Well, if you are reading this and your site comes up with a blank screen, because you simply changed your theme, and you can’t get back into your wordpress admin, you are in the same boat I was in. 

How Did This Happen

Interestly enough, the theme I chose to switch to used to work. That is, it used to work under a previous WordPress version. This is something that you can control.  Just don’t go switching your themes like I did.  Eventually you will hit a theme that is not compatible with your current WordPress version.  That is when you have to do some stuff to get it back, you may not have the ability to do.

What Did I Do?

First I determined it was from switching the WordPress theme.  Our brains get kind of cloudy right after we do something, especially if you get stressed out.  You may not remember what happened.  Of course, if this has happened to you, you are probably already googling, “my wordpress site disappeared” looking for some guidance. 

In order to fix this problem, I had to get WordPress to point back to the original theme.  I had to FTP into the site (and this was a site I don’t typically log into). 

Once I ftp’d to the site, I copied the offending theme directory back to my PC and renamed it old.  I then renamed the theme directory on the server to the name of the current theme. This is a temp fix, and for a moment the homepage showed up on WordPress. 

Then I copied the good theme down as well to my PC, and made sure I had a copy back on the server with the right name.  I then went in and moved the site to the original theme it came with.  This gave me access to wordpress. With temporary access to WordPress I had to go in and specifically activate the original theme. 

Site is back up and running.  This blog entry helped me out considerably.

Flash Fonts

For those of you out there not aware of these, take a look at my site at http://www.takeitnational.com.  I purchased this theme from Theme Forest, with Flash Fonts, which for some reason has nicer themes than most places where you can buy a quick theme. You will notice the red fonts on the home page are not your normal css or text fonts.  They are each individual Flash Fonts.  This third party application actually converts each letter one by one.  Why is this cool?  Basically it allows my site to have nicely curned fonts that are very appealing compared with some of the text and css that currently have limits.  Also, the real key to Flash Fonts is the <h1> and <h2> tagging are not messed up for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).  This means that, in the past, when Flash was used, it would hose up your SEO text on the page, since Flash was not so SEO friendly.  It also meant in the past with Flash that the website would slow down.  But this does not seem to be much of an issue with flash fonts.  Where to get them.  I am using Sifr (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), which is an easier to implement version of this stuff.  Best answer is just find a theme with them built in already and you will get them…

Amazing Ajax Graphs And Charts

Another thing that somebody pointed out to me recently is this amazing array of ajax graphs.  See this article.  Basically with just simple ajax and html you can pop dynamic charts onto your wordpress page.  Years ago I was addicted to EasyCharts, one of the first open source chart, javascript, chart produc the market.  Now it is a cornucopia of charting and graphing to go around.

When A Post Is Not A Post

Asked to give a few people advice recently about their WooThemes themes they purchased I looked carefully how the Woothemes get implemented and this seems to be a pattern.  What they basically do is ask you create a post category.  Let’s say we call that “Features”.  Then they have this admin section in the back that allows you to select the “Features” category to show up in a particular part of the home page.  It could be a calendar-like section or a middle section, sidebar left or right or testimonials.  Notice that I do not use the word “Widget” in discussing this method.  Because what they typically do is use posts as content in places on the home page or throughout the site.  On the area where it is the full blog, the site knows to ignore “Features”, because that is how this works.  Woothemes and other theme makers use posts as static content, so that is why the blog ignores it.  Some use categories to do this, others use tagging.  For the events area, the site uses additional fields which show up under posts, down below on the page.  This way the posts are tracked as “events”  (You have to go into their special admin and set events as the event category).  These are part of many clever ways that WordPress is used to solve content issues.

Next time, an article on new words, that WordPress has sealed in the english language…

While those of us in our 40s and 50s or older freak out as we get let go from jobs with corporations that we have been with for 5, 10 or 15 years, there is another group of workers who are working through the night on their own businesses. 

This group is a variety of people.  They are 21 year college kids who see that this is by far the best time to ever start a business online, with unlimited access to millions on the web with just an idea and a keyboard.  Never has there been that much opportunity to do something different, get access to the world, use the tools that are out there, often free, and just do it.    These young people and others (not so sure if I am one of them) are regrouping themselves for a new career after figuring out there is none out there.  There are those who have been working the part-time thing on their own thing for quite a while are getting ready to launch.

