cache helped the site weather the increased traffic during the show.

The gist was this: be aware of what plugins you are using on your site. Check out the plugin before installing, know what it’s supposed to do, check it’s stats, who wrote it, is it maintained, is it documented, is it current and will it work with the latest WordPress. There are a lot of good free WordPress plugins out there, but there are also a lot that will cause you problems. I also touched on premium plugins – they’re worth it for the development cycle and support.

Don’t  leave  unused plugins installed – clean up after yourself. Unused plugins that are still activated can slow things down and unused, un-updated plugins can be a security risk for your site.

Not all plugins play well with others, some may conflict with your theme, they can even slow your site down depending on how they’re written/coded.  To take a page from Carolyn Shelby’s presentation:  If you have a site, you should be familiar with enough  html, php, and the general workings of WordPress to be able to spot something not quite right. I’ll add, if you’re not, then you need someone on your team or that you can go to, to help you make the call.

Scott Hendison did a great overview of WordPress SEO by Yoast on the panel, and Ben Cook covered some of the reasoning on how to best use Categories and Tags in WordPress – and if you weren’t there, you missed Ben’s great Lego slides – I looked for the Panda one for this post, but didn’t spot it.

SEO and Performance

• WordPress SEO by Yoast
• W3 Total Cache

Social

• Socialize
• Share This
• Social Media Widget
• Simple Facebook Connect
• Simple Twitter Connect
• Google Plus Widget

Other Plugins

• Broken Link Checker
• Viper’s Video Quicktags
• Cookies for Comments
• Redirection (although I’m a fan of working directly in .htaccess)
• Login Lockdown

Premium Plugins

• Gravity Forms
• Wishlist Member
• BackupBuddy
• WordPress Mega Menu
• Cart66

I saw a few tweets that mentioned some other plugins, I’ll be checking those out – do you have any favorites?

It’s going to be a great event, if you’re there, come say hi!

This is a small site and we adapted their existing design using the Thesis theme. For SEO and best practices, all urls were kept the same.

This site is using StudioPress Genesis Theme and a customized Magazine child theme. Relationship Gold also uses Premise.

I’ll also be doing a full day workshop on the 10th – if you’ve been thinking of doing your WordPress site, or setting up your blog – I’ll be taking a limited number of people through the process, hands-on, step by step.  We’ll start with installation, theme choice, and cover SEO, customizations, backups and more – your technical and design issues tackled live. More on the WordPress workshop ->

Look for more on WordPress from me – I’ve got some top secret stuff in the works.

Tiling Background Image

Today, let’s tackle your background.

Sure you can use the Design Options and set the background color. And if you’re feeling really adventurous you can even check the box that adds a cool shadow effect to the site. (this keys off your background color to create the shadow effect)

But what about adding a tiling image to your background? This page has a custom tiling background, here’s how you can do it. (you can also do it for a particular post, more on that in a moment)

Enter custom.css – and a little bit of code. (don’t worry, it’s not hard to work with…)

First you’ll need an image to use as your background. Check out this site for generating background patterns: bgpatterns.com (warning this site can be fun and you might find you spent more time there than you intended) and download your background. This site’s backgrounds are nice – because they seamlessly tile to create a background. Small file sizes create really striking looks.

Got your background? Good. You can rename the file to something easier to work with – if you downloaded from the bgpattern site – it will be a randomly generated name beginning with patt_. You’ll need to ftp or upload it to your web server. It belongs in the wp-content/themes/thesis/custom/images folder.

Now for custom.css. Go to the custom file editor in Thesis and you should see the the custom.css file there ready to edit.

Here’s what you’ll paste in:

body.custom  {
  background:#F3F7FB url(images/wpa-clouds.jpg) repeat-x;
}

Now change the name of the image to your background image’s name. That works for all the pages on your site – but what if you want to assign a special background to a particular page? Thesis makes that easy, actually!  For example, say you have a page called “services”. You can apply a different background on this page by using this css, because Thesis adds a css class for each page of your site. (home would be home, contact would be contact, basically whatever you entered in as the page’s name in the permalink or slug field.

body.tiling-background-thesis {
 background:#F3F7FB url(images/patterntile.jpg) repeat;
}

If you wanted to – you could even apply different backgrounds to your category pages of your blog – the classes for these are created like this: cat_categoryname – so if you had a category called Beaches, it would be cat_beaches.

If you decide to apply this to a post, there’s one more step – after you’ve created your style, note what the class name is – that’s the part after the dot. Then edit your post, look in the SEO Details and Additional Style section for the  CSS Class field, add your class there (no dot) and update your post. That’s how I got the different background on this post! Easy!

There’s a lot more customization you can do with this system – but this is one of the simplest and easiest changes you can do to your Thesis site.  Have fun!

I like Thesis by DIYThemes for some of the same reasons I choose to work with WordPress. It’s flexible, yet solid framework. Thesis works with WordPress without messing with the the core WordPress files, this makes updates easier and less likely to cause problems. (plugins and updates of those are another issue)

Thesis as a Framework

Thesis gives you a framework for your site – it’s not like many of the other custom themes that focus more on visuals and less on flexibility. That said, if you find a premium theme you like that works for you, that doesn’t make it a bad choice.

Styling Thesis

Thesis can be styled to look like whatever you’d like to see – between custom css, custom functions and the featured content function/area – you have the ability to put together a design that can run a corporate site, an affiliate site, a product catalog, or even a blog. It doesn’t have to look like a blog. This is one of the questions I get asked over and over again – “will it look bloggy?” No, not if you want something different. You can incorporate the elements of a blog with your site, but not be left with a site whose focus are the blog posts.

