Archive for the wordpress tag

30+ hours down

< -- Start Rant -->
Ok, so this site has been down for the last 30+ hours. Folks on the rss feed obviously wouldn’t have noticed. The site went down at around 2:00pm yesterday (Monday) after using the Media Temple admin panel’s totally screwed 1-click install “feature”. I tried to install another copy of WordPress into a sub-directory for testing purposes and somehow it made all directories above (the install directory) inaccessible. After trying to correct things through trial and error, with no luck, I contacted MT’s tech support system through the admin panel. After 30 hours of not hearing a peep from tech support (and several additions to the support ticket noting hours passed), I got the bright idea to call them up on the 800#, doh! 5 minutes later and I’m back up and running. Turns out 1-click install created a new ‘www’ directory for qualitypeoples.com and screwed the apache config file. So even after I used 1-click to de-install the copy of wp, it didn’t make things right. Andre at Media Temple single-handedly saved MT’s ass, if it weren’t for him I’d have started the long process of moving my domains and hosting to a new fucking hosting service. I dumped Dreamhost for the same exact crap. Andre was fully apologetic about MT’s tech support lagging and having too many open cases to handle. That alone is gold. His next move was to say that I could have called anytime which, although comforting, made me feel a bit like a shmuck. If you’re a hosting company and it takes you more than 30 hours to respond to a tech support complaint, an apology better be the first words out of your mouth (or the first words on that response email), secondly you better higher more fucking people. And if your stuff is hosted at Media Temple, two things: 1. beware of the 1-click installs. They’re a recipe for 403/404 disaster and 2. fuck the MT admin panel tech support, go straight to the real-talking people, use the phone.

One more bad tech support experience like this and I think I’ll give Tilted a try.
< -- End Rant -->

Wordpress + iPhone

WPhone and iWPhone are two wordpress plugins that reformat the Wordpress admin for easier access for iPhone users (and other smart phones in the case of WPhone). pretty sweet.

Custom Admin Menu for WP

This is a companion piece to WP Admin Branding: Now that you’ve designed your WP admin panel to fit your client’s branding, you want to hide most of WordPress’ admin menu options, so that the client doesn’t muck up the site, have a look at Barun Singh’s Custom Admin Menu for Wordpress. [via All Forces, again]

WP Custom Admin Branding

So you wanna create a blog/news/magazine site for one of your clients with Wordpress as CMS. You wanna brand the WP admin as well (so your client feels at home), but this has been hard in the past. All that’s changed: Josh Byers brings it with a Wordpress Custom Admin Branding plugin. [via All Forces]

Magazine Layouts with WP Revisited

Revolution Theme and Revolution News Theme are two magazine style layout themes for WordPress. Both themes are well designed and coded, the idea is to take the themes and add your own styling and ’sparkle’. A good jumping off point to making your WP site less default WP-like. A word of note: I think his pricing is shortsighted and prohibitively expensive. Que lastima!

WordPress 2.3

WordPress 2.3 is in the wild, I’ve got it up and running. looks nice, can’t wait to play with the new ‘tags’ feature. I’ve been feeling that my ‘daily link’ posts have been rudderless without some kind of sub-categorization within the ‘daily links’ category, so tags will probably be good for that. Also, anyone running the Sideblog plugin, remember to save your config file as you’ll need to upgrade it as well (i learned the hard way!). I’m also noticing some jerkiness with my css file and form elements, so ten cuidado.