Tag: wordpress

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New WordPress theme might be good for churches

There’s been a flood of new Bootstrap-y sites for churches made over the last couple of years, and I’m sure that’s the kind of thing that some other churches would want and cannot afford.

I’m looking at the new default business-minded WordPress theme — Twenty Seventeen — and it pushes some of the same buttons that those other sites push. Cutting edge design? Hardly? But it might what a church needs to refresh its look, and it has features that should make it easy to manage by non-pros.

For a week or so, I’ll have the default Twenty Seventeen theme up. (I’m not selling plants now.)

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Finding, fixing broken blog links

After blogging for six years — and this is post 2,664 — I have many (600+) broken links and missing images.

I found this plugin, which seems to be quite good at finding the dead-ends. For other WordPressers ready for a little housekeeping.

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Upgrading to WordPress 2.7

What a sharp looking piece of software, with several improvements that I already appreciate. For instance, I am writing this blog post from within the dashboard — no burrowing down a couple of levels to do the one thing that brings me to the admin side of my blog the most. Can zap spam from the same place and review the drafts I’ve left to moulder.

And — this is good news for the less web-handy bloggers out there — this ought to be the last manual upgrade you would have to do. Nice.

Download it here.

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WordPress bloggers: categories or tags

A little word to my fellow bloggers: if you have a new version of WordPress, you’ll see how you have a choice between categories and tags. What’s the difference?

In short, you plan categories; tags are ad hoc. I would think you would have more tags than categories.

Unitarian Universalist Association would be (here) a category; when I blog about General Assembly, I’ll use a tag, perhaps uuaga08 or generalassembly.

Here’s a good article (pre-tag-functionality) about it: Tags and Categories are not the Same!

Oh, and I have work to do: I have 79 categories, which is far to many to manage.

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Now WordPress 2.5, playing with widgets

I’ve upgraded the software behind this blog to WordPress 2.5 and (like everyone else I’ve read who has an opinion) I love it.

Now I just need to figure out how to automate the sections in the sidebar, making them into widgets. Those are modular tools that I can add or remove from a control panel, as opposed to writing them in manually to the template. This will make administration oh-so-much easier and makes WordPress that much more appealing for small site managers.

And in time, I plan to tame the too-long list of categories (which should be for pre-planned structure, like UUA or church administration) by making more use of tags for ad-hoc indexing (like a particular program or interest area).