How I Tweaked WordPress
17 February 2009
8 Comments
WordPress is pretty nice out of the box but there’s a few things you’ll want to do on top of the base install. I’ve been tweaking WordPress 2.7 since the day I installed it. It’s humming just as I like now and I figured I’d share the few things I changed.
- I started with wordpess 2.5 which was my host’s default installation. I immediately upgraded to 2.7. This was as simple as ftp’ing some files across and running a database script.
- I migrated my old data, which was in SQL Server into mySQL using some simple SQL scripts. This took about an hour as I’d never seen the wordpress scheme before. I lost my tags in the process but no big deal.
- Then I grabbed the Arthemia Lite theme (http://colorlabsproject.com/arthemia/) which I’d first seen on my buddy Chris Webb’s site (ckwebb.com). The lite version is free but with reduced functionality.
- I grabbed JCarousel (http://sorgalla.com/jcarousel/) and modified the index.php template to make the featured items scroll in the top right.
- I threw in some Google Adsense ads into the main template.
- I migrated from Feedburner to Google Feedburner and added in Ads into the RSS in the process.
- I did some UI tweaks around the theme but nothing too crazy. E.g. Added an image to the Single Post page, updated the favicon etc.
- As far as plugins go I’m using Akismet for spam prevention, Contact Form ][, All in One SEO and WP Super Cache.
- Modified the Thumbnail script (timthumb) so I don’t have to upload the images to my server and can link to them directly. This makes new posts much much faster.
That’s about it. Last night I upgraded from 2.7 to 2.7.1 which was very easy and took about 10 mins. Pretty happy so far.
Hi Bro, was googling ard for an instruction on how to add jcarousel for the featured section like what u did. Is it possible to share how u acheived it?
Thanks
JC
Adding JCarousel is fairly easy. Just place the content you want scrolled in an unordered list (ul tag), give the UL an ID that flags it as a carousel and add a reference to JQuery and JCarousel JS files.
You can optionally add a configuration function that tweaks it.
There are plenty of examples here: http://sorgalla.com/jcarousel/
Let me know if you run into problems.
-fs
Hi.
I need more instructions to get JCarousel working in Arthemia. Is baby steps to much to ask?
Thank you
I also need instructions on how to add jcarousel for the featured section in Arthemia Lite Theme… please help me!!!
Thanks for attention…
Ok ok, I’ll add a little post as to how I did it…
Stefano, Bloubul, JC, here you go: http://francisshanahan.com/www/index.php/2009/how-to-add-jcarousel-lite-to-wordpress/
Modified the Thumbnail script (timthumb) so I don’t have to upload the images to my server and can link to them directly. This makes new posts much much faster.
can you provide the steps for this as well? plzz!!
thank you:D