How to install WordPress, step-by-step, plus a video.

Now that you have WordPress installed, you’ll want to get to know it a little bit. Specifically, you’ll need to find your way around the very extensive – yet easy to use – WordPress control panel. This is the backend of your blog. It’s accessible only to you. If, at some point in the future, [...]

It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. There’s a SNAFU with your web host, and they tell you that your website is no more. It’s gone. Kaput. Like Elvis, it has left the building. And worse, they don’t have a recent back-up of the data. Or worse still … they don’t have ANY back-up copies of the data. Think it can’t happen? It can. And it does. But it doesn’t have to be that big of a problem if you’re prepared for the worst.

We received a thoughtful inquiry from a customer recently who wanted to know how to better understand the manner in which images are managed within our themes. This is naturally too good a topic for just one customer so we thought we would share our complete explanation with everyone. At this time, our most popular [...]

I get a lot of folks who want to add a header graphic to my Simplicity WordPress theme, so I figured it was time to just write a tutorial on it. It’s really pretty simple to do.

We’ve all heard of Spring cleaning sessions. Well, for whatever reason, Solostream customers have created an equivalent phenomena right now — Fall Update/Upgrade/New Plugin season. Perhaps this is being triggered by the soon-to-be-released WordPress 2.7. The rash of activity has triggered an important conversation with our team that we need to share with you. One [...]

PART I: Introduction and Housecleaning It’s no fun when your WordPress site gets hacked. I had a first-hand experience the other day when I was told by my brother that it happened to his site. After being able to successfully get it up and running again, I’d like to now share some helpful information and [...]

PART II: Database Modification and WP Admin If you’re reading this, I can empathize. It’s really a downer when you’ve realized that your database has been compromised, but hopefully we can get things working right again.

PART III: Plugins to Make Your Life Easier Below is a list of plugins that I have used to harden WordPress (and make my life easier). In no particular order, they are: WP Security Scan – Scans your WordPress installation for security vulnerabilities and suggests corrective actions. 1. passwords 2. file permissions 3. database security [...]

There are probably over 1000 free WordPress blog themes/templates out there. Yet, I still get people who write and ask me to help them design their own. And that’s cool. After all, it’s a great way to express one’s creativity. This post marks the first in a series to help you do just that: create your own WordPress blog theme. Before we get into WordPress blog/theme design, however, we need to talk a little bit about WordPress itself.

In part 1 of this series, we talked a little bit about database driven publishing platforms, such as WordPress. The key point of that discussion was that your blog data is separate from your blog design (the look and layout of your site). The data – such as blog posts, blog comments, blog categories, etc. – reside in a database on your web server/web host (you establish your database during the WordPress install process).

My tutorial on adding Flash video to your Worpdress site was pretty popular … this tutorial is designed to make it easy for you to add Quicktime video to your WordPress site.

So you want to create the next Rocketboom (video blog). Or perhaps you have some video you want to add to your WordPress blog or website. This tutorial shows you how to do it with WordPress.