The first thing to do is look at Settings > Media and make sure you are happy with the image sizes that are specified there.

While adding or editing a page or post, click the Add An Image icon. If you use the Flash Uploader, you will see that you can select multiple files. The images for your gallery can be in multiple folders or all in one folder.

In the HTML editor, you can add the shortcode [gallery] anywhere in your post or page. In Visual mode, there is an Insert Gallery button.

You can click the Add An Image icon at any time to see the images in the gallery, and also to remove them or change the order.

To get the most out of your image galleries, you will probably want to install a Lightbox plugin, and if you plan to post large galleries, you will want a Pagination plugin. I have found that jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries and ByREV Gallery Pagination for WordPress, but note that I had to leave AJAX caching turned off to make the latter work without conflicting with another plugin.

Voila! You now have a photo gallery and you didn’t manually resize any photos or write any code!

Examples:

Gallery on a WordPress Page

Gallery in a WordPress Post

This article copyright © John Nasta 2011 – All Rights Reserved

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If you’d like to do this, first ask yourself if you feel comfortable editing the code in your theme files, and if you feel comfortable using FTP to upload the edits to your web server. Remember to use a plain-text editor to make all of your edits, not a word processing program like MS Word. If you can do those things without hesitation, you’ve made it over the first hurdle.

The next thing you have to do is decide whether you are going to make the domain name point to your WordPress folder or if you are going to copy the site files from your WordPress folder to the folder that the domain name points to.

• If the domain name is changing, you can often point the new domain name to the WordPress folder when you add it in your hosting control panel, and not have to copy or move any files at all.
• If the domain name is not changing but the path to the site is (e.g. moving WordPress to the root folder), and/or you don’t know how to point your domain to a specific folder at the hosting level, you can simply copy all of your WordPress site files via FTP to the folder that the domain name points to.

Two things to do before you upload your site files

Check the .htaccess file in the WordPress folder: WordPress usually writes entries to a .htaccess file in the main WordPress folder. If you are moving the site from a sub-folder to the root or vice-versa, you will have to edit this file. If your site is in a sub-folder called /blog, the .htaccess file in your WordPress folder will contain these lines:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

If your site is going to be in the root folder, the references to the sub-folder need to be removed, making it look like this:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

Add two lines of code to the functions.php file of the Default theme: As shown in the WordPress Codex article Changing The Site URL, you can add these two lines of code to the top of your functions.php file to tell the database the new site URL:

define('WP_HOME','http://example.com');
define('WP_SITEURL','http://example.com');

Replace example.com with your actual domain name and any sub-folder name that points to your site. The only reason I suggest doing this to the functions.php of the Default theme is so that you don’t have to mess with your active theme’s files. If you prefer to edit the functions.php of your active theme, that will work too. It is advisable to make backups of your functions.php file and your WordPress database at this time.

If you have chosen to edit the functions.php of the Default theme and that is not your active theme, go to your site’s admin at the old URL and activate the Default theme. If you edited the functions.php of your active theme, you can skip this step.

Now that you’ve done your edits, you can upload all of the necessary files to the proper folder. If the folder is not changing, you only need to upload the new functions.php, and possibly the new .htaccess file. If you are changing the folder, upload the entire site to the new folder.

Now simply go to your site at the new URL. It should work. Assuming it works fine, you can upload the backup version of the functions.php (i.e. one that has not been edited). It is important to remove those extra lines of code. Your site is now ready to go.

Additional considerations:

• If you are using a plugin that references a file in your folder structure such as the Google XML Sitemap Generator or a database backup utility, you may need to change the path in the plugin’s settings to the new path.
• You may also need to change the path to your uploads folder in Settings > Miscellaneous
• You may want to use the Broken Link Checker plugin to make sure that you don’t have any broken internal links or redirects in your site caused by the URL change.
• If you feel brave and have a lot of internal links that need to be changed, you can use the Search and Replace plugin to change them all simultaneously.
• If you have moved your WordPress site to a new folder on the server, remember to delete the old files.
• If you have changed your domain name remember to put in a .htaccess 301 redirect from the old location to the new one.
• It is advisable to put a robots.txt file in your root folder so that search engines will crawl and re-index the site. Google may reject your sitemap if you don’t have a robots.txt file giving them access to crawl the site.

If this seems too difficult for you, you may be interested in my article on Accessing Your WordPress Site From The Root Folder, which explains how a simple .htaccess redirect file can point requests from your root URL to your WordPress folder.

Have fun!

This article copyright © John Nasta 2010 – All Rights Reserved

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Much like the Thesis theme from DIY Themes, you get a complete back-end interface for customizing the theme. However, Thesis starts at $87 for the Personal license, and Atahualpa is free.

The most important thing to know about how to customize Atahualpa is that you can create your own PHP templates for pages such as multi-post archives (including category & tag pages), search results, single posts, etc. People are often confused by the fact that the theme does not come with templates such as archive.php, search.php, single.php and others that you might expect, but what is not entirely obvious is that you can create these templates and upload them, and WordPress will automatically use them.

