Here is the first release of my first freely available WordPress theme, Muggles.

This theme was originally designed for a client, who decided it wasn’t what they wanted. I spent a bit of time working on this particular theme and wasn’t about to let that be wasted, so I hope you find a use for it.

It features bright yellow, pink and blue and nice curves.

Stay tuned, as I have already started working on some new WP Themes that are destined straight for the website (not through potential client filters), which will be available free too.

This theme (as with most of this website) is released under a Creative Commons, Share and Share A Like license. See my Legal Information for full license details.

Download Muggles v.1.0

This site has now been upgraded to WordPress 2.0.3, a little further behind release than I’d normally like to be, but things have been so busy lately I haven’t had a chance to do it. This release is primarilly a security update and I’d personally advise all my clients to upgrade as soon as possible.

I am available to do upgrades if you run into any issues with your upgrade or would like it done for you, please don’t hesitaste to contact me.

I’ve made a few other changes to the site during the process which will make future updating easier, mainly to do with the paths WordPress was installed into and some customisations i’ve made. If you notice any issues on this site, please contact me also.

For sometime now i’ve been meaning to investigate Christine Davis‘ plugin “Ultimate Tag Warrior” for wordpress. The main reason for this is the benefits¹ that can be acheived by participating in things like technorati.com.

The main concept of things like technorati is that by tagging and searching using tags more acurate searches with more reliable results can be found, instead of relying on plain language search string matches through content that may or may not be relevant. You can be pretty sure an article tagged with seo is going to be about search engine optimization, while one that is tagged as audio probably won’t be. This kind of search is particularly more useful when searching blog content, and more inline with the way a network of blogs works then the “conventional web”.

Installing the “Ultimate Tag Warrior” was mildly straight forward, there is plenty of info out there that helped to solve a few of the problems that popped up. I still have on problem with re-writing URLs so that I can have my “tag” archive pages appear under jaredquinn.info/tags/sometag instead of jaredquinn.info/index.php?tag=sometag - but I’ll get this fixed up soon.

If you do need assistance installing UTW, you can try these sites:

• Jarrod Trainque’s “Turning Wordpress into a tag based blogging app”
• Lorelle VanFossen’s UTW Info

If you need assistance with a UTW installation, I am available, Contact Me and we’ll discuss your requirements.

Whats Changed at jaredquinn.info?

The “Blog Archive” page has been renamed to “Browse Archive”, and now lists the Tag Cloud (or balloon) at the top, the Date Archive list and the Category Archive list. These may one day be seperated into seperate pages, when or if it becomes required.

Each previous post has been tagged with some relative tags, this will help eventually when I am able to claim this blog at technorati.com, which I have been unable to do as yet.

Wrap Up…

Again, there is no point attempting to drive additional traffic to a site unless there is useful content for people, firstly no one is going to point links at useless content, and unless the content is relevant, useful and fresh, you may as well have a static page that gets updated once a year and not a blog. At least that is my theory on it.

Upgrading WordPress to version 2.0.2 is highly recommended to resolve several bug and security related issues.

The upgrade went very smoothly, just replacing the WP files with ones from the latest tarball from the WordPress website.

Please contact me if any assistance is required in upgrading to WordPress 2.0.2.

My previous posting was a post to ‘Ask JaredQuinn’ to assist a user of the WP Support forums with their enquiry about setting the default post date in Word Press posts.

While this is still not technically a “plugin” because it requires modification to WordPress core files (there are no current hooks for these, yet) the closest I can get to a plugin has been released as in now available here.

This plugin allows you to specify any value that the strtotime() PHP function accepts, this includes strings such as:

• now
• next thursday
• in 1 week

These can be inserted into the Post form as the default timestamp and used to set the default without needing the user to click the ‘Edit Timestamp’ box.

See the link above for full details.

Plugin Details

Comments can be made on the download page.

How can I automatically set all posts to 00:01am for the following Monday morning?

(Modified version of a question I answered in the WordPress support forums at http://wordpress.org/support/topic/59803)

This is something that I quickly hacked together. I’ve never actually tried plugging anything into the Admin interface to over-ride/replace anything, so for the moment it’ll stay as a quick hack.

Open up and Edit wp-admin/admin-functions.php, we’re going to put a new function in there.

