Month: September 2013

[highlight background=”#ff9024″ color=”#ffffff”]Backup files before attempting these steps ![/highlight]

Deactivate All Plugins

Sometimes WordPress plugins can cause this issue specially if there is a conflict between two plugins. To deactivate all your WordPress plugins, connect to your web hosting using an FTP client. Rename /wp-content/plugins/ directory to plugins_backup. This will deactivate all WordPress plugins installed on your website. We also have a detailed tutorial on how to deactivate all WordPress plugins when unable to access WP-Admin. Once you have deactivated all plugins, try to logging in to your WordPress site. If you succeed, then this means that one of your plugins was causing the issue.

Revert Back to the Default Theme

WordPress themes can also cause conflicts after upgrading to a newer version of WordPress or the theme itself. To find out whether the problem is being caused by your theme, you need to deactivate your theme. The process is similar to deactivating the plugins. Connect to your website using an FTP client. Go to /wp-content/themes/ directory and rename your current theme directory to anything. WordPress will look for your current theme and will fall back to the default theme. Once you have done that, then try logging in again. If you succeed, then this means your theme was causing the issue.

If you are already using the default theme as your current theme, then you can still rename it and try to login. If you are able to successfully login then this means that your default theme may have been corrupted. Download a fresh copy of the default theme from WordPress theme repository and upload it to your website.

Clear Cookies to Resolve Login Issues

WordPress uses cookies for login authentication, so the first step in troubleshooting WordPress login issues is the simplest one. Clear your browser cookies and cache. Also make sure that your browser has cookies enabled. After doing that restart your browser and then try to login. This should fix the issue for most folks

Delete .htaccess File(Be Careful !)

Sometimes .htaccess file can get corrupted which can result in internal server errors or login page refreshing error. Simply access your website through FTP. Backup the .htaccess file in your computer and then delete it from your website’s root directory. You may want to delete .htaccess file in wp-admin directory as well if it exist. Try logging in again. If you succeed, then this means that your .htaccess file were stopping you from logging into WordPress. Once you are logged in, simply go to Settings » Permalinks and click Save. This will generate a new .htaccess file.

Update Site URL

In some cases defining the site URL seems to fix the issue. To do this, you need to login to your site using FTP and edit the wp-config.php file. Simply add these two lines of code in your wp-config.php file and don’t forget to replace the example.com with your own URL. Also if your site have www. then make sure you add that.

• define(‘WP_HOME’,’http://example.com’);
• define(‘WP_SITEURL’,’http://example.com’);

Save changes, and hopefully that will fix the login page refreshing issue.

WordPress generally does a good job creating URLs for your pages or posts, but sometimes you’ll need to adjust. Here are the most common instances you’ll want to change URLs.

• Your page or post URL contains special characters like %,+, &, $, @, or *. These characters make it difficult for search engines to read and can be problematic for browsers, potentially preventing some of your pages from loading.
• Your post or page title is really long and contains words not optimized for search. For example, if we write a post called “Bomb Blasts makes the communists to raise over the government” .
• WordPress may automatically generate this URL: “Bomb-Blasts-makes-the-communists-to-raise-over-the-government” Search engines prefer shorter URLs, so it’s worth removing words that won’t help the post’s or page’s ranking. Search engines also prefer that high-ranking keywords appear at the beginning of URLs.
• In the example above, if we want to rank for the phrase “Bulgarian books ” we may want to adjust the URL to read “Books in Bulgaria”.

How to do it ?

•  In the WordPress backend, go to the Edit screen for the post or page you wish to edit.
• Just below the title, click the gray “Edit” button next to the permalink. If instead of “Edit,” you see a button that says “Change Permalinks,” Click that button and click the “Post name” radio button on the “Permalink Settings” page. Then click the blue “Save Changes” button. Go back to the post or page you wish to edit and you should see the “Edit” button.
• When you click “Edit,”, the URL will change to a text box, ready for you to alter. Remove special characters and any words that could hurt your search engine rankings. That means generic words like “a,” “or,” “in” and “the.” As mentioned above, we might change “Bomb-Blasts-makes-the-communists-to-raise-over-the-government” to “government-communists-bomb-blasts”. Make sure you also separate each word with a dash (-).
• Click the gray “OK” button.
• Click the blue “Publish” or “Update” button to save your changes.

CSS3 allows rotating of letters , but we have to do a lot of work to get the job done to get letters along curved paths.Arctext.js is a jQuery plugin that let’s you do exactly that. Based on Lettering.js, it calculates the right rotation of each letter and distributes the letters equally across the imaginary arc of the given radius.