Take for instance one of the most popular questions asked about customizing Atahualpa in the BFA Forum. How do I get Atahualpa to display full posts on archive pages instead of post excerpts? The answer is diabolically simple. Just download the index.php file from Atahualpa and save it as archive.php. Remove the part of the template that calls in The WordPress Loop:

<?php /* This is the actual WordPress LOOP.
The output can be edited at Atahualpa Theme Options -> Style & edit the Center column */
bfa_center_content($bfa_ata['content_inside_loop']); ?>

and replace it with loop code from the archive.php of a theme that displays full posts on the archive pages, such as the WordPress Default theme:

<div <?php post_class() ?>>
<h3 id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>"><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title_attribute(); ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>
<small><?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?></small>
<div class="entry">
<?php the_content() ?>
</div>
<p class="postmetadata"><?php the_tags('Tags: ', ', ', '<br />'); ?> Posted in <?php the_category(', ') ?> | <?php edit_post_link('Edit', '', ' | '); ?> <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »'); ?></p>
</div>

You can edit this code as well. One thing you might want to do is replace <div class="entry"> with <div class="post-bodycopy"> so that the body text will follow the styling guidelines set by Atahualpa.

If you don’t want to display the time & date above the post, simply move or remove <small><?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?></small>. If you don’t want the meta data to appear below your posts, simply remove that whole paragraph.

If you are familiar with WordPress coding, then you know that <?php the_content() ?> is what displays the full post content.

When you are finished editing, just upload your new file and WordPress will recognize and use it.

This also applies to using plugins that require you to add a piece of PHP code to one of your template files that Atahualpa does not come with. If the template doesn’t exist, just create it, upload it, and WordPress will use it.

Diabolically simple, yet not obvious…

This article copyright © John Nasta 2010 – All Rights Reserved

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I see a lot of people asking how to make their WordPress site accessible from the root directory folder. In most standard installations, WordPress is installed in a sub-folder and the only way to access the site is to add that sub-folder name to the site’s URL.

If you read the wordpress.org support forum you’ll find posts suggesting that you move the WordPress index.php file to the root folder and change a few things in that file. You’ll also see replies from people who have tried it unsuccessfully.

Here’s a little trick that will allow you to access your WordPress site from the root URL without moving or modifying any of the WordPress installation files. This method will “hide” the WordPress installation’s folder name when people access your home page but they will see the folder name in URLs when they start clicking around…

Check your root folder for a file called .htaccess (note that the dot is before the file name). If there is one, download it. If not, create one with a plain text editor such as Windows Notepad. Make sure that when you save it, the file type is set to “All Files” so that your editor doesn’t try to add an extension onto the file name.

Make sure that these lines are included in your .htaccess file. For this example the root URL is shown as domain.ext and the WordPress folder is shown as wpfolder. You will have to change these values to match your own domain name, extension, and WordPress folder name:

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} domain.ext$
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !wpfolder/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ wpfolder/$1


Upload this file to the root directory of your web server as a plain text file. You’re done!

Now go to Google Webmaster Tools and let them know the “preferred URL” of your home page so you don’t get penalized for duplicate content.

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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It is not widget-ready and the sidebar is not contained within <UL> or <OL> tags.

The single post template (single.php) does not call in the sidebar, so when a user goes to an individual post the navigation disappears.

single.php also contains over a dozen validation problems. The Minima theme that alternate0 is based on does not use the single.php template, so I can only assume that the person who adapted this template was a terrible coder. If you haven’t invested any time in this theme it might actually be easier to start with the Minima theme and customize it to look like alternate0. They are very similar.

It is set to a fixed width of 700px, which wastes a lot of screen space for most users.

The links in the header are hard-coded and need to be manually changed in order to be of any use.

It does not contain any RSS links.

The comments.php file has Google ads hard-coded into it and you’ll have to know how to remove them.

comments.php also contains a hard-coded link to a subscription management page on the author’s site and a “subscribe to comments” checkbox that doesn’t work. Both have to be removed.

The sidebar contains hard-coded links to the author’s sites under “Good Reading” and the “Alternate0 is based on…” credits. You’ll also want to remove the “Your Google Ads Here” text while you’re at it. The sidebar is full of junk that you’ll want to get rid of, yet doesn’t include things that would be desirable such as Recent Posts, Links, Pages, and Meta sections.

The sidebar Categories drop-down has a hard-coded /blog/ path, so if your WP installation is not in a folder called “blog” the drop-down will not work.

The footer.php also contains hard-coded links to other sites.

The CSS does not contain several required classes including alignleft, alignright, aligncenter, and wp-caption.

The theme comes with files called templates.php and testimonials.php that appear to be there for no reason other than to promote the author’s other themes and socio-political agenda.

The authors did not respond when I tried to reach them by email, and a comment on the ThoughtMechanics web site in which I politely asked for some help with this template was apparently deleted from the moderation queue without being published or responded to.

In short, it looks nice but be prepared to do a lot of hacking to make it usable.

I am working on fixing this theme because I have a client who likes the way it looks. I’ve gotten all of the above fixed except for the disappearing navigation on single posts, which I am having trouble getting to line up properly (that’s what my question to the authors was about). I also have not made it widget ready because so far my client hasn’t had any need for that, and I have to concentrate on what they do need first. Once it’s fixed I will make it available to others. In the meantime this theme is not one that you can expect to simply unzip and use. I will also try to work some of the WP v.2.7+ features into it such as comment threading. This template was written in 2005 and I have to assume that the author has abandoned it.

This article copyright © John Nasta 2009 – All Rights Reserved

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8. Date Image Hack (Source: YugaTech)

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18. Removed

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52. Removed by author

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55. How To Create A Custom WordPress Page Template

56. WordPress tutorial–installing on a local server

57. Recover WordPress Password When You Have Forgotten It

58. WordPress Tutorial – Edit a Sidebar File Using a Text Editor

59. WordPress Tutorial – Make Menus of Links With the Blogroll 2

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