Changelog

• new: responsive design
• new: show more/less feed items
• new: show blank thumbnail if no images in feed for photo/videorss.tmpl
• new: show/hide bookmark/feed/searhbar icon options in admin
• new: full width page template
• bugfix: dates not displaying for posts with same dates
• bugfix: remove comma when no relative date
• bugfix: display widget titles for international language

For existing users, please contact me and I will email you the new package. Please include your Paypal email address for verification purpose.

Contact me here

When using the [ gallery ] shortcode, the individual photos are linked to the photo attachment page in the rss feed e.g when your visitors click on the above first photo in Google Reader, they are brought to the thumbnail attachment page (http://ericulous.com/demo/2007/07/19/full-of-images/attachment/01/). Which may be confusing to your visitors if your theme does not have a nicely formatted attachment.php file.

The [ gallery link=file ], which should open the full image directly, also doesn’t work. Not ideal either as I prefer my visitors to view my post rather than simply view all the images from Google Reader. In this case, I would rather they be redirected to the parent post (http://ericulous.com/demo/2007/07/19/full-of-images/).

So I created a new file – attachment.php in my theme directory and insert the following code. If your theme directory already have a attachment.php, you can insert the code in the very first line.

<?php
header( 'location:' . get_permalink( $post->post_parent ) );
?>

Once again, as the new features/changes in 3.3 involves mainly the WordPress Admin backend, I don’t foresee much issue upgrading.

Plugins

All three free plugins (excluding the Feedburner Sitestats plugin) should work fine in WordPress 3.3 without modification.

Themes

All free themes and most of my premium themes should work fine in WordPress 3.3. Remember to backup your theme first before upgrading and report any bugs you found.

You probably heard of the TimThumb Zero Day Vulnerability by now and unfortunately (or fortunately) only 2 of my themes (HackerWP and Celebrity Gossip) uses the TimThumb script for generating thumbnails. The fix is pretty easy.

1. Go to your theme cache directory (e.g /wp-content/themes/hackerwp/cache) and delete all files except index.htm
2. Download the latest version of timthumb.php and replace the file on your server at /wp-content/themes/hackerwp/timthumb.php
3. Optional: If you wish to grab image files from all external sites. Open timthumb.php, look for

$allowedSites = array (
'flickr.com',
'picasa.com',
'img.youtube.com',
);

and replace with

$allowedSites = array (
'*',
);

Since the new features/changes in 3.2 involves mainly the WordPress Admin backend, I don’t foresee much issue upgrading. I’m now running on 3.2.

Plugins

All three plugins (excluding the Feedburner Sitestats plugin) should work fine in WordPress 3.2 without modification.

Themes

All free themes and most of my premium themes should work fine in WordPress 3.2. Remember to backup your theme first before upgrading and report any bugs you found.

Plugins

All three plugins (excluding the Feedburner Sitestats plugin) should work fine in WordPress 3.1 without modification.

Themes

All free themes and most of my premium themes should work fine in WordPress 3.1. Remember to backup your theme first before upgrading and report any bugs you found.

OneNews 3.0 receives a major revamp, in design and functionality. And now requires at least WordPress version 3.0 to work. I have tested it on WordPress 3.1 RC2 so I do not expect any issues when WP3.1 is released.

Main Highlights

• Dropdown Custom Menu
• New tooltip with thumbnail, social media, new indicator, relative date
• Support for Vimeo videos
• Sideblog revamp
• Localization ready

For existing users, please contact me and I will email you the new package. Include your Paypal email address for verification purpose.

Contact me here

I have 3 different installations of WordPress on this domain: one for this blog, one for the demo blog, one for the onenews blog. It can be a pain when it comes to upgrading the WP core and plugins. So I decided to take a jump and activate the multisite mode which was introduced in WP3.0.

Enabling multisite mode turns out to be a relatively easy task with this simple guide. Encountered some hiccups along the way but nothing where a hack won’t do.

The Road Blocks (and getting past them)

Google XML Sitemap plugin not compatible
The stable version 3.2.4 is not compatible with the new multisite feature. This being a must have plugin, I went ahead and installed the 4.0b3 Beta version.

Not given the option of sub-directories, sub-domains installed by default
Turn out that if your site is more than 30 days old, you will not be presented with the sub-directories option. Luckily you can force enable it. Simply follow the How to Force Multi Site to Use Subdirectories guide.

