It’s been a long time since themes.wordpress.net stopped taking new themes, and it’s nice for there once again to be a central place for people to distribute their themes, and I’m sure it’ll grow very quickly from the 6 themes that are on there at the moment.

Good work, Wordpress!

UPDATE : forgot to post the link!

I’m slightly skeptical about the post revisions, though, because I think it could well lead to a bloaded database that takes up far more space than it needs too. It’s a great idea, and it’s very usable, but I wonder if having an option to turn it on or off would be a good idea.

I’ve also been playing with Crazyhorse (or rather, I was before I left for holidays) , which is a branch of Wordpress with even more drastic edits to the backend, with a totally new layout. I actaully really like it It’s available in a branch of the trunk somewhere, I can’t remember the exact URL.

Ordinarially, Wordpress uses the post.php or index.php file from your theme directory for the image template, which just formats it exactly like any other post you can find. However, if you put in a file called attachement.php, it’ll work from that whenever it finds an attachment - this is the Wordpress theme hierarchy.

To make your own attachment template, take the contents of your post.php file and make a new file called attachement.php - then modify the layout to exactly how you want it. That part is simple.

Problem is that Wordpress doesn’t show the image as part of the_content() in the template anymore, so you need to find it manually. Never fear, however, because this is really simple. If you put this code in where you want your image to be:

<?php echo wp_get_attachment_image( $post->ID, 'medium' ); ?>

Then it’ll show up. Obviously, if you change ‘medium’ to ‘large’, you’ll get the full size image and so on. Then you can move the

<?php the_content();?>

to wherever you want the image caption to be, because that’s all that will be there. It’s awesomely simple. You can also link to the full size image using a bit of code like this:

You can see the full size image <a href="<?php echo wp_get_attachment_url($post->ID); ?>">here</a>

Nice and simple. Now, upload the file into your themes directory, and voila!

You MUST backup your blog! I’ve talked to people who never really thought about it or bothered, and then all of a sudden crisis happens, their data is gone, and their precious blog that they spent months on it dead.

I’m entirely familiar with this - it happened to me. Thankfully, it was quite a while ago, while I was still experimenting and I didn’t lose very much. At that time, I decided that regular backups were a must. It’s fairly simple to do, there’s a nice automated backup plugin which does the job nicely - I email myself a copy of my database every morning at the moment, and upload it onto my bingodisk, all good. It’s then saved in 4 places, and I’m sure there is more chance of me becoming the King of England and the president of the US than them all going at the same time.

So yeah, go forth and backup. NOW!

Why not, on the day that you have hundreds of ideas, write up 2-3 of them, maybe more. Publish one that day, and then set the next ones for the next few days, through the post timestamp function. Then, if you have ideas tomorrow, schedule them for after that.

This way, you’ve got posts most days, which makes your blog seem more active, and you don’t have to bother on some days if you like, you know that it’s going to automagically post something for you

The new design has also been redesigned to work really well with Wordpress 2.5, rather than the old one that seemed a little ,, antique, in my opinion. The new one looks awesome

I’ve got it running on GPearce and I might possibly put it up here too, I’m not sure yet.

If you’re blogging in a niche, it’s important that you select a theme that fits into this niche, there’s no point having a blog about the latest technology, and using an olde style theme, it just doesn’t make sense. If you’re making a personal blog, then go for a theme you like. It doesn’t matter if anyone else likes it, it’s for you to use for your blog.

When I started out, I used a free theme from wpthemesfree.net, browse through there and see if anything catches your eye.

The major limitation of free themes is that thousands of people use them, which means that they aren’t unique. However, if you don’t want to spend too much money, they are often the only way. Whatever happens, don’t go for ripped premimum themes, you get found out sooner or later. Pick a free theme, install it, and then customize it as you go along (or get someone else to help).

As a guideline, you should go for a theme with at least one sidebar, which is widget enabled and not too heavy. Load up the theme demos on websites, and browse around - don’t just choose by the screenshot

Once you’ve chosen, upload the theme files to your wp-content/themes directory and activate them through the Design tab.

Installing Wordpress itself is pretty simple. You download the file, change wp-config-sample.php to wp-config.php, and then open it up in notepad. Then make a database using cpanel or similar, make a username, put them together (this is very self explainitory), and put the information into the wp-config.php file. Then upload the whole lot to your website, and navigate to it. The install process does the rest.

However, once you’ve got your blog installed, there are some things you definitely should do.

The first of those things is to setup permalinks, because a blog with ?p=44 links looks ugly, to be frank. There is a complete tutorial on how to do this here.

Next up, you should do your about page. Don’t worry about the theme for a moment, that’s in the next post. Your about page should contain information on what subject the blog is written on, and if it’s a personal blog, maybe a bit about you. Everything counts.

Now setup some categories. This can be done while posting, but I think it’s better to have pre-defined categories to work with, its simpler. Head over to manage >> categories and add a couple here and there, depending on what you feel like.

And that’s it. You’ve now got a nice blog with nice links, categories and an about page. Next up, a theme.