How did I do that? Easy, if you have a single.php file in your theme. Use the code in this WP Recipes post. I added it just below
<div class=“postmetadata”>
- code will vary from theme to theme.

Why the Like button? Folks can Like your post with one click. Easy exposure. No need to comment, just click.

Thanks to Robert Kopacz for his encouragement (who also has the Like button on his Madison, NJ video posts).

Has anyone tried out the new Tweet button from Twitter? I clicked on it on one post and find it created a funny looking shortened url. But that was just one post. Just did another one – it worked fine! Update: I just added the new Tweet button from Twitter and deactivated the BackTweet button.

A child theme is a way to make changes to a WordPress theme without making changes to the main theme, the parent theme.

Why Create a Child Theme?

Whenever the theme is updated, if you apply the updates, all your changes will be lost. You will have to re-apply theme to the files. Instead of re-applying the changes every time there’s an update, it’s simpler to keep the changes in what’s known as a child theme.

How Do I Create a Child Theme?

You create a folder inside the themes directory and give it a name similar to the parent theme. For example, I decided to name the child theme for the theme I use for this blog, Panorama, “pandaughter.” Then, at the very least, you need to create a style.css with certain code at the top. See this post on the Codex to get the proper code for your child style.css:

Codex: Child Themes

Finally, you need to activate the child theme by going in the Admin menu to Appearance and selected your child theme from the theme choices.

Can I Do More Than Change Styles?

You can create (or re-create) any of the files in your parent theme in your child theme, such as functions.php, header.php, and sidebar.php. If it doesn’t exist in the parent theme, you can still create it in the child theme, such as category-3.php, for example. You can get quite sophisticated with your theme manipulation by unhooking functions and then recreating them in functions.php. You will find recreating the header.php will take you far in getting your header specific to your site. Then, when a theme update comes along, you won’t have to remember and redo all of your changes.

Are Some Themes Easier Parents than Others?

Certainly. You might have a very complicated theme with lots of coding, and it may be difficult to create a child easily. Conversely, some themes lend themselves to creating children. Here are a few examples:

Thematic
Twenty Ten Default Theme
Hybrid
Carrington

For more posts on child themes, visit:

• WordPress Child Theme Basics
• How to make a child theme for WordPress: A pictorial introduction for beginners
• Understand WordPress Child Theme

Note: the mother and daughter in the illustration are from this painting by Robert Walker Mac Beth.

Why did I choose Highland Park Environmental News for the new default theme? I don’t like the old theme, don’t have updates for it, and never cared for the colors. Here’s the old theme:

As this news site doesn’t get updated as often as one might like, it is a good test site for a new theme.

I want a theme that is easy to update. So I wondered – menus, header – will they be easy to tweak as well?

Here’s what I did:
1- I took a screenshot of old theme. I also copied the header image to my hard drive.

FYI, the photograph of the running deer was taken by Arnold Clayton Henderson, who spent a lot of time on environmental issues in Highland Park, including providing most of the content for the website. He has since moved to California, and we miss him!

2 – I looked at widgets. I must be using all hard-coded widgets – there is nothing listed. But you might be, so copy them down.
3 – I clicked on Themes, clicked on the Twenty Ten theme, previewed then activated the theme.
4 – The header was ready on my hard drive.

The menu on the left has a header item now – I just clicked on that and added the header.
5 – What did I want in the sidebar? Since I had done a screenshot, I could look at it to recall all the details. Or I could reactivate the old theme and look in that manner.
6 – Creating menu: Why doesn’t it appear? Need to save something somewhere.
7 – I clicked Save Menu and the new menu appeared. Need to click Save Menu each time you add a new item to the menu.
8 – Sidebar – Widgets. All I had to do was click, drag, save. Easy. Looks like lots of options for widgets are available – I just drag those to the sidebars, as I do in other themes.

The only issue I had was the font for the main content showed up as a serif font, and I wanted sans serif. So I went into style.css (you can do it from the Adminstrative back end, but better yet, do it on a copy on your hard drive and upload the changes while saving the original, just in case) and moved body down to the sans serif section.

I also found this post called WordPress Twenty-Ten theme modifications with even more discussion about tweaking the CSS for Twenty Ten. You might want to refer to this post, for example, if you are unhappy with the spacing in your blog.

I asked if anyone else has used Twenty Ten on Twitter, and Mark Headrick showed me his blog in Twenty Ten. Note how he changed his menu color to blue – you don’t have to stick with the standard black if you can tweak a little CSS.

I noticed my good friend Michelle of Rambling Woods is using Twenty Ten on her nature blog, because one of the commentator said, I like how you keep changing the background. I looked “under the hood” (i.e., in the source code), and I saw this:

See that twentyten directory in the path name? That means she’s using our theme.

Here’s the screenshot:

This is a smart approach for Michelle, because she can easily change her header or her background. Also, she made use of the menu in a creative way, making it much longer than just one line of links.

