dmitri,

eto isa pa tanong. pano ko gagawin na yung header ko ay clickable to the main page(home)?
at pano gumawa ng extra page na “home”?
para kapag nasa ibang pages yung bwisitor ko, eh pede lang nila i hit yung “home” button or yung main header para bumalik sila sa 1st page.

tenkyu.

Let me translate that for everyone else to understand (here’s hoping that there really are someone elses here):

Dmitri,

How can I make my header to be clickable to the main page (home) to enable my visitors to be returned to the main page upon clicking the “home” button?

How to make an extra “home” page?

Thank you,

Buraot

Buraot has just migrated from blogspot to wordpress with Anak Ni Kulapo? Now he’s created another blog he calls IAMBURAOT.

At first, I was extremely confused about his questions so I have decided to visit his two blog. Truth indeed, his Wordpres Themes’ headers, un-like the usually Wordpress Themes, are not clickable – they are not linked.

Before answering his questions, let me call Iosif to demystify some of the HTML terms. Here’s Iosif:

In cyberspace, what most internet users call homepage is the page that appears when you enter the URL or domain in your internet browser (such as Internet Explorer, Opera, Firefox and Google Chrome). But in order for that to happen, there should be at least an index.htm (or index.asp, index.php, home.php or home.htm depending on the language that you are using – HTML, ASP, PHP, etc.) file. Otherwise, you will just see a directory listing of that domain or folder (if directory listing is enabled) or an error message.

In the case of Wordpress, it is using PHP codes driven by MySQL database and most Wordpress themes are using index.php for displaying the home page.

Thank you Iosif, that was one brain-whacking information you got there. Though we think that was unnecessary.

Looking at IAMBURAOT.COM, the header is pulling all the Wordpress pages but not the home page. I am safely assuming that his theme’s header.php file is similarly coded as this:

<ul>
<?php wp_list_pages(’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=’);?>
</ul>

Those codes are meant to pull a list of the pages’ titles and link to each one accordingly. What we need to do is insert another list which will call the homepage. Like this:

<ul>
<li><a href=”<?php echo get_settings(’home’); ?>”>Home</a></li>
<?php wp_list_pages(’sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li=’);?>
</ul>

You are free to change the text Home to what ever you want and it will all the same point to your homepage.

The problem with this kind of coding, however, is that it will automatically display all of you published pages in your blog. Sometimes the header gets too crowded when you have published too many of them. Or even if you just have a few, the length of the page titles make it difficult for the header space to display. In that case, you always have the option to code your header.php file manually to display only those pages that you deem important on that location. Here’s an example:

<ul>
<li><a href=”<?php echo get_settings(’home’); ?>”>Home</a></li>
<li><a href=”<?php echo get_settings(’home’); ?>/about“>About</a></li>
<li><a href=”<?php echo get_settings(’home’); ?>”/contact>Contact</a></li>
</ul>

You’ll notice that the codes <?php echo get_settings(’home’); ?> points to the homepage location. What you just need to do next is to insert the page slug of the pages you wanted display after a forward slash (‘/’). Though this is only true if you’re using the post slugs (pretty permalinks) but if you prefer to use the page ID (ugly permalinks) then you should add /?p=page_ID.

In most cases, Wordpress themes are coded differently depending on the theme creator. If you could not edit your header.php file with my instructions, chances are we’re looking at different codes. You may email me you’re header.php file and let me see what I can do.

And regarding making your whole header clickable, you have to have a linkable image instead of simply a background image. I believe you Wordpress Theme, just like this blog’s, don’t have a header image. They only have a background image for the entire blank space. You should put something there and enclose it with the link tags like:

<a href=”<?php echo get_settings(’home’); ?>”><img src=”image-location“></a>

If you didn’t like the plugin but you still want to replace the Wordpress logo with you own brand, you could still do it by replacing the default Wordpress logo-login.gif image in the wp-admin/images directory folder. Here’s how:

1. In Adobe Photoshop, or whatever image editor suits you, create a new 326 x 80 pixel transparent image.
2. Embed and resize your own logo or branding that suits that image size.
3. Save your image as logo-login.gif and upload it in the wp-admin/images directory folder of your Wordpress blog.

If you want to blend your logo with the background color of your Wordpress login page, you can use the RGB color codes F9F9F9 (in Wordpress version 2.7 or FFFFFF in version 2.5) in the color palette.

Here’s how the old and new Wordpress Login Page of this blog looks like before and after the modification.

Before:

After:

To begin with, let me make it clear that this blog has not been purchased or is currently being ran by new owners - we wouldn’t want to do that. There are just a few major changes made here and there in order to make your browsing experience a little more interesting, entertaining and, most of all, informative. Blog Almighty, himself, summoned the powers of five blogging deities (including yours truly) to fill every pages of this blog with useful and informative ideas pertaining to the technical aspects of this blogging platform (i.e. Wordpress). You may find some useful information about us on the About Us page, which is now entitled as Meet the Five Blogging Deities - That’s us.

For the contents, the all new Blog Almighty will be concentrating on five main categories: Building/Rebuilding Wordpress which is about all the things you need to know when you need your Wordpress blog archived, recovered when lost, fixed when experiencing massive errors and even back-to-basics information on installing Wordpress when you have the need to move from your old blogging platforms or even from free Wordpress to self-hosting; Wordpress Hacks, Tools and Plugins will feature some of the available Wordpress tools and plugins which could aid you in optimizing you blogging experience; Demystifying HTML Codes and Demystifying Photoshop will deal about manual webpage coding and photoshop tutorials, respectively; and Wordpress Themes will, of course, discuss about anything and everything you want to know about Wordpress themes (we will also release our own free Wordpress themes soon). In order to receive timely updates, please make sure to bookmark this site (that’s Ctrl+D on your Windows keyboard or Command+D in you Macs), subscribe in a reader or to our email feeds.

