I always recommend that clients upgrade WordPress and their plugis regularly. When working with open source software, that’s just a concession we’re going to have to make. There’s a reason the patches come out, so always upgrade.
However, every once in a while an upgrade can break your site. No worries, though, we’ll fix it.
This time it was with the Thesis Openhook plugin. We do a lot of design work using the Thesis theme, and Openhook is a fantastic plugin for expediting work within the Thesis Framework. But the last update requires a few extra steps to get your site up to date.
For this entry, I’m going to assume you have already updated the plugin, thus making your site go all wonky. If you haven’t updated, go ahead and do it and then to fix it, follow these steps:
Step One: After the initial update, the plugin will become deactivated. So first step is to go to the plugins list and activate the plugin again. It changed names too, now it’s called The OpenHook Customizations Manager. So active that one.
Step Two: Go to Settings->Openhook. Find the two top check boxes and check them. That’s the checkbox for Thesis and WordPress. Check those box and click “Save Changes.”
Step Three: That’s not enough though, there’s one final step. Look below the “Save Changes” button to the “Manage Options” area. The first button in that section reads “Upgrade from Openhook 2.” Click that button, hit okay, and that should complete the transition for your site, and everything you had before should be reinstated.
Still need help with your wordpress or Thesis site? Get in touch!
One of the biggest questions I hear is what kind of site do I need? Why would I need a WordPress site versus a static, brochure style site.
Truly, they each have their benefits. However, if you want to have a site that you can login from anywhere and edit your content, then using WordPress is an excellent option. WordPress has developed from a blogging platform into a full-fledged content management system. You can easily learn to update your own website.
The benefit of being able to update your own content is speed. You don’t have to wait for your designer to be available to do the updates, and you have control over every single word. You can work on your site at any time of day or night.
What if I don’t want to update it myself? If I go with WordPress, will you still update for me? Of course! We maintain many WordPress sites for clients.
At Sumy Designs, we are experts at the Thesis Theme Framework for WordPress. Nearly every WordPress site we do uses Thesis. If you aren’t familiar, here’s a little background info from the creator.
The Thesis Theme framework is a premium template system for WordPress that is designed to serve as the rock-solid foundation beneath any kind of website.
What I like about using this theme for the foundation of my sites is the flexibility it provides me to do just about anything on a WordPress site. It’s powerful. It’s efficient. And it comes out of the box ready for SEO. You can’t beat it.
Want to see some sites we’ve done using the Thesis Framework? Well, you’re on one right now. That’s right, sumydesigns.com uses Thesis.
Another in my series of screencasts about using WordPress. This one is a quick tutorial on how to upload images to your NextGen Gallery, and then how to embed that gallery into a post. Keep in mind that you have to have the NextGEN plugin installed and active before this tutorial will help you. Also, I only showed the short code for adding one kind of photo gallery, but there are multiple options for those galleries in your posts, and you can see all those options on the NextGEN Gallery demo site.
I get asked a lot of questions on how to do things, and from time to time I write tutorials, but I thought it might be fun to do a screencast. A screencast is a short video of my screen, running through a concept, with my exciting voice narrating what you need to do. This one is a short and easy video on how to add photos to your posts and pages in WordPress.
We do a lot of WordPress design, and often I’m challenged to find a solution for a site, and that’s where WordPress plugins come in. There are a lot of great ones out there, but here’s a shortlist of my favorites, ones I use on a regular basis.
Contact Form 7- I use this in every WordPress site I do. It’s simply the easiest plugin for having a form on your WordPress site. You activate the plugin and pop the shortcode in your page. Instant form. Plus, it’s easily customizable, you can make multiple forms, and you can add a database extension to track your contacts. Lots of possibilities.
NextGen Gallery – Whenever anyone needs a gallery, I pop this one in. It’s easy to set up, has lots of options and you can add on lots of extras.
Akismet – A given, if you want to block blog spam, Akismet is the best.
ShareThis – In this day of social media, you need to make every post share-able, and this is an easy way to do it.
Widget Logic- For a long time, I didn’t realize you could control the sidebar for each page, but here you have it. Just some logic and a little time, and your pages have individual sidebars for each page.
WP Archive-Sitemap Generator – Creates a sitemap of your pages and posts. Not an XML sitemap for the search engines, but an actual sitemap for users to find your content.
I get asked this question a lot, so I thought this would be a good place to answer it. How does one upload a PDF and link to it in WordPress?
First, make sure you open the page or post in WordPress where you want your PDF to be linked.
Step 1: Find the Upload/Insert area above your formatting buttons. You have four options: Add an Image, Add Video, Add Audio, or Add Media. Click on Add Media.
Step 2:Click “Select Files” and find the PDF from your desktop that you want to upload, click “Select.”
Step 3: Once uploaded, you will see a “preview” screen like the one below. Give your PDF a title. The title are the words someone will click on to get your PDF. Check the Link URL box to make sure the URL appears there. That’s the location of your file. If it does not show a URL, click the “File URL” button and it will show up. Once you have your Title and URL, click the “Insert into Post” button.
Once you hit “Insert into Post”, you will have a link in your post like this one.
Step Four: Once your PDF link is ready within your content box, just click the “Publish” or “Update” button to update your post or page. That’s all there is to it!
When we got started designing for WordPress, it was only for blogging. It was becoming popular, and we wanted a part of the action. At the time, we were also doing e-commerce sites, static sites, and fully loaded content management systems.
Over the years, one of the things we discovered was that most of the content management systems are just too much for the average end-user. Clients who came to us wanting to update their own site were intimidated by the CMS, and more often than not, we ended up doing the maintenance for it after all.
During this time, WordPress evolved into a more dynamic content management system in itself, with all the features we wanted but the ease of use our clients wanted that enabled them to do their own updates without spending hours banging their heads on the wall.
More and more we’ve been developing WordPress for clients who want a great site, but want to do their own tweaks and updates. It’s powerful enough to do what we need it to do, but easy enough for novices to maintain their own content. WordPress as a stand alone content management. We love it!
