WordPress

If you’ve visited my blog in the last few days, you’ll notice that I changed the theme. After trying out a few themes, I’ve settled on Suffision, which is very customizable with over 20 pages of options. I’ll continue to fine-tune it. I also made my software page the default home page, to emphasize my iPhone applications.

I’ve found the perfect WordPress theme, Atahualpa from BytesForAll, which I’m now using at MacMegasite. Every aspect of the theme is completely customizable with 25 pages of options. I highly recommend this theme. With all of those options, you can easily make it your own.

One of the new features in WordPress 2.7 is “sticky” posts, which will always appear at the top of the home page. The option is pretty well hidden, so unless you know where to look for it, you probably won’t find it.

In the edit or create post screen, there’s a publish options box which lets you specify the visibility for that post, with an ‘edit’ link next to it.

Click the edit link and it will expand the box to show the options, including a ‘sticky’ checkbox.

You can test for sticky posts in your theme using is_sticky() and change the appearance to highlight those posts.

In the theme’s index.php, alter the class of sticky posts with code similar to this:

    <?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
       <div class="post <?php  if (is_sticky($post_id)) { echo 'sticky'; } ?>" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
 ...

Finally, add a ‘sticky’ style to the theme’s style.css, for example:

.sticky {
	background: #dde;
	padding: 5px;
}

I’ve upgraded MacMegasite to WordPress 2.7. As always, the upgrade was quick and painless: I simply uploaded the files (after backing up the old version) and updated the database through the admin screen. In less than 10 minutes it was back up.

I’ve upgraded this blog to WordPress 2.7b3. As always, the upgrade was quick & painless. The only plugin that broke is Leopard Admin, which isn’t really that important any more with the new admin dashboard. I’ll probably upgrade MacMegasite in a few days after more testing to make sure it doesn’t break the forums & other plugins.

Lorelle warns about a malicious fake WordPress site that looks like the real one, but isn’t. There is no WordPress 2.6.4. The latest version is 2.6.3. If you “upgraded” to “2.6.4″, then you have installed a fake trojan version (more details here and here). If you’ve “upgraded” to 2.6.4, delete your wp-admin and wp-includes folders and replace them with fresh copies from wordpress.org. More detailed instructions for cleaning up are available here.