mccormicky

This tutorial is for anyone who has a good grasp of how WordPress themes work,or is using a test installation and won’t mind messing it up.Not recommended for beginners!

What is a WordPress SIDEBAR, anyway? It’s only a Div or an Unordered List that contains PHP and HTML,right? Well then, a widget-ready “Sidebar” doesn’t have to be a long skinny rectangle on the side of your blog or website. It can be a banner with rotating images and that is what I am going to show you how to do in this post.But if any plugin provides widgets you can use these steps and your own ingenuity to stick them wherever you like.It’s definitely NOT limited to nextGen or the header.
My next post along this vein will demonstrate how to stick WP-Ecommerce widgets somewhere besides a sidebar using widgets not straight php code or the plugin’s hooks.Which is of course an option for anyone who is very comfortable hacking their templates and themes.The tweaking of WordPress seems to be limited only by the imagination.

The problem with Sidebars is you can only add Widgets to Sidebars.
But once we stop thinking in terms of Sidebars and start thinking in terms of Divs we can use our theme’s functions.php file to register these new widget ready Divs.Make a copy of the sidebar.php file from your theme and use an include to get the new widget ready Div into your theme exactly where you want it.
Read the rest of”How to Make Your ENTIRE Theme Widget Ready” »

I tried to view my website about an hour and a half ago and all I got was a blank white page with the message “no input file specified”.No matter what page I tried to see as long as it was a php file I got this message.I could see jpgs and html pages.
So I checked the database and all the files and everything was neatly in its place.
Then I searched “no input file specified” to see what came up.

I found this suggestion, create a custom php.ini and put it in the root,containing this little line:cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0;
Once my website decided to load I couldn’t login to the dashboard. And I had to refresh each page about 4 times before no input file message would clear off and load the page.20 minutes later though, I was able to login again and it was as if the problem had never been.Back to normal then? But I have no idea if adding a php.ini file to the root(as well as the admin folder) helped or if this was something caused by my host.

More searches turned up a boatload of various forums with posts about this issue.Some suggestions were to put a question mark after index.php.But since WP writes the .htaccess file correctly using Request Filename I also read that using a question mark after index.php is unnecessary.
So basically I don’t know why this happened or if it will happen again.
Boring.

wpsc, an abbreviation of wp-shoppingcart, a plugin for WordPress.
Post Revisions Buggy-ness & WP-Shoppingcart plugin
Most people get nervous when it comes to mySQL database tables.So I was glad to find a way to fix this bug without having to use phpmyadmin.

After I upgraded to WP 2.6 and upgraded the wpsc cart plugin to version 3.6.8 I noticed that revision-71 was being inserted into my single product urls. 71 being the id of the edited page.
This bug also happened with WP 2.6 and wp-shoppingcart 3.6.7.It only happened to pages containing wpsc short code:[shoppingcart ] [productspage ] and [tranactionresults ] and [userlog ]

I did some forum searching and found this plugin by Jeremy Clark.
Re creating the bug itself was easy enough to do. All I had to do was deactivate the disable posts revisions plugin and edit a wpsc page. Voila:revision-pageid reappeared in the single product urls all over again.

**Author’s Note**
I’m actually using this plugin
Plugin Name: Disable Revisions and Autosave
Plugin URI: http://exper.3drecursions.com/2008/07/25/disable-revisions-and-autosave-plugin/
Description: Disable the Revisions and Autosave functions. Original idea and code by Lester Chan and Untwisted Vortex.

Sorry for the confusion.

I re activated the plugin and deleted the product listing page. I created a new page,pasting the productspage shortcode into it.Then I checked the Admin in Settings and noticed that not only the product listing page link was messed up-the Verify Your Order link was also messed up,because I had edited that page as well after I deactivated the disable post revisions plugin.

Fixing stuff
Get this plugin
Test for whether or not you can just activate this plugin to get rid of the bug without having to delete the page containing some shortcode.If this fixes the bug you don’t need to delete pages.
If the problem still exists delete the page,copy the short code into the new one and publish it.
Check Admin in Settings in Ecommerce to see if your page urls are correct.
If they contain revision-pageid, correct the url and hit Update Page Urls.
Reload the Admin page in Settings>Ecommerce to make sure the corrected link(s) “stick”.
To make absolutely sure this is fixed go back and edit a page containing wpsc short code (just hit save).Then view the page and see if the single product links work.

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I took this quiz and even though I only got a B+ and I have a lot to learn I think I am well on the way to being effective when it comes to helping my clients make more money with their websites.

I wrote recently on how I redesigned the web site for Lee Lee’s Valise which was already a much searched for and well trafficked though young website.This was my first and only experience redesigning a website that had sitelinks otherwise known as “breakout” site results in Google.I was worried that the action of recreating the existing pages in a WordPress as a CMS environment would wreck the sitelinks. Actually though, because of the ability to redirect old pages using .htaccess and those old page’s popularity, I needn’t have worried.

It took a few weeks and the help of 2 very important plugins for WordPress:the All in one SEO Pack and the Google XML Sitemap Generator to transfer the powerful juice of the old .htm URLs to the dynamically generated WordPress page URLs.Now the redirected URLs no longer get sitelinks generated by Google but the new WP URLs and more importantly the one for the new online store,do. And instead of just 3 sitelinks, Google now gives us 5!