Getting Ready To Launch

It seems like this new hard core group, and they may be 15, or 75, I might add, are gearing up for their big launch.  I am doing it too, as we get Take It National, Inc. ready for market.  This is the same conversation I have with Don from Austin, who is building a new kind of online business generator, or Jeromi from California, who has a new kind of dental floss, he is getting ready to launch. And then there is the lady we met who is starting a business of sending out young cute female models to boxing matches, wrestling, auto shows…

I guess if you don’t have the patience to go through the process of starting your own business and want a job, then follow some of these people around and when they grow their business big enough you will get a job from them, someday soon.

Where Do They Hang Out?

Now, not that I am a joiner, and even if I do join, it is only as an experiment typically for me, but my business partner and I have been hanging out at CEOSPACE.  Got nothing bad to say about them, especially now that I am a member.  They take in the wide-eyed, wondering if they can do it on their own crowd, entrepreneurs to be, and give them an street smart MBA like education in a weeks time.  I think from our recent experience, that CEOSPACE is for the serious entrepreneur with the serious idea…  My business partner has a similar type of training system for the every man called StartupBusinessBootCamp.com.  This one is for the masses and it can handle any idea.  Startup Business Boot Camp is running these weekend boot camp events around the country.  If you are in south florida I would check it out. 

Real MBAs

Finally there are those like myself, who suffer through the full MBA curriculum.  In fact, I did it twice, once at Farleigh Dickinson University in Madison, NJ, where I did not finish my MBA.   I finished my second at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, FL in 2006.  Either way, this is a little more than a week, 2 weeks or a weekend.  It is a serious academic exercise whether you go to Harvard or FAU.   You do this for you mind and not for the paper, because the paper will do a little for you in a practical sense.  You still have to sell yourself to make it work for you.  In fact these other boot camp and CEOSPACE types of education I am finding more practical and more geared towards startups.  Sorry about that, but I am yet to find an MBA with entrepreneuralism that is honest and direct.  They are more like outings for professors.

Where Do The Hungry Hang Out?

Well, if you haven’t already put the words “Startup YOUR TOWN” or “Business Group YOUR TOWN” or “Entreprenurship YOUR TOWN” into google, you will find a mixed bag of groups in every town out there.  There is BarCamp, an Internet Social Media Startup Group, which is for the youngest and boldest of entrepreneurs starting out mixed in with bloggers.  BarCamp is in most big towns out there along with WordCamp (A WordPress Conference That Runs In Most Large Towns).  I would provide a link here, but BarCamp is always so disorganized an event, I can’t find one single national link…

There are also a dozen civic, technology, marketing, social media, internet or other related startup groups in every town.  Just look around and attend and maybe you can find some bliss.

My initial running of the install did not have any problems, and if anything I am noticing that WP 3.0 is running faster than it used to, at least on WordPress 2.9.2, along with some improvement in the UI look and feel that is really not too noticeable.   In fact, if you are not interested in the Multi-Site part of this install, you would actually not experience much of anything.  The basic upgrade like previous versions of WordPress went smoothly and I did not notice anything too different.

The WordPress 3.0 Multi-Site

If you have no interest in having a thousand blogs on one install, then this is not too important to you.  What is Multi-Site?  It is the ability to generate as many WordPress sites on one account as you can put on there.  This is even true of a shared environment.  There are several issues with how do the implementation, for instance if you are www.strategicpoints.com, you can easily offer bob.strategicpoints.com and dan.strategicpoints.com with their own blog, but if you want to add www.gudema.com to that site, well, you can do it, but you will have to use .htaccess and mod rewrite to get it to work properly… 

Who wants to offer dozens of blogs to people? 

Not me.  I just want all my blogs to be under one install, so I don’t have to upgrade a dozen sites.  Like for instance, I will be upgrading this install of wordpress under strategicpoints.com when I already did gudema.com.  This is just a pain in the butt.  Well, they have just made it easier.

Where is it?

