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Plugin of the Week: Search and Replace

We ran across an interesting problem when we transferred a WordPress site from Dreamhost to Bluehost. We actually did a database export/import with phpMyAdmin instead of using the XML export tool built into WordPress.

When the database was transferred over to the new site, something had converted or rendered the apostrophe characters (‘) in the site to a weird character string: â€™

So we had this seemingly weird string appearing on different posts and pages.

So how could you fix this? One way would be to give the aptly named “Search and Replace” plugin a whirl. It worked really well for our site considering it replaced over 400 character errors – which would have taken a really long time to fix manually.

Once the Search and Replace plugin is installed and activated, you’ll find it under the Tools menu. Select the database field where you want to perform the search and replace. Most of the time this would be “content.” Make sure to scroll to the bottom of the page to use the search + replace function.

Search replace plugin

Make sure you have a backup of your the original MySQL file just in case you need to restore it because there isn’t an undo function. Again, there is no undo so be careful using this plugin.

Here are five other common conversion errors that we also had to fix.

• = bullet point •

— = long dash/hyphen —

“ = start quote “

” = end quote ”

’ = apostrophe '

Get it: “Search and Replace” plugin

Side note: If you’re an advanced user and want to prevent this error from happening, here’s a solution at the MySQL level.

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Site of the Week: Themes Forge (and Twenty Eleven theme Preview)

We love it when we find a new site filled with great WordPress tips and tricks – so we were really excited today when we stumbled on Themesforge.com.

Themesforge com site jpg

It’s filled with great posts on WordPress themes and some behind the scenes tidbits that call it like it is – like a post covering the great Thesis versus Automattic debacle of last summer.

But our favorite juicy coverage involves the upcoming Twenty Eleven theme preview from Automattic.

Twenty eleven theme

There are also some great tips on using WordPress with the high performance alternative to Apache web server called Nginx. So if you’re an intermediate or advanced WordPress designer, developer, or hacker, we recommend taking a look at Themesforge.com.

Update: If you want more WordPress 3.2 and Twenty Eleven coverage, check out WPMods review and our own quick impressions.

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Misc. Updates

You may have noticed that we haven’t updated the site in a while. Why? Because we’ve been working on a lot of WordPress projects for clients. In the meanwhile, here are some updates based on our previous posts.

Web Hosting
A weeks ago, we looked at four different web hosting providers including MediaTemple which we were unhappy with because of performance issues. So a few days ago, we moved this site over from MediaTemple’s grid server (gs) platform to MDD hosting simply because our site took (what seemed like) forever to load up even with high speed DNS, page caching and CDN plugins enabled.

We’re also moving away from Dreamhost because we ran into some troubles with our poor customer service experience. The latest incident happened when someone from our local meetup group mailing list asked for opinions on the best web hosting providers. Low and behold a system admin from Dreamhost chimed in about how good their service was. coincidentally that morning we ran into a problem with our account and so we asked that Dreamhost employee for some help via a private email. We then received a dead-end response of “I am sorry I can’t help.” without any other solution. We were expecting at least something like this: “I am sorry, I can’t help you directly but let me forward you to one of our customer service reps.”

Our take is that if you’re going to talk up your company and product in a public venue, you better be prepared to help people who come to you. And if you can’t help them, at least point them in the right direction and not just give them a dead-end answer.

Theme frameworks
We also switched over to Pagelines Platform Pro a few weeks  ago which we like overall but then we ran into problems assigning featured images that would break our home page. So based on our anecdotal experience from a few weeks back, there is a lack of responsiveness for a commercial theme from the company. We had to post our question in the message boards that took almost a day for a response. We emailed the company directly but it was Friday and no one responded to us over the weekend or even on Monday. In the end, we figured out most of the problem ourselves with a little bit of help from another Platform Pro user in their support forum. We hope Pagelines has improved their level of support in the past few weeks since our last incident.

On the flip side, we’ve also been working with StudioPress’ Genesis and their support forum moderators astounded us with lightning fast responses to questions.

So the moral of our story is companies need to kick it up a notch with customer support and training their employees. Because there are going to be competitors that will want your business if you don’t take care of your clients.

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WordPress theme of the week: The Talking Fowl

The Talking Fowl theme is one of the more unique looking WordPress themes we’ve seen in a while. The author, Tolu Sonaike, has designed a blog centric WordPress theme with a stylized timeline view.

Talkingfowl wordpress theme

The Talking Fowl theme also features an Ajax drop down menu to hide the main navigation near the top right corner. It also has built-in Twitter and Flickr feed integration at the top of the home page without the need for a plugin.

With a lot of WordPress themes looking more and more alike these days, Tolu Sonaike has been generous to give this theme out to the WP community.

Get it: The Talking Fowl theme

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New: P2 Reloaded v2.8 release

After nearly a week of testing, we’re happy to announce the newest version of P2 Reloaded theme. This WordPress theme is perfect as a collaboration tool in a small group. It gives you the ability to quickly post status updates and messages. Think of it as a “private” Twitter system that runs on WordPress. See P2theme.com for some of the original thoughts behind it.

We’ve taken some of the user feedback and suggestions in this release. You can now enter in post titles from status line, enable private blog home page message, removed the “do you want to navigate away” message, removed some of the duplicate notification emails, and a few more behind the scene bug fixes.