Please don’t forget that there is also a special column that will deal with all your technical questions revolving around blogging and Wordpress in general. In the best way that we can, Ask Dmitri (that’s me) will answer all your questions individually. You may send your questions to us through email address ask@blog-almighty.com or use our contact form at the bottom of the Ask Dmitri page. We’re too eager to receive your questions so better start sending them now.

And finally, Blog Almighty is now officially opening our doors to offer you professional and dedicated Wordpress development services. We’ll help you install, build, move or migrate Wordpress blogs from elsewhere to anywhere in the cyberspace (even in you local computers). Please contact us at support@blog-almighty.com for support and pricing inquiries.

That’s all for now, ladies and gentlemen. We hope that you’ll enjoy your blogging experience with us. Thank you all for your support in the past.

How to export your Wordpress WXR files

1. Under Tools tab (in Wordpress 2.7 or Manage tab in earlier version) in your Wordpress Dashboard, click Export.

2. In the Export panel, you will have the option to restrict your download by author. Click Download Export File button to start download.

How to import your Wordpress WXR files

1. Under Tools tab (in Wordpress 2.7 or Manage tab in earlier version) in your Wordpress Dashboard, click Import.

2. Locate your Wordpress WXR file from your computer and hit Upload file and import button to start upload.

3. Choose Wordpress when asked which blogging platform your import file is from.

4. You will be prompted to assign new authors for your imported posts or map them to existing ones. Click Download and import file attachments check button and click submit to continue.

Wait for the All done. Have fun! message to appear to ensure successful upload. If the process terminated without this message, hit refresh in your browser to repeat upload process. Don’t worry that you will have duplicate posts because Wordpress will not import duplicate contents.

Note that your import size may be delimited by your hosting provider so if you have large xml files, you will have to resize them accordingly. Here’s a step-by-step process that you may follow.

But there’s a solution: Split your XML files into several chunks of uploadable sizes.

1. Create a new text file and name it WPEXPORT.xml (or however you want to name it as long as the extension is .xml and not .txt)

2. Open you exported Wordpress XML file in notepad and find the first <item> tag. Your may press Ctrl+F, type <item> in the ‘Find what’ tab and press enter.

You will notice that your XML file is arranged in this order:

• <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?> SOME IMPORTANT CODES THAT YOU DON’T REALLY NEED TO UNDERSTAND </wp:tag>
• <item> HERE’S WHERE YOUR BLOG ENTRIES ARE CONTAINED </item>
• </channel></rss>

This is an indicator that your XML export has been properly completed. If your export does not end with </channel></rss>, it means you have not successfully completed exporting your blog contents and some entries will be missing.

3. Copy all texts before your first <item> tag and paste it in your WPEXPORT.xml file.

4. Reserve a few spaces (press ENTER several times) just so you could mark the location for the next steps. Copy </channel></rss> in the end of the WPEXPORT.xml file. Save it and make several copies.

Now you’re ready to split your exported XML file.

5. Cut and paste you posts between the spaces you’ve made in your new WPEXPORT.xml files.

6. Continue the process until you have copied all of your XML files into several 2MB or less files.

If your nose bleeds during the process, blame it to the Joneses.

Another option that I’ve tried is by compressing the XML file into a GZip file using a 7z software. But it doesn’t always work correctly and we’ll tackle this case later.

A script on this page may be busy , or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now or you can continue to see if the script will complete.

Script: http://…../wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js?ver=1.2.6:11

Two of my blogging friends have experienced the same error (they also mentioned their other friends are experiencing the same) and one of them got their wordpress blog locked by their hosting company. He has been seeing the same symptom for a while but he chose to ignore it and then one day, without prior notice, Bluehost has locked his wordpress blogs. Now he has no access to his dashboard so he couldn’t even export the XML files. Fortunately, the SQL database remained accessible and the transfer to a new host was done, though not smoothly.

I scoured the internet for similar discussions and found this thread in Wordpress Support Forum. The recommended solution was to delete the following lines from the edit-form-advanced.php file under wp-admin folder:

<?php
$metadata = has_meta($post->ID);
list_meta($metadata);
?>

In effect however, deleting those lines would disable manual editing of the custom fields and if you’re like me who uses custom fields excessively (particularly with magazine-style Wordpress themes), this is going to cause a lot of pain. Like how can you assign a custom field when the custom field form is inaccessible?

Someone from elsewhere also explained that when one starts creating a new entry, the said script is loading all the META data in all existing post and page ID the Wordpress database and if you have tons of them (just like my two friends who have been blogging for eternities), you have high chances of encountering this problem.

I do believe it’s true because, even in my one and a half year-old blog, all the previous META data would load below the custom field tab each time I create a new entry. But because I only have a few hundreds of entries so far, the loading goes smoothly. I believe it was the reason why one of my friends’ blog was locked by Bluehost – it’s consuming too much server resources. But hell, they could have given my friend a warning when even their team had no idea where the problem is coming from.

I wonder if the loading is multiplied when you’re using the All-in-one SEO pack because for many ways, it registers a lot of META data for each entry.

I do hope that Matt’s team could come up with a better fix because the case got worse with the upgrade to the Wordpress 2.7.