If you did the WordPress 3.0 upgrade/install and you are not seeing anything different, you are not alone.  There is no remnant of WordPress Multi-Site (previously WordPress MU) anywhere, until you place this special line into the wp-config.php file:

define(’WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true);

After that, suddenly things start to change on the site.  You will notice, when you log back into WordPress, under Tools there is a new menu item called Network. This Network controls the setting up of WordPress Multi-Site.  And then there are a series of things you will need to add to the wp-config.php in addition to get to work.  You can grab these from the Network page.  Also found a couple of good links out there about this already such as http://wptheming.com/2010/03/wordpress-3-0-enable-network/.  All of this is old news to the WordPress Dev community apparently.  I am just catching up as I and thousands, (I mean thousands and thousands or millions upgrade).

How does WordPress Multi-Site it work?

It appears that there are shared resources, new kinds of users and websites.  Once you have set everything up you can create these users and websites.  This means you have added to your wp-config.php a whole bunch of stuff you found in the Tools/Network page, switched the information in your .htaccess file and relogged onto WordPress, and wholla you will find a new menu item called Super Admin. 

Word Press Super Admin

Super Admin seems to be the place where all the Multi-Site Action happens.  This is a new menu item on the top of the WordPress menu with Multi-Site turned on.  This is where you configure your multi-site capabilities and create new sites.  One of the unique features of this multi-site system is the ability to allow your customers to create their own blog sites on the fly.  This means that every version of WP has the ability to be a generator of blog sites.  Nice.   Also you have the ability to create a library of themes, that your users can choose from.  Also, not sure of this one yet, but wouldn’t it be nice to not have to add plugins to all of your blog sites and keep them all in one place.  Not sure if this works this way, but maybe the WordPress gods will make it so.

One Click Updates to Plugins, Themes, etc.

Also noticed that the download and update feature of plugins went really smooth under 3.0.  Not sure if I am just imagining this, but it looks like your ability to update an individual plugin with a new version just got easier.

So that is it for now.  Not much time for WordPress for me these days as I head into the world of startups again…

Don’t fret.  The process can be boiled down to a few critical elements, many of which you will easily find examples throughout the web and in a book at your local Barnes & Noble.  So, first, before we do anything, this blog entry is just about the initial steps you should take before going ahead and doing this.

One first step, if you are not a programmer, is to get familiar with PHP.  If you are not fluent in the PHP programming language, this will be a challenge, not a challenge you can’t necessarily overcome, but a challenge none the less.   Along with getting familiar with PHP is getting familiar with WordPress.  If you have just begun the process of learning both PHP and WordPress, you may want to put this design conversion off for a bit, till you are ready.

The next step is to get your design.  Now, you may already be a designer or you have hired a designer and you are getting closer to the point of wanting this design in WordPress.  If you already are using this design (see I am giving you some ideas here) on another site and just want to convert it over, for instance, so your blog looks the same as your main website, you will have to free your design from that site and have it handy in your page editor.

Remember to get a program like Textpad or Homesite or Visual Studio, or whatever editing tool you use, especially one that can hold many files at the same time.  That is why I use Textpad, since it is a basic program and its free.

You should also be familiar with HTML, CSS and possibly javascript.  Also, we will encounter Flash and other technologies, most of which are ready for you to integrate with your design.  So, sign up for this blog and come back when I have the next in this series ready.

Michelle is now associated with this website and can be contacted through this site.  Michelle’s experience and background is listed below:

Greater New York City Area

Michelle Gudema & Strategic Points in Greater New York City Area
Marketing Operations Consultant

Michelle Gudema is an executive with extensive Operations, e-Commerce, Internet Marketing and Customer Care experience focused on rapid sales growth while improving operating efficiencies, increasing customer satisfaction and lowering costs.  Proven leader, innovative problem-solver, and strategic visionary that can execute and deliver an organization’s next level of success.