Download: p2-reloaded-2.8h.zip
Please add comments over at: P2Reloaded.com

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Overview of 11 theme clubs via Smashing Magazine

Steven Gliebe, founder of last week’s site of the week Theme Sorter, has written a great piece in Smashing Magazine about 11 of the WordPress’ community best known theme clubs including WooThemes, Elegant Themes, Studio Press, and a few more that you may never have heard of.

Steven delves into pricing, number of new releases per month, inclusion of PSDs, and support features. It’s an excellent piece of you’re thinking of ponying up some money to join as a member into a theme club to get access to a library of WordPress themes at a substantial discount.

Here’s our take on some of them…

ElegantThemes are great deal with beautiful graphics, lots of shortcodes, and good theme panels. The only catch is that if you plan on customizing the themes with anything more than simple graphics replacement/swaps. it can become time-consuming unless you’re an advanced user. So basically if you plan on using the themes as-is, with little customization, the $40 is a great deal.

We aren’t a full member of StudioPress membership plan but we have bought Genesis and a few child themes and really like the phenomenal level of help available in their support forums. We think paying one time life time fee like StudioPress’ model is a great way to go.

We’re not a member of WooThemes club either but like most other WordPress users we’ve worked on quite a few of their themes and they provide solid and feature filled themes.

Read it: Detailed Comparison of Premium WordPress Theme Clubs

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Quick Review: Modularity Theme

A few weeks ago we looked at two Graph Paper Press themes aimed at photographers and artists. We like GPP (Graph Paper Press) themes because their grid based layouts and great use of negative space. After all do you really need to fill up every single space of a web page?

So when we were recently contacted by a photographer friend and asked to redo her Flash based website, we didn’t hesitate to create a demo site for her with Graph Paper Press’ Modularity theme.

Here’s a quick overview of the Modularity theme home page (click image for larger size):

The theme follows the usual WordPress layout with a header area which includes: logo, navigation bar. Below that is a main image area with slideshow functionality, blog posts, and a sidebar. Two slight twists are the inclusion of two sliders: one is a thumbnail post slider and a larger feature article slider positioned below the main slideshow.

Unfortunately during our testing we were informed by GPP tech support that it’s not very easy to resize these thumbnails in that slider so you can’t easily set a fixed amount of thumbnail posts to perfectly fit the width of the page. We also thought having a secondary featured post slider was somewhat distracting so we disabled it. You can see the secondary featured post slider in action on GPP’s demo site here…

Graphpaperpress modularity panel slideshow

As you can see in the panel options, you can specify up to 4 images and timing for the main home page slideshow. Using the other theme panel tabs you can easily customize other site setting’s like the site logo, page background image, or font colors.

Graphpaperpress modularity panel

You can also define up to 5 columns of content right above the footer by specifying them in the theme control panel. What may throw you off is that this section is called “Category Columns” in theme panel which doesn’t really describe that it’s closer to the footer area. Eventually you’d figure it out though.

The major drawback with Mouldarity is that it’s very strong on the home page presentation but unless you install a plugin like NextGen gallery, there’s no built-in gallery function for the inner pages. Without using a gallery plugin, the inner pages would consist of simple thumbnails sorted in a blog-like fashion. See an inner page example from the GPP site….

However overall ease of use trumps our misgivings. Modularity is one of those rare themes that an intermediate skill level WordPress user could figure out without reading any documentation. It’s not a perfect theme but it works well out of the box and would be great for any image oriented WordPress site but not necessarily a portfolio site without having to resort to a gallery plugin.

Get it: Modularity

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How to convert your blog’s full post to excerpt format – Part 2

A few weeks ago we should you how to convert a WordPress theme that was designed to show full posts into one that should excerpts instead. We included instructions on hacking your theme but someone showed us an oldie but goodie plugin called Evermore that might get rid of the need to hack your theme.

Here’s how it looks like once it’s activated:

Evermore

As you can see above, it will even let you define the length of the excerpts by the number of paragraphs and/or character length.

The only catch is that it was last updated in Feburary 2009 but it worked well with our test WordPress 3.1.1 installation, so give it a try on a test site first if possible.

Get it: Evermore

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Quick tip: Styling posts with a different background

Here’s a typical scenario: Say you have a WordPress blog and wanted to highlight certain posts (blog entries) on the home page to show up with a different background color or other styling like a border to draw more attention to these posts.

So how do you do that? With WordPress it’s surprisingly easy to do and it’s a good way for beginners to start theme hacking. As always make sure you have a backup copy of your original theme file that you can re-upload via FTP in case something goes wrong.

In this example, let’s say that you want posts for “events” to have a slightly gray background.

So the first thing is to mark all your post(s) with the “events” category in the WP admin post editor.

Then you would go to Appearance -> Editor and select the “style.css” file (or if you’re using something like Pagelines or WooThemes, go to your theme control panel’s custom CSS editor page).

Then you’d add something like this to the bottom of your CSS file.

.category-events
{
background-color: #e9e9e9;
padding:5px 10px 5px 10px;
}

And voila, if the CSS class matches the actual “slug” name being generated by WordPress, all the “events” posts on the home page will have a light gray background.

The important thing is that the CSS class (e.g; .category-events) matches the WordPress slug for that category. Sometimes if you have previously deleted that category and re-created it, WordPress will add “-2” to the end of that slug. You can tell what the slug name is by looking in the slug column in Posts -> Categories. Unfortunately other than directly editing the MySQL database there’s no easy way to rename or delete category slugs.