SEO is built-in to Thesis, but if you choose to use one of the popular plugins – you can do that too. More on this later.

Installing Thesis

Installing Thesis is pretty standard – as themes go. You upload the Thesis folder into the wp-content/themes folder. Then activate the theme.

When you first install Thesis and visit the options panel, you may see a message about your file permissions. Don’t panic! This is easy to take care of and will allow you to manage many things from your Dashboard.

The easiest way to take care of this – open your ftp client and go to the Thesis folder. You’ll find it here: wp-content/themes/Thesis (or something similar)

Look for the custom-sample folder. First rename this folder to custom.

Now open the custom folder. Change the permission on three files to 666:

• layout.css
• custom.css
• custom_functions.php

That’s it – you’re ready to make changes to settings to Thesis from the Dashboard.

The Thesis Options Dashboard

Let’s look at some of the features of Thesis:

You can control the top Navigation on your site. Add and remove pages. Sub-pages even appear as a drop-down menu. You can add Categories to appear here, and even your own custom links.

You can control how the header, bylines, how the category and other archive pages work, how tagging works, comments (whether or not they’re on pages, etc.) all from the Thesis Options page.

Design Options

From the Design Options page you’ll find Font settings for the various elements on your site, including font sizes and a color picker which makes it really easy to select and choose colors that work with your design.

Something I like a lot: in the Body section of Fonts Colors and More: you can click a box to add a cool shadow effect to your layout – this adds a bit of a shadow effect to your layout – no graphics required. You can also turn off interior borders that appear within the page, no additional css required. Easy!

Site Layout options are also here – you can choose the number of columns and their configuration – what order they appear in and even their width.

You can also modify how post images work and how post thumbnails work on the site. These can be overridden at the individual post/page level too – giving you complete control.

Teasers are something that affect the blogging part of your site – if you’re using Teasers (settings for this found on the Thesis Options page) you can select how they appear and what they contain.

Feature Box – this is a setting that turns “on” the Feature Box – but to use it you’ll need a bit of custom code. Feature Box is an area you can use on just the home page, or on both the home page and blog page or even sitewide.  You can also select where it appears: across the content area, or full width across the top of the content area and columns or even above the header. You use a custom function to insert the content and it can contain any html along with php you’d like. We’ve used this to pull in the featured content slider on a number of sites, but there are a lot of things you can do with this area to make your site stand out.

Multimedia Box: Here’s something a lot of people miss when they look at Thesis and it’s really powerful for how you use your site. The Multimedia Box is a function that is built in to Thesis. Activating it takes just a quick select. You can have it display randomly rotating images, show a video, or show any html you’d like. The cool thing: you can turn it on or off sitewide, AND you still have the ability to configure it on a page/post basis.

What can you use this for? rotating images that change with page load, place a video on your product or service page that explains that product or service, add an opt-in or other call to action, use it for quick news or messages – anything you’d like to highlight. Nearly anything can be placed in this area. Just keep in mind that the size of the Multimedia Box will depend on your columns, column configuration (layout) and the widths of your columns)

Goodness, all this and we haven’t even talked SEO.

SEO and Thesis

Thesis builds in SEO – really built in SEO controls for so many of the options you want and need. Instead of needing another plugin – it’s already there, waiting for you to use it.

On every Page or Post you’ll find the SEO Details and Additional Style section. This section will allow you to completely control your Custom Title Tag, Meta Description and your Meta-Keywords for the page. Hand craft your Titles and Descriptions for the most response.  What if you choose to use a plugin that generates these for you automatically? Not a problem – Thesis will use the plugin instead, so if you’re using All in One SEO – no worries.

What’s New with Thesis?

What’s new in Thesis – 1.7 is in beta at the time of this writing and has some awesome new additions such as the ability to easily include other javascript libraries (jquery or mootools anyone?) This will make doing cool customizations even easier on a page level – since you can load the library you need only where it’s needed not across the entire site. Don’t worry if this is too geeky – it means you get cool stuff on your site and better performance.

Also new are Robots Meta Tags – you can choose these on a page/post basis adding noindex, nofollow, and noarchive as needed.

This review is really only scratching the surface of all that can be done using Thesis with WordPress on your site. I plan to follow with more posts on how to specifics soon! Got a question about Thesis? Let me know! Ready to Get Thesis?

Google is generating these links automatically based on your page structure – you have to have them to get these links. They’re easy to add, but there are a few things you’ll want to do to increase the chance that yours will be picked up.

Make sure your long pages with multiple topics are structured properly. What does this mean? It means use the H1 tag for the main heading, H2 for the main sections, H3 for sub-sections and so on.  Then be sure to include a table of contents that links to the named anchors in the document. This can be a simple bulleted list with the links to the appropriate section of the document.

Example: Creating Named Anchors

Here’s an example right here on this site. We’ve added the anchors and table of contents to our FAQ page.  Here is a step by step on how to add them:  (we’ll assume your page is already using a solid structure with Hx tags and such)

First: Add your anchors.

<a name="why_wordpress"></a>

Place this at the point the section starts, this is where the link in your table of contents will “jump” to when clicked.

Now link your table of contents list to the named anchors you created.

<a href="#why_wordpress">Why WordPress?</a>

Repeat for each item in your table of contents and page.  It takes a bit of extra work, but it’s worth it!