Finally, here’s how my new Twenty Ten themed blog now looks:

The background is still a dull gray, so if you have any ingenious ideas for what to use as a background that’s not too distracting, feel free to let me know.

More on the new Twenty Ten theme:

• Twenty Ten home page
• New Theme: Twenty Ten

So why should some companies or organizations go with Drupal? I’m sure Drupal experts will have more answers than these, but at present I have three:

1. Dates: Dates and its various formats are built into the Drupal core. I did a calendar for WordPress, and the only place dates are set up as dates is in the scheduling and publishing function, so at first I used that for the calendar. Later we switched to using custom fields, which I would suggest with WordPress. Will WordPress 3.0 and its new content type functionality help make dates easier to use in WordPress?
2. Fine tuned Roles and Permissions: Also built into Drupal is the capability to put users in certain roles and fine tune the permissions allowed for each user. I am currently using a Drupal module called Taxonomy Access Control to do the fine tuning of permissions.
3. Views: once you learn how to use Views in Drupal, you can display your data in multiple ways and locations on your site.

If you have worked with both WordPress and Drupal, what do you see as the strengths of these two systems? Weaknesses? Looking forward as both grow and continue to compete with each other.

Some links that discuss WordPress and Drupal:

• Comparisons between WordPress and Drupal
• Drupal vs WordPress: Which one is right for you?
• Drupal 7 vs. WordPress 3: Battle of the New Features

(Oh, and that’s not the *real* Drupal icon on the upper right of this post – that’s my dressed up version).

Recently, we upgraded a site at Rutgers from Joomla! 1.0 to Joomla! 1.5. When an upgrade this major is done, first it is done on a “play” copy of the site, called a sandbox. That way initial problems are discovered and fixed before going live. I encouraged my clients who use WordPress to do the same: do the initial upgrade on a copy of the site. Although at first I found few problems, as I went through our newly upgraded site, I noticed that the global settings had been changed. So there is a warning specific to Joomla!: check the global settings. We also had to change several modules related to playing videos, a photo gallery, and a slideshow. So I had to tweak specific files to get those to work again.

Some upgrades are small, and some are big. Last year I started working on a site that was done in Drupal 5. I discovered it was so much work to change that particular site (because a lot had been tweaked and tailored to the site) to Drupal 6 that the client and I decided it was a fine time to switch the entire site to WordPress. An upgrade from Drupal 6.2 to Drupal 6.3, on the other hand, would not have nearly been as dramatic.

Sometimes you can use upgrade time as a time to reassess how your site is done. Soon WordPress will release WordPress 3.0. You can read this post on Six Revisions to learn more about the new features. One of the new features is a new default theme. I am strongly considering using the new default theme for one of my sites instead of the current one, as the new default theme looks promising and has flexible options.

Here are a few basics steps in upgrading (can you think of others? feel free to say so in the comments):

1. Make a complete copy of your site and upgrade that one first. Look at it carefully to see what might have stopped working and what may need fixing.
2. Back up both your database AND your theme files. If for some reason your site doesn’t work after upgrading, try the default theme. Does that one work? Then something in your theme files needs fixing. Or consider switching themes. If you have tweaked your theme a lot, you may find you need to rework the theme to get the tweaks to work again.
3. Check the pages, the posts, the videos, photo galleries, the forms, and any other specialized feature you have added to your site.
4. Sometimes a plugin that worked before will not work with a new upgrade. Remember that you can delete a plugin by renaming the plugin folder (or deleted the plugin files) so it doesn’t get picked up by your CMS.
5. Permissions: I find this is more of an issue with Drupal or Joomla than with WordPress. Make sure the people that need to see a page can see it, and those who should not cannot.
6. Conflicting plugins: You may proceed to use your site for a while and then discover something that used to work no longer works. In one case with WordPress, for example, we had loaded two plugins that conflicted, so a page no longer sorted properly. We deleted the less useful plugin, and the problem was fixed.

Finally, if something does go wrong that you cannot fix, be aware that someone else may have had the problem. Search the web for a solution or ask on Twitter. If you don’t find an answer that way, try asking the question in a forum.

Do you have any upgrade tales?

I explained to her that WordPress was originally set up to be blogging software, and of course she could use her site to include the new blog. She just needed to create a new category called Blog and add new posts in that category. Then the links to the new category would need to be added to the desired menus.

FYI, WordPress 3.0 is coming out soon, and one of the new capabilities is multi-site blogs with one installation of WordPress. See How to enable Multi-Site option in WordPress 3.0.

After years of building and updating websites with straight code or other content management systems (I’ve used Joomla and Drupal), I now almost always recommend WordPress to clients who are looking to build their small business websites. The reason? Ease of use.