Broken links in main blog
All my posts permalink were modified to point to /blog, so http://ericulous.com/2007/mypost/ becomes http://ericulous.com/blog/2007/mypost/

That would be an SEO disaster! No fear. Go to Super Admin > Sites > Edit > Permalink Structure and remove “/blog”.

Funny characters in posts
As my database tables are of collation latin1, the define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘UTF-8′) was commented out in wp-config.php. Once I switch on multisite mode, suddenly WordPress decided that my tables should be in UTF-8. I have to uncomment that line so that the non-english characters display correctly.

Unable to create new blogs
With the main blog settled, I happily went and created a new sublog. And got “Error establishing a database connection” or “One or more database tables are unavailable. The database may need to be repaired.”. I went into phpmyadmin and noticed no tables were created for the new sublog.

I suspect it was something to do with what I did to define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘UTF-8′). So I comment out that line again and viola.. new sublog added. After finish adding, I have to uncomment it again! I don’t understand the logic behind that but I’m glad it works. Also I don’t see myself adding sublogs frequently so a small inconvenience here. Just have to remind myself to comment/uncomment define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘UTF-8′) in wp-config.php when required.

Theme switcher not working
I have the theme switcher plugin in demo blog but it’s unable to switch themes anymore. Turn out it was being cached by WP-Super-Cache, even though I did not activate the plugin in the sublog. Apparently supercache is enabled across all the sublogs. The simple solution is to add /demo/ to the rejected strings field in supercache.

Have you been to a blog that have hundreds of comments which are separated into many pages? Now made easy with the Paged Comments feature from WordPress v2.7 onwards. It can be a pain sifting through each page looking for something. Now wouldn’t it be nice if there’s an option to show all comments with a click? Do your visitors a favor by adding a “Show All Comments” feature.

Since codes differ from theme to theme, I will be using my Google Chrome theme as an example. It should be fairly easy to apply to other themes.

Open comments.php and replace

<h3 id="comments">Reader's Comments</h3>

With

<h3 id="comments">Reader's Comments</h3>
<?php if ($_GET['showall'] != '1') { ?>
<a href="?showall=1#comments">Show all comments</a>
<?php } ?>

Replace

<?php wp_list_comments(array('callback' => 'custom_comment', 'type' => 'comment')); ?>

With

<?php if ($_GET['showall'] == '1') { ?>
<?php wp_list_comments(array('callback' => 'custom_comment', 'type' => 'comment', 'per_page' => '0', 'page' => '0')); ?>
<?php } else { ?>
<?php wp_list_comments(array('callback' => 'custom_comment', 'type' => 'comment')); ?>
<?php } ?>

Replace

<div class="alignleft"><?php previous_comments_link() ?></div>
<div class="alignright"><?php next_comments_link('Newer Comments &raquo;') ?></div>

With

<?php if ($_GET['showall'] != '1') { ?>
<div class="alignleft"><?php previous_comments_link() ?></div>
<div class="alignright"><?php next_comments_link('Newer Comments &raquo;') ?></div>
<?php } ?>

A mini upgrade for most of my free/premium themes to support the Custom Menu feature in WordPress 3.0.

Themes Updated

Artificial Intelligence
CelebrityGossip
EcoNature
Food Recipe
GenkiTheme Fixed
Grey Blog
Internet Center
Internet Music
Internet Sharing
Orange Web 2.0
Red Business
Scrapbook
Softwareholic
Technoholic
Woogle

Themes NOT Updated

Fashionista – Please use the built-in Custom Menu Widget
Small Studio – Please use the built-in Custom Menu Widget
GenkiTheme – Custom coding for left sliding menu cannot be replicated with the new WP3.0 wp_nav_menu function
Google Chrome – Custom coding for top menu cannot be replicated with the new WP3.0 wp_nav_menu function

Been playing around with WordPress v3.0-release-candidate-1, in both single and multiple site mode. And happy to report that my themes and plugins are working fine. Should not be a problem when the official v3.0 is released.

Plugins

All three plugins (excluding the Feedburner Sitestats plugin) should work fine in WordPress 3.0 without modification.

Themes

All free themes and most of my premium themes should work fine in WordPress 3.0. Remember to backup your theme first before upgrading and report any bugs you found.