Specialties:

Integrated Marketing Operations, Email Operations, Email Deliverability, Business Process Improvement, Project Management, CRM Solutions, Database Management and Marketing, Loyalty Program Management, Customer Care, Integrations, E-Commerce Technology, Outsourcing, Change Management, Vendor Management, Process Engineering, Marketing Technology

• Robots.txt
  Robots.txt needs to be different in each level of DEV, QA and PROD.  If you are using SVN this can be a challenge.  If you don’t know what SVN or CVS are, then don’t worry about this one.  Basically as you copy the site from DEV to QA to PROD, you end up with the same robots.txt.  This can’t happen from a technical perspective, since you really want robots.txt to block the search engine bots on DEV and QA, and not on PROD.
• wp-config.php
  wp-config.php, the settings file for WordPress, needs to be modified if you are spanning the code across DEV, QA and PROD.  Simple answer for this, use the old PHP switch statement and change the site based on server name with case statements.  The variable to use for this is $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].    A good example is below:

  // ** MySQL settings – You can get this info from your web host ** //
  switch( $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] )
  {
  case “dev.strategicpoints.com”:
  define(’DB_NAME’, ‘dbname’);
  define(’DB_USER’, ‘dbuser’);
  define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘dbpassword’);
  define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost or SERVER NAME’);
  break;

  case “qa.strategicpoints.com”:
  define(’DB_NAME’, ‘dbname’);
  define(’DB_USER’, ‘dbuser’);
  define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘dbpassword’);
  define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost or SERVER NAME’);
  break;

  case “www.strategicpoints.com”:
  case “strategicpoints.com”:
  define(’DB_NAME’, ‘dbname’);
  define(’DB_USER’, ‘dbuser’);
  define(’DB_PASSWORD’, ‘dbpassword’);
  define(’DB_HOST’, ‘localhost or SERVER NAME’);
  break;
  }
  

• Server Name in Mysql
  It is important to make 2 changes in each DB when migrating MYSQL between DEV, QA and PROD.  These are in the wp_options table, and if you have been through this drill before they are pretty explanatory.  The option names you have to change are “siteurl” and “home” to the full path of the site such as http://www.strategicpoints.com.

To solve some of these incompatibilities between the DEV, QA and PROD there are plugins and other things that need to be put in place in order to keep these versions in sync.  This is a major challenge.  As I solve each one of these issue or more issues, I am going to update this blog post.

Load Balancing, Why Do It?

• Redundancy
  If one of your servers crashes, hangs ups or experiences a hiccup, you have another hot one ready to serve pages.
• Server Speed
  If you are overloading one server, obviously a second server will resolve some of the speed issues if you are having IO issues.  This is only if you are TechCrunch or Huffington Post.
• HTML Loading Issues
  If you are far away from the server, yes it could take a long time to view a page.  Ever wonder how long it takes to reach your website from Buenos Aires.  If you wanted to know, look at a service like Gomez or Keynote.  Not sure of any free services out there to tell you this, and if you find one definitely let me know the URL!

WordPress On Multiple Servers

I am sure Automattic has been doing this for the larger clients at a fee, and that is where some of their revenue is coming from, because this is where the pain kicks in, while implementing WordPress.  If you have two servers that need to split the WordPress traffic load, this will work fine, as long as you can call them both the same name, with separate IP addresses.  This is where the loadbalancer does its job.  Not an expert at loadbalancing, but I have heard of an F4.  Basically, it splits the load and sends web traffic either round robin or on some algorithm to each site.  It can be tweaked if one box is acting up or doing something wrong.  If there is extremely high volume of traffic, you could go to many boxes, but then you may want to look at cloud computing.

Load Balancing Across Multiple Locations

Now this is where the bigger issues come into play.  For instance, if you were to creating multiple load balanced servers in different data center, including different international locations, you will have to deal with the issue of syncing of files and of syncing of either DB latency issues or distributed DBs.

The MySQL Database Issues

Sudden MySQL and pretty much every DB becomes an issue when you are running a site in mutiple locations.  You can do it, and we are going to be running WordPress in a multi server environment soon, so we can experience the latency first hand.  By latency, we are referring to a site in one city, let’s say Houston, and the DB in Los Angeles.  That would mean every DB query would have to cross the country and there would be some delay in the query result arriving.   This would also mean that there is a chance the site will be worse off than before the new remote servers go online, and what would be the point of that.