The main idea behind the Arctext.js plugin is to rotate letters with CSS3 transforms in order to place them along a curved path. The curve is always a segment of a circle (hence arc) for which the radius can be specified. The space and rotation for each letter will be calculated using that radius and the width of the text.

Options:

radius : 0,(Minimum value allowed is half of the wordlength)

dir : 1, (1 is curve down , -1 is up)

rotate : true,( if true each letter should be rotated.)

fitText : false ( if you want to try out the fitText plugin (http://fittextjs.com/))

Demo

Using WordPress Keyboard Shortcuts
I’m sure you use Control + C and Control + V to copy and paste all the time. But most people don’t know the WordPress editor also has shortcut keys, and if you’re working in the editor a fair amount, they can save you a lot of time. Here are some of the best shortcuts to try out.

• Bold: Control + B
• Underline: Control + U
• Italic: Control + I
• Heading 1: Control + 1
• Heading 2: Control + 2
• Heading 3: Control + 3
• Heading 4: Control + 4

For a full list of WordPress “Hotkeys,” click the “Help” button with the question mark on the WordPress editor, then click the “Hotkeys” tab.

Remove Formatting from Copied Text

Sometimes we copy text from Microsoft Word and, even though you’re using the “Paste from Word” button (a clipboard with a “W” on it), the text still doesn’t look quite right. It might be the wrong color or size. In any case, a button exists specifically for removing formatting from outside sources. To use it, follow these steps:

• The “Show/Hide Kitchen Sink” button pictures boxes with different-colored squares and rectangles. Click it to show a second row of buttons.
•  Highlight the incorrectly formatted text.
•  Click the “Remove Formatting” button. This button features a white eraser that turns pink when you hover over it. That should do the trick.

Don’t forget spell check.

When you share your posts and pages on Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn, these services pick up a page title and description to go with the link you share.

And when your page turns up as a result in a search engine, the title and description are what people use to decide whether or not to click on your link. Page titles are also an important element for search engines.

That makes the title and description some of the most important text on your page!

To get better control over what appears in these results, use SEO optimization software like Scribe to edit the page title and description.

Remember, descriptions are mainly for readers. Don’t try to cater to Google robots with these — instead, make them enticing, elaborate on the promise made in your headline, and use a strong call to action to encourage clicks.

When restoring a manually created backup, you may come across two possible choices. You can either create a new database and import your backup into it, or you can empty your existing database and import backup. If you are cleaning a hacked WordPress website, then it is very important to change your MySQL username and password before creating a new database or importing into existing database.

To empty your existing database, log in to your cPanel account (Your web host may have some other solution), scroll down to databases section and then click on phpMyAdmin. This will open phpMyAdmin in a new browser tab. Click on your database, and select all tables.

Now if you were creating a new database, then simply log in to your cPanel account. Scroll down to the databases section and then click on MySQL databases.

On the next screen simply provide a name for your new database and hit create database button.Once you have a clean database OR a new database, click on the import tab on the top in phpMyAdmin. This will take you to the import page where you can click on choose file and the select the database backup from your hard disk. . After choosing your back up file, click on the Go button at the bottom of the page. phpMyAdmin will now import your database

First of all we need to understand what WordPress theme is and how it’s files are related to themes.While the most minimal of WordPress Themes really only need an index.php template and a style.css file (or just the style file if it’s a Child Theme) most need something a little more solid.

Most the themes will have like this tree structure.

• inc (folder)
• js (folder)
• languages (folder)
• layouts (folder)
• 404.php
• archive.php
• comments.php
• content.php
• content-aside.php
• content-page.php
• content-single.php
• footer.php
• functions.php
• header.php
• index.php
• no-results.php
• page.php
• search.php
• searchform.php
• sidebar.php
• single.php
• license.txt
• rtl.css
• style.css

Now let’s open up the last file we created, style.css, in a text editor. The first thing we need to do is add a section at the top of this file bracketed by what are called CSS “comments” (/* and */). It’s here that we need to put the info that tells WordPress about your theme. Without it, your theme won’t show up in the themes panel.

I’m using “Simplex” as the theme name here, but feel free to name your theme what you want. And of course, fill in the author name, URLs, and description with your own information.

[css autolinks=”false” classname=”myclass” collapse=”false” firstline=”1″ gutter=”true” highlight=”1-3,6,9″ htmlscript=”false” light=”false” padlinenumbers=”false” smarttabs=”true” tabsize=”4″ toolbar=”true” title=”style.css”]
/*
Theme Name: Simplex
Theme URI: http://cloudspier.com/
Author: CloudSpier
Author URI: http://cloudspier.com/
Description: The Simplex theme is a simple, minimalist theme.
Version: 1.0
License: GNU General Public License
License URI: license.txt
Tags:
*/
[/css]

Theme Name – The name of your theme, obviously!