Been playing around with WordPress v2.9-beta-2 and happy to report that my themes and plugins are working fine. Should not be a problem when the official v2.9 is released.

Plugins

All four plugins should work fine in WordPress 2.9 without modification.

Themes

All free themes and most premium themes should work fine in WordPress 2.9. Remember to backup your theme first before upgrading and report any bugs you found.

Plugins

All four plugins should work fine in WordPress 2.8 without modification.

Themes

All themes should work fine in WordPress 2.8. Remember to backup your theme first before upgrading and report any bugs you found.

Themes inspired and created by WordPress theme authors, based on their favorite desktop applications and websites. Comment away if you know any look-alike themes that’s not in the list.

Free WP Themes Clone

Apple.com vs iBlog

CNN vs WNN

Coda vs WP CODA

Digg vs Digg-like

Digg vs Max Magazine

Facebook vs CryBook

Facebook vs Facebook WordPress

Gmail vs Gmail WordPress

Google Chrome vs Google Chrome WP

Google Search Engine vs Woogle

Mac OS X vs Leopard Mac

Mac OS X vs Tigerpress

Mac OS X vs iTheme

Mac OS vs Retro MscOS

Msn Messenger vs Msnlog

Tumblr vs Tumblelog

Twitter vs Fresh Tweet

Win Vista vs Themedvista

Win Aero vs Aerodrome

WP Dashboard vs WP DashboardLike

Gawker Lifehacker vs HackerWP

Premium WP Themes Clone

Alltop/Popurls vs OneNews

Apple.com vs iBlogPro

BBC vs TheBeeb

CNN vs The Gazette Edition

GameSpot vs GameMaker

Kineda vs Celebrity Gossip

New York Times vs New Yorker

Win Aero vs Aeros

WordPress.org vs Shade Pro

[29 May 2009] Turned out I have been Aril Fooled. WordPress 2.8 should be released real soon (31st May according to the WordPress Trac). Added 2 more new functions: comments_open and pings_open.

With the release date for WordPress v2.8 scheduled on 1st April, I believe the theme codes are more or less stable. Not much changes between v2.7 and v2.8, thankfully. The current themes should work just fine without any modifications on v2.8. Basically 4 new functions were introduced: body_class(), automatic_feed_links(), comments_open(), pings_open().

bodyclass()
Found in header.php
<body <?php body_class(); ?>>
Display css classes for the body element.

automatic_feed_links()
Found in functions.php
automatic_feed_links();
This will automatically generate all the relevant feed links. You may need to remove current hard-coded feed links in header.php e.g

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> Atom Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>" />

comments_open()
Found in single.php and comments.php
if ( comments_open() )
Checks whether the current post is open for comments

pings_open()
Found in single.php
if ( pings_open() )
Checks whether the current post is open for pings

Using another Greasemonkey compiler, the Show Missing Images Firefox Addon is finally compatible with Firefox 3.0 and above.

This FF Addon will display missing images regardless of ALT tags and upon mouseover, display the original image’s source url.

After coming up with the popular Google Chrome WordPress theme, Kris commented that I should do up a Google Search Engine(GSE) WordPress clone. To be honest, at that time I didn’t think it was a great idea for a blog to look like GSE. It reminds me of those Made-For-Adsense(MFA) and domain parking sites, which always result in me clicking the back button.

Then, as April Fool’s Day is approaching, I was wondering what might make a fun theme for the occasion and bingo.. the Woogle theme! On the 1st of April, switch to this theme and proudly claim that your site has been acquired and integrated into GSE. This theme should be ready by April Fool’s day. No joke!

Been sometime since my last theme. Here’s one with your blog served up cafe-menu style. Main inspiration from a CSS styled Restaurant Menu. Hopefully the final product will turn out looking delicious.

Plugins

All four plugins should work fine in WordPress 2.7 without modification, baring any last minute changes in WP v2.7, which is highly unlikely.

Themes

I have updated all themes to work on WordPress 2.7 and should be backward compatible with v2.5. The most visible feature would have to be the threaded and paged comments. Of course you need to be running on WP v2.7 to use them. View the individual theme’s changelog to see the changes in the latest version.

Remember to backup your theme first before upgrading and report any bugs you found.

For existing premium theme owners, I will be sending out the emails with download links when WordPress v2.7 is officially released.