Solutions For The WordPress MySQL DB Issue

First solution to consider is Caching of content.  Looking at wp-cache 2, and Super Cache, it is possible to have the individual sites create their own cache locally after one DB hit, or the first one after the cache times out locally.  This would only make sense if you have a website with little dynamic content.  This is good for web pages, but for rapidly changing blog comments or forums, it does not work, because it would mean it never will update proper.  However, experimenting with this is a good thing, and will help.

The second solution is to come up with a way for the MySQL DBs to be sync’d on a regular basis, preferably offline.  Possibly one way would be every hour or 5 minutes a script would kick off and check for any changes.  The changes would be sync’d to the other DBs in the distributed network and you would be able to keep all the sites local MySQL and speedy.  Good luck on this one.  Maybe a plugin to do this, is the answer.

What’s The Point Of Creating Categories?

Well, actually Categories are content, and content is used by Search Engines to find you.  So like many things on your website, Categories can really drive traffic if you figure out the proper wording, this may take some simple research, and you just fill out all the fields in the category management in WordPress.  One other thing to note is the Hovering over categories will typically show the user the content of the category description.  This means increased usability.  In the end, for most of us, its about driving traffic, and categories in WordPress is one of the not so complicated ways to drive that traffic.

Where Are Categories In WordPress?

There are categories in 2 places in the basic WordPress Implementation.  These places are Posts and Links.  So if you have not yet managed these well, take note and spend a little extra time to get them up to date.

Can I Manage Categories While Creating A Post?

When creating a post you can create and mange new categories in the bottom right of the screen. Don’t forget to do this while you are creating a post.  I typically do it at the very end of the process.   Most important is checking the little boxes and adding the post to a category.  Luckily WordPress has created the + Add New Category function at the bottom of the right sidebar.  Just click the link and you will notice the ability to create a Parent category (top) and a lower hierarchy category right there as you write your post.

Why Create Hierarchies of Categories?

Hierarchies of categories help your customers find articles and information that is relevant. The hierarchies are typically used by your theme to show the category information in a useful way on your site.    From an SEO perspective you are creating more content, more specific content and getting this indexed!

Need An Idea For A Category Name

If you are looking for good category names, then the best place is Google.  Start by determining what you know is a good search term.  Then go to google.com and enter this good search term(s) into the google search.   I searched for “WordPress Categories” .  Then click on the link +Show Options, right below the search box.  Not sure if you ever noticed that little link there.  Once it opens, the side bar has a link called Related Searches and Wonder Wheel. I use the WordPress Wheel to give me an idea of what people are searching for that is similar are more relevant, such as  I see the words “WordPress Categories List”.  So I actually am going to create a new category with that term for this article beneath Wordpress  and WordPress Categories…

Slugs And Permalinks

Slugs are used by categories for the url permalink at the top of the page for SEO purposes.  Most of the time you would just let the WordPress category automatically becoming the URL.  For Instance for this site the category we created above would be /wordpress-categories-list/.   The actual link will be http://www.strategicpoints.com/category/wordpress/wordpress-categories/wordpress-categories-list/.   Lots of typing involved here but great stuff for the search engines.  If you want to change the actual slug, you go to Posts and then Categories and you can edit that URL, so I am going to switch it to http://www.strategicpoints.com/category/wordpress/wordpress-categories/wordpress-categories-lists/ no problem.  I just added an s at the end…  You have total control over this.  Notice how the URLs show all the hierarchies of the categories when you click on the categories.

Category Descriptions

Lots of time we don’t fill this out, because it is not created during the time of post creation.  This requires going back and editing the categories directly.  For both posts and pages this means going to the link on the left and clicking on the “categories” link below post or page.  Once in there, adding a nice description is a good thing for SEO and usability and it will pay off in the end if you fill it out.  But like everything this takes a little time and energy.  I am going to put a follow up post on this and let you see the results of the categories created for this article…and show you how they showed up on Google, and typically within 24 hours of the post.  Now that is power!  Nice!

Link Categories

Link categories, which are just as important work a little differently that posts.   You will find them listed right below Links.  The important difference is that you have to be careful creating link categories, because most templates do not display them as hierarchies.  They are groups of links.  This means that if you want only one groups of links called “Links”, then you delete the “blogroll” link category and create a “Links” category.  Then you would make sure all the links are associated with the Links category.  If you wanted 3 groups of  links on your site, you would create 3 link categories.  Just like posts, managing the links category slugs and descriptions is important as well.