Administrative Area is Easy to Use

Compared to other content management systems, it is so easy for someone to dive into the WordPress admin section and start to edit and write posts. I just remind my clients to add the posts to the correct category, and the theme will take care of places the posts where they belong. You can start a draft and leave it there, updating it as you want until you are ready to publish it. Then you can just as easily unpublish it so it becomes a draft form again, in case you want to use it again later.

Easy to Upgrade

Click, click, click and you are done with upgrade. No need to FTP files or get into shell mode or remember what you customized. Oh, do backup your blog first (but with a variety of backup plugins, this too is easy).

Many Plugins and Plugin Developers

The range of plugins available for WordPress is numerous and growing. And often plugin developers are happy to answer your specific installation or use of plugin questions. See the WordPress plugin directory.

Easy to Customize

Want a header specific to your site? Easy with WordPress. With any WordPress theme, you can edit the header.php and style.css to make it your own. Or you can hire a professional to design and install a header that will make your shine stand out from the competition. WordPress appearance and functionality can be tweaked and changed via the theme files, so your site can function specific to your needs. If you take a look at the layouts on this post on Highlighting Upcoming on a WordPress Home Page, you can get some ideas of how you could customize your site.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Even if you do nothing extra to your site, it will have an advantage in search engine optimization by utilizing the WordPress set up. If you add the plugin All in One SEO Pack, you can fine tune each post so keywords will appear in title tags and description tags.

Easy to Edit and Add New Content

Did I use the word “easy” enough times in this post? Yes, it really is easy to use and publish your pages. You can edit, add, add categories, backup, add links, upload photos and docs and add widgets, all with a few clicks.

If you use WordPress, what do you like about it?

Whenever I can on Twitter, I try to use the actual URL of the post instead of a shortening service. Two reasons:

1. People can then see the URL directly and know what they are clicking on. It also gives some branding to the domain name.
2. If I search for that domain using Twitter search, I can see what has been tweeted of that domain.

So this is the code that you need to remember:

What’s that 1234? That’s the number of the post. If you go to the Admin section of your WordPress blog, you will see the number of the post when you hover with your mouse over the Edit button of the post. As an example, this is the link to this particular post:

It’s a good idea to memorize that ?p=POST_NUMBER so you can use it in a hurry some day when you want to tweet something with the original URL, and you don’t have much time.

Or maybe your home page looks like a list of excerpts, like so:

What if you want to make one post in particular show up on top? You could use sticky posts, but then that top sticky would like exactly like the other posts.

Here is code that I’ve used to get one or a few posts to show up on top of your regular posts. First, write one of the posts and designate it in a new category. Call your new category “special.” Look in the Categories section of your admin panel to see the number of the category. Jot down the number. Now add the following code to the top of your index.php page:

You may just need to insert the code from START SPECIAL SECTION to END SPECIAL SECTION; the key is to put it in the right place, so it just appears on the home page. The posts from the special category will now show up as clickable links on top of your home page.

Let’s say you want formatted in a more special manner, like so:

Instead of

Try this:

Then you will need to write up some CSS code to make the box stand out. You can try some of the code in this post on Fancy Boxes in CSS. Also, be sure your theme has the new thumbnail code applied – see the post on thumbnails in 2.9 for more information. An alternative to the special category is to use a custom field – you can then do a similar page layout as above with rewind_posts() or with a custom query_posts().

This is NOT a post on how to implement the new thumbnails code for WordPress 2.9 (latest is 2.9.1). If you want to implement the code, simply open functions.php and add the code as explained in these posts:

• Mark Jaquith: New in WordPress 2.9: Post Thumbnail Images
• WordPress Codex: Template Tags/the post thumbnail
• WP Engineer: About WordPress Post Thumbnail

This post is about how one can use thumbnails to enhance a site.

Why are thumbnails important to your site?

When you first come to a site, be it a blog or a website, what do you see? You might see a list or a menu of links and a header with an image reflecting the overall site. You might see one large image representative of the last item posted to the site. If all you see is lots of text or links, this may not entice to click further. But what if you are given choices, as in this library site:

Much more likely to click on one of these than on a plain link, right?

What if you want the posts organized differently on another page, say on a category page? How’s this:

Same thumbnails, but this page has tags, dates and category links as well. Same posts, but the layout has changed and more information added.

What has changed in WordPress 2.9 in regard to thumbnails?

Before WordPress 2.9, you could do thumbnails using a custom field. Now the thumbnail has its own spot on each post, and you can easily add the thumbnail (and change it) as well as descriptive text while working on the post. Also, thumbnail does not have to mean small; one can use a variety of sizes. See the links at the beginning of this post for detailed information.

Noteworthy Examples of Thumbnails

Lyza Danger’s projects page

News and Resources page of Connelly-Campion-Wright Insurance

Do you have an example that you like of a page with thumbnails? It doesn’t have to be done with WordPress – just good thumbnail design.