One of the best ways to stay up to date in your particular niche is to subscribe to similar blogs. This will also help you to get ideas for posts. I subscribe to several great WordPress blogs and one recently caught my eye from Hack WordPress.

The post, Collection of WordPress Resources, is a list of blogs related to WordPress. It’s a great list of sites that can help you with your WordPress blog. Oh and WordPress Max made the list! Thanks Kyle!

The first step is to make your WordPress theme’s files writable. To do that you must change the permissions in your hosting account. I suggest connecting to your hosting account with an FTP client, and browse to the theme and change the permissions on the whole theme’s folder and all the files within it to 777. Otherwise you may need to change one file at a time if doing so in the control panel of the hosting account. The path to the theme is the blogs directory then wp-content/themes/your-theme. You could just make the whole themes folder writable.

From within the WordPress dashboard, click Presentation or Design, then Theme Editor. Almost all theme editing is done in the stylesheet (style.css) file, and all other files are just displaying the settings that are specified within the stylesheet. There are exceptions to this but beyond the scope of this WordPress guide.

WAIT!!! Before doing any editing copy the contents of the file and paste it into a text file like Notepad for safe keeping before you attempt to edit it. If you screw things up you can paste the original back in to restore your file. Remember this is extremely important and I take no responsibility for what you may do to your WordPress blog!

On the right side of the Theme Editor are all the files associated with your active theme. Finding the correct code to edit to change the font of the header is in the header.php file. While you don’t need to edit this file the clues to what the header is calling for from the themes stylesheet can be found in the header.php file. Below is the code from the header file found in the default theme.

<div id=”header”>

<div id=”headerimg”>
<h1><a href=”<?php echo get_option(’home’); ?>/”><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></a></h1>
<div class=”description”><?php bloginfo(’description’); ?></div>

The code between the <h1> tags is the clue we are looking for that calls up the name of the blog. The blog name in the header is styled by the <h1> tags, and the description is being called from the <div class=”description”>. Now that we know what is styling these two items we can edit the style.css file to change the way these two items are displayed. Remember that this case is specific to the WordPress default theme and you need to look at your specific themes header file to determine what code you need to work with. In most cases the <h1> tags call up the blog name but the description or Tagline can be called almost anything.

Now click the themes style.css file on the right side of the Theme Editor and look for the code from the header file. In this case it is

h1 {
font-size: 4em;
text-align: center;
}

#headerimg .description {
font-size: 1.2em;
text-align: center;
}

If you want to change the color additional styles can be added like this:

#headerimg .description {
font-size: 1.2em;
text-align: center;
color: #666666;

}

The h1 code and description can now be changed to a larger size or aligned differently, it can be aligned to the left, right or kept centered. The font color can also be changed by adding this code color: #666666; and changing the color code number to your liking. Make your changes and click Update File, then look at your blog to admire your work. You may need to refresh your browser to see any changes. There are numerous css styles that can be applied to the text in a stylesheet, far to many to place in this post. For css color codes check out CSS Color Chart or Google css color codes. For more styles that can be applied, a quick Google search for css font styles, can keep you busy experimenting for hours.
Thanks to Stephen from The Lazy Way To Buy And Sell Cars blog who asked for this guide and a million other questions on Ask Max

You should first read any installation instructions on the plugins site if available. Next download the plugin into a folder on your computer that you can find easily. I have a WordPress folder in my documents and in that I have other folders for themes and plugins. I like to keep the things that I can control organized. Then unzip and extract the plugin into the same folder.

This is the part that can confound the newbies so pay attention! Knowing what to upload depends on what you find within the extracted folder. Usually there is a folder within a folder and within that folder is either a single file ending in .php (there may also be a readme text file that does not need uploaded) or several files and maybe even several files and other folders. It all depends on the function on the plugin and how it was coded. Usually uploading the extracted folder will not work and you must keep opening the folders until you see if there is only one file or a group of files. The examples below show what I mean.

This first example shows that there is a folder within the extracted folder and within the second folder is the actual file to upload into the plugins directory.

The next example shows a WordPress plugin with multiple files. Upload the entire folder one level up from the multiple files.

Now you know what to upload but where do you upload them too? When you connect to your site with an FTP client, like FileZilla browse to the location of the WordPress files. Getting there depends on your hosting account. You will usually not see the root of your domain first when connecting. You should look for the www or public folder, then you may even see multiple domains (if you have them). Look for the directory your WordPress files are in and then find the wp-content folder and finally within that the plugins folder. You can see the full path for WordPress installed in the blog directory in the image below:

After uploading the plugin go to the plugins panel and activate it. Now that you know how to do it this way how about a plugin that installs WordPress plugins and themes right from the dashboard? OneClick does just that and will work in most cases but if you have a highly functional plugin with multiple files and folders you still may need to resort to this method.

Here is a list of things WordPress can do that you may want to know before you dump all that time and money into a static website with a blog added onto it.