Now, Find the ‘touch_time’ function and in particular the line that says:

Change it so that it looks like:

This will cause all posts to default to 00:01 on the following monday. If you want to change that particular date/time, play with the get_ext_week function defined above.

The latest bugfix upgrade from WordPress is out which fixes some of the minor (because there wasn’t any major) niggles some people had with the Christmas release of 2.0, so the dev team brings us all WordPress 2.0.1.

This site has been upgraded to WordPress 2.0.1, and if anyone is experiencing issues with 2.0, especially memory issues (which I have noticed had started appearing in the last few days) I encourage you to upgrade. If you need commercial/professional assistance upgrading feel free to contact me.

I needed to generate a list of URLs to submit to Yahoo’s SiteMap upload feature, and couldn’t (quickly) find a WordPress plugin to generate this for me.

Instead of a full blown plugin, I quickly hacked together the relevant code to do the job as a standalone script and have published it. You can find it here.

If you have any questions/comments, ask here.

I was expecting migration of everything to the release candidate of WordPress 2.0 to be a difficult task, but it wasn’t. So far I have yet to make any changes to anything, here’s what I did.

• Copy my theme from my current wp-content/themes directory into the new one.
• Ensure all required plugins are activated from the administration panel.
• Copy the plugins directory from wp-content/themes directory into the new one.
• Copy my “downloads”, “images” and “pic” (and/or any that you use) from the old wp-c0ntent into the new one.
• Test

I had no issues, nothing to report out of the ordinary and nothing much to do at all.

My development blog can be found at http://jaredquinn.info/dev if anyone cares to check it out, it’s only up to date as of a few posts ago.

It’s getting closer to the release of WordPress 2.0, and i’m already getting questions from some customers of mine who I support WordPress installations for, so I figured it was time to put myself up a sandbox, do a test upgrade and see how it all goes?

This is also a step-by-step guide of how I achieved it.

Backup Data

First thing is first, let’s get a play copy of my database to play with. Hopefully you’re web provider is kind enough to allow you to create multiple databases, if not visit the Contact page and ask me for WordPress hosting!

Using phpMyAdmin complete the following steps:

(Users of my WordPress hosting service can find phpMyAdmin installed at http://…../system/phpMyAdmin and will require thier webhosting username/password to login to it).

Select the database you’re using for WordPress from the drop down menu of databases, followed by the Operations tab. Enter the name of a new database and click Go.

You should then also make sure you have a backup copy of all your files somewhere as well, before you go playing too much. You don’t want to lose anything!

Change to the root of you’re webhosting directory (mine is ~/jaredquinn.info), and create a folder for your sandbox/testarea to be installed info.

I’m living dangerously here, and am using the latest (regularly updated copy of WordPress from checked out from subversion, as I intend to use this for WordPress development.) You can use a straight install of WordPress into this directory if you like; or to get the cutting edge stuff:

Once you’ve got the code extracted (or downloaded or otherwise copied) into your sandbox area, copy your wp-config.php into there and change the name of the database to the one you just created.

Next, you need to make sure that your database has the correct paths and URLs in it for the new blog, to do this we need to get back into phpMyAdmin, find the wp_options (where wp is the prefix you use for your tables) and select Browse.

Find siteurl and set it to the URL to get to the new path you created (I just needed to add ‘dev’ on the end of mine, as I set up an Apache alias to point /dev to the path of the subversion trunk directory inside my sandbox.)

Once you’ve done that, grab your browser and head to the wp-admin area of your new blog.. Mine happens to be http://jaredquinn.info/dev/wp-admin/. Wow a nice new shiny login screen, and once you’ve logged in, a nice new shiny theme for the admin panel. Welcome to WordPress 2.0

What Next?

My theme or plugins were not copied over, as this was a fresh install from subversion, so I had to go and set back to a default WordPress theme and then head to my main blog to see how it was.

My next couple of articles will deal with converting my theme and plugins over to this new install, before finally making the site live once I’m happy with the result.

Some other relevant links that may help you on your path to 2.0…

• WordPress @T2 Upgrade
• Asymptomatic - WordPress Upgrade Documentation
• Ryan on WP 2.0 Release Candidates
• WordPress Upgrade Party