Theme URL – The URL of your theme’s home on the web. It can be a section of your website. For example, many theme authors will use something like: “http://yourgroovydomain.com/your-theme/”

Author – Self-explanatory. Your name, of course!

Author URI – Link to your website

Description – Provide a brief and clear description of your theme, summarizing its purpose and features in a few sentences. This description will appear in users’ Dashboards when they search for themes, as well as next to the theme’s listing on the WordPress.org Free Themes Directory.

Version – The version number of your theme. It’s up to you to decide how to number your versions, but you can start at 1.0 if it’s brand new. If you ever release updates, you can change the number accordingly.

License – Your theme’s license. If you’re distributing your theme, it’s required to use the GPL license, the license that WordPress uses.

License URI – Provide a link to where users can find the text of the license. We’re including a “license.txt” file with the theme that we’ll fill in in our lesson on Distributing Your WordPress Theme.

Tags – These words describe your theme’s features, colors, and subjects. They are required if you plan to distribute your theme. These tags allow people to filter their searches by color, subject, etc., when searching for themes in the WordPress Free Themes Directory or in their Dashboards. Here’s a list of approved tags.

Something to note: a lot of this is optional. Really, you just need the Theme Name. But if you ever plan on releasing your theme, or if you’re making a custom theme for someone, you’ll want to start out including most, if not all, of the rest.

Well then now your theme is searchable.

We will discuss about modular nature and other php files in the coming tutorials.

BackupBuddy offers a very convenient way to restore WordPress from a backup. If you are using BackupBuddy to backup your website then login to your WordPress website and go to BackupBuddy » Restore/Migrate. Download a copy of importbuddy.php. You will be asked to provide a password for importbuddy. This password will be used when you restore your website.

Download a copy of your backup. You can download it from BackupBuddy » Backups or the destination that you used to store your backups.

Once you have the backup zip file and importbuddy.php stored on your computer, connect to your website using FTP. If you have a complete backup of your website, then delete all files and folders from your server. However, if you have a partial backup then you may want to first download the files that you haven’t backed up. For example, files in your /wp-content/uploads and /wp-content/themes directory. Once you are sure that you have everything backed up, proceed deleting all files and folder from your website’s root directory.

Upload your BackupBuddy backup and importbuddy.php files. Once both files are uploaded to the server, visit importbuddy.php in your web browser. It is in your website’s root directory so its URL will be something like:

http://www.example.com/importbuddy.php

ImportBuddy will now ask for the password that you created when you downloaded ImportBuddy.

On the next screen, ImportBuddy will display the backup file you uploaded. In case you did not upload your backup file using FTP, then you can click on upload tab to upload the backup file now. If you have your backups stored on iTheme’s Stash storage service, then you can connect to it by clicking on stash tab now. Once you have selected your database, click on Next Step to continue.

ImportBuddy will unzip your backup file and show you a success message when it has extracted the files. Click on the next step button to continue. On the next screen, ImportBuddy will ask you to provide site URL and Database information. If you are moving from one domain to another, or a local server site to a live site, then you will need to update the site URL. If you are simply restoring a WordPress site then it will already be set to use your current URL.

If you are restoring a hacked WordPress website or trying to remove malware, then you do not want to use your old database if it already has WordPress installed. You can either drop tables from your old database using phpMyAdmin, or create a new database using cPanel. Once you are done creating a new database or emptying the old one, provide your database details. If you are restoring to your old database then Import Buddy may have already filled these fields for you. Test your database settings and then click on next step to continue.

ImportBuddy will now import your database once it is done, click next step to continue. Now ImportBuddy will update your site URLs paths etc. Once it is done, you will be asked to test your site. If everything is working fine, then you have successfully restored your website. On the importbuddy page click Clean up and remove temporary files button. This will delete temporary data in database and files created during restoration.

UnSlider:

Unslider is very simplistic slider optimized for mobile devices

Pros:
1)Basic Effects
2)Responsive
3)Optimized for Mobile devices

Con’s:
1)Simple not very complex

NivoSlider:

The world’s most awesome jQuery & WordPress Image Slider .Nivo Slider is a great alternative if you want a good WordPress slider .

Pros:
1)Easy to Implement
2)Responsive
3)Nice ,Clean Look

Con’s:
1)Limited Transitions compared to others.

iViewSlider:

iView Slider is a focused more on content delivering mobile devices.It comes with 35 Transitions.

Pros:
1)Design for Mobile Devices(Touch Screen)
2)Responsive Layouts