Summary

Like everything in life, filling out your categories is work.  If you blog for a living, this has to be done properly and you should be an expert already.  Just take time to organize and fill out the descriptions and make sure everything is in place and you should be good on the search engines.  If you want more and there is a lot more, then start looking at a variety of Categorization Improvement Plugins.  There are at least 20 out there.  I am going to review them in a my next article about WordPress For SEO – Categories update.

Benefits of qTranslate Plugin:

• Localize (Translate) your website into many languages.
• Have your website seen all around the world and get indexed in internal search engines and get more traffic.
• Using WordPress, makes it is possible to hire third parties to translate for you directly.
• Automated language translation services are available.
• Supports additional domains like es.strategicpoints.com if you want to use this method.

Challenges of qTranslate Plugin:

• qTranslate has been around for many versions, yet we ran into a few bugs.
• Installation is not as simple as plug and play.  You have to make choices and sometimes DNS changes.
• Support for problems is still not for non programmers.  You may need a technical person to help out.
• Needs to be planned out and may require a dev environment for larger websites.
• Issues when you run WordPress Upgrade, often qTranslate needs to be upgraded.  WATCHOUT FOR THIS ONE!

Unlike other simple plugins, this plugin allows you to create domains like es.strategicpoints.com and de.strategicpoints.com if you choose.  The default would be simply strategicpoints.com/es/  and strategicpoints.com/de/, with the language represented by the directory.  So you have to decide which format you are using, either a directory method or a domain name method.

The other issue that needs to be resolved is whether or not you are going to use translations that are done by hand or by a “machine”.  By machine this means a translation engine has attempted to translate it for you.  Apparently this old translation that most on the web used to call Babelfish, because they were an early automatic translator, as well as systran, is still giving it a go.  I guess one day it would be ready for primetime.

After our first attempt at the qTranslate WordPress plugin about a year ago on a small website, there was a second attempt at it this past fall, to translate one of our medium sized websites into 3 additional languages.  The first time at this had its pitfalls, but the second time around has been a lot better.

First issue that we ran into is what to call the domain names.  After deciding to go with the domain name approach, we found that we were restricted to es.strategicpoints.com…  This was a bit disappointing, because we had originally wanted to come up with completely different domain names per language.  Maybe this will be a feature that will be added.

The next issue we ran into and still have a problem with is, once we turned it on, the wrong default language kept coming up.  We wanted it to be English, but it came up German!  The only thing we could think of was to set the default site to en.strategicpoints.com (you realize I am just using this site as an example).  And we had to use .htaccess to do this.  Not good.  But of course marketing folks did not like the en. in front of a site, so we were stuck between a rock and hardplace.  Have not yet resolved and we may have to hack the site to get it work right.

Overall it saved us thousands of dollars, and yes we did run into a bug with qTranslate.  That said, it still was a big lifesaver and appears to be worth its weight in gold.  So, if you have a bit of technical team around and want to local/translate, this is the way to do it in WordPress.  In fact I can see sites switching to WordPress for just getting the qTranslate running.

UPDATE

So as an update to the particular bug I ran into using qTranslate, I went through and found out what the real problem was and fixed it manually.  Basically the issue was that the program was looking for “de” at the beginning of the domain name.  So what was happening is dev.strategicpoints.com was pointing automatically to the German language.  That is because “dev” begins with “de”. The qTranslate plugin was just looking at the first two characters of the domain name, and assumed it was de.strategicpoints.com.

How did I fix this?

If you are having this bug, which I doubt, because you would have to have a domain with three parts that begins with either “de”, “es” or “en” or something like that, you could go into the qtranslate_core.php file and correct the problem.  That is what I did.  I went in and edited the open source code and checked for the full domain name string, “dev.strategicpoints.com” and when it matched I set the language to “en” or english, my base language.  Leave me a comment below if you have any additional questions about how I fixed this, though I highly doubt that anybody will have this problem.  The biggest issue now that I have solved it, is remembering to not overwrite the old plugin with a new one without fixing the code I placed in there. ..