• You can use a static front page with WordPress. With this option and WordPress setup on the root of your domain, your main website page will look just like the blog.
• You can create a different page template for the main or front page of your site that looks completely different than the blog. For example you can create a page template without the sidebar or a sidebar different than the blog.
• You can add static pages just as easily as adding a blog post
• You can use the WordPress Links menu or what was called the Blogroll as your site navigation. Instead of showing the Pages of your site keep them off the sidebar and add links to your static pages in the Links menu under the category of your choice.
• Changing the look or theme of your WordPress Powered Site is very easily done with a few mouse clicks. No need to manually change every page because the content of your site is held within a database. Your WordPress theme isn’t tied to the pages or posts.
• Additional functionality can be added using plugins. If there is something you want your WordPress site to do, chances are a plugin is available for it. For example a forum can be added by uploading the plugin and activating it.

The advantages of using WordPress to power a website are obvious once you understand the workings of WordPress and the power it has. If you are willing to learn how to customize WordPress to fit your needs all it takes is some time searching online. If it seems a bit intimidating to you there are many freelancers online that can set it up. Either way there are not many reasons to pay to have someone create a static HTML template and then another to match a WordPress theme to it. That in my opinion is spending money twice on the same thing and really putting the cart before the horse.

Other fixes include the media uploader that has been the cause for many a blogger to revert back to previous versions. I haven’t encountered any of the reported issues on my test blog running 2.5 and I normally don’t encourage upgrading WordPress but in this case if you are running version 2.5 and like it you might want to. You can grab it at WordPress.org.

[See post to watch Flash video]

One such issue I came across recently on WordPress version 2.5 is a memory limit on a hosting account. This was causing the Google XML Sitemaps plugin to create issues when publishing a new post or saving changes to an existing post. Mike from Total Marketing Toolbox contacted me with this problem and I was able to track it down for him.

The problem was when a WordPress post was published or saved, in a Firefox browser the page would just go blank, or in Internet Explorer an error message can up ‘page could not be displayed’. It took some digging around but I figured it had something to do with a plugin. So first I deactivated all plugins and tried to recreate the issue after activating one plugin at a time. After isolating the plugin I checked the settings on it and got lucky. It told me that the sitemap could not be written and that I should check the servers memory limit. The plugins configuration page also has a setting to increase the memory limit. It was an easy fix to raise the memory limit and get the WordPress blog back in business.

If you encounter similar issues when publishing a new post first look at plugins that perform a function when publishing a post, like Google Sitemaps, or Smart Update Pinger.

Thanks to Arne Brachhold for writing such a great plugin, Google XML Sitemaps, and making it easy for us to track down and fix these little issues.

Getting to the new Links menu is under Manage then the Links sub panel. To edit an existing link simply click the name of the link (not the URL) on the left to open it.

Adding new links categories as as simple as ever now that it has its own sub panel that is also under the main Manage panel. You can even rename the default Blogroll category to what ever you want. I suggest you only place links in one category so they show only once in the sidebar under the specified category.

As I research WordPress Version 2.5 more the more I find to like. Although this site still operates on a few version removed from even 2.3.3 I know the time is coming and I have been contemplating the upgrade for this and my other blogs.

To learn more about WordPress version 2.5 WordPress Expert has an informative post about most of the WordPress 2.5 Features.

Getting to sidebar widgets in WordPress 2.5 is just a little different than previous versions in that the Presentation menu is now called Design. Once in the Widgets submenu you will see it has a completely different look and feel.

At the top of the widgets screen you will see new drop down options, one on the left for what widgets to show in this view. Note this option doesn’t affect what shows on the sidebar, just your view while working in this menu. Another drop down on the right to choose what sidebar you are working with if your theme has more than one sidebar. There is also a sidebar search feature on the top right.

Adding widgets is pretty straight forward from here: If the Add link is shown on an available widget from the left side then clicking it will move it over to the right into the sidebar. Once on the sidebar you can now use drag and drop to position the widget into the desired location on the WordPress sidebar.

Clicking Edit on the widget will give you the option to remove it or, if available, to make any changes you want to it. Removing a widget is a little awkward in that you must click the edit link on it to get an opportunity to remove it. Something I admit took me a while to figure out. Once you have all your widgets as you wish just click Save Changes.

Text widgets are still one of the most versatile, and best options of using WordPress, and in WordPress version 2.5 there are now more than the ten available text widgets as in previous versions. Text widgets can accept plain text, scripts or HTML, just be sure if adding images or scripts to a text widget that they are not larger than the sidebar container. You should check the look of your WordPress blog in at least two different browsers to make sure it looks right. Bad code or missing code tags can wreak havoc on your blog as well as images too big for the sidebar. Pasting text from an MS Word document into your sidebar, or a post, can create problems as well.

Update for those having problems with text widgets in 2.5 and 2.5.1 !

There are known issues with text widgets in both versions and I don’t have all the answers. There are multiple posts on the WordPress forum regarding this. The easiest fix may be to use Firefox for a browser rather than Internet Explorer. Another reason to not upgrade your blog if it is operating the way you want as it is! If you have widget issues check out all the posts for a possible solution here: WordPress.org Forum