Warning: Use of undefined constant ddsg_language - assumed 'ddsg_language' (this will throw an Error in a future version of PHP) in /usr/home/mcbuzzmedia/public_html/wp/wp-content/plugins/sitemap-generator/sitemap-generator.php on line 45
More WordPress Help and Discussion - Comments Are Closed | WordPress Websites, WordPress Help | McBuzz Communications

More WordPress Help and Discussion – Comments Are Closed

Jul 26, 2011

Comments on This Page Are Closed.

This page was formerly called “Even More Free WordPress Help”, but you can no longer ask questions here.

Here are my suggestions for WordPress resources: WordPress.org support (WordPress support for self-hosted sites), WordPress.com support (WordPress support for sites hosted on WordPress.com), WordPress Answers, the Seattle WordPress Meetup discussion board, and Bob Dunn’s WP Chatter on Google+.

 Got a question about Search Engine Optimization? Check out this slide presentation on Search Engine Optimization Success with WordPress. You can post SEO questions in the comments on that page, and we will answer for FREE! (Please note that McBuzz Communications, McBuzz.com and Mark McLaren are not affiliated with Automattic, WordPress.com or the WordPress.org website.)

You can also look for Answers to WordPress Questions that have already been answered on these help pages:
Free WordPress Help
WordPress Q&A: More Answers to WordPress Questions
Questions About WordPress? Ask Them Here!
More WordPress Questions? Ask Them Here!

I have added a new search feature to the www.McBuzz.com site (at the top of the page up there on the right). If you are looking for something specific, try putting it in quotes, like “style.css file” or “submit xml sitemap”. You can also put only part of your search term in quotes, like theme “navigation menu”. This search feature does a much better job of searching through comments, where there are lots of questions and answers about WordPress, SEO, Online Marketing and such.

Comments: 137

137 comments

hi, so i’m setting up my first website with wordpress and in the process i made some plugins and i have a problem with one of them here’s what i did:
i made a plug in that collect and store data into the database.

i made a page to display those stored data under the dashboard with the add_dashboard_page function and lets call it page1.

now inside page1 i have some dynamically created links that point to a second page lets call it page2.

my question is : how to program that link to point to page2 and when i click it it display page2 in the admin screen like it did with page1 but without having a sub_level_menu that shows in the sidebar?

NOTE: page2 acceptes data by the GET methode from page1.

@tyoli – Congrats on building your first site! Also congrats :) on going beyond my (relatively limited) understanding of development on the WordPress backend. I have never made a plugin, though it’s on my list of things to do! I recommend that you head over to a site for WordPress experts called WPMU.org. Their WordPress Q&A is a good place to start.

thanx, will do.

I tried to insert a compressed image as I’ve done countless times before. However when I click on insert image, nothing happens. Any ideas?

I went with Word Press from the start because I heard it was the best. But I no nothing about coding. Do you happen to know if Blogger is more user friendly for non-coding competent baby boomers such as myself? If so, do you know if my last 2 years can be imported over? I’ve looked online but can’t find much information on it.

I need to be able to put big banner ads on my site. However, when I had my site redesigned last year the designer picked a theme that only allows 125×125. I didn’t know that at the time. I trusted him to know what was best and apparently he didn’t.

Any info you could provide would be greatly appreciated. I’m about to start running with scissors in traffic,

Hello, I ran across your site in Google today trying to find an answer to a WordPress issue and was hoping to throw a question out at you. I changed the site wide “link” decorations in this theme as you could not even tell they were links before and now all of the items in my navigation bar are underlined and I cannot figure out how to remove it from the nav bar items, but keep my sites links underlined.

Any suggestions?

Thanks a bunch!

@JimK – In the dashboard, you can use Appearance > Editor to edit your theme’s style.css file. Before making any changes, go to the style.css file and be sure to Select All, then Copy and Paste the whole thing into a text editor (Notepad on the PC or TextEdit on the Mac, for example). Then save the file on your computer so you can put it back if anything goes wrong (copying and pasting back into the Appearance > Editor > style.css.

To fix your problem, find the following in style.css – somewhere around line 46.

.topnav li a {
-moz-border-radius: 7px 7px 7px 7px;
background: url(“images/linav.gif”) repeat-x scroll 0 0 transparent;
color: #E7E5E5;
display: block;
float: left;
font: bold 13px Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
padding: 10px;
}

Add a line that says “text-decoration: none;” (without the quotes) as shown below.

.topnav li a {
-moz-border-radius: 7px 7px 7px 7px;
background: url(“images/linav.gif”) repeat-x scroll 0 0 transparent;
color: #E7E5E5;
display: block;
float: left;
font: bold 13px Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;
padding: 10px;
text-decoration: none;
}

Be sure to save the changes.

That should remove the underline from your top nav links.

OMG, thank you so much! I was trying to figure that one out for a good hour and half today!! This site is FREE? I don’t think I would have gotten an answer quicker on a paid site:-) Sometimes the simplest things in this business can take forever to figure out or find your answer.

Thanks again so much and I love your site, nice clean and sharp design!

JimK

@JimK – Thanks, Jim. Your question was pretty straight-forward. That helps a lot. I completely agree that it can be hard to find answers to WordPress questions, which is why I started doing this.

I’d like to figure out a way to create a more comprehensive resource for answers to WordPress questions, putting all the answers in one place – or organizing them better – and making them easier to find. Google’s not always great for this. Neither are the forums at http://wordpress.org and http://wordpress.com

@Michele – Porting all that information to Blogger seems counter productive. You will also have to deal with the domain name issues related to moving from a self-hosted site to blogger.com – not to mention the fact that (as far as I know) you stand to lose a lot of your information (like tags and, maybe, comments). I would look carefully at what the move entails. It’s not going to be pretty imo.

Your site looks very good. Why not find a tutor or someone else who can help with the things that are giving you trouble?

As for inserting an image, it’s hard to say since I can’t see what’s happening. If you were to find a tutor that could use Skype or another screen sharing app, you could connect remotely and they would be able to walk through things with you in a few minutes so you could get on with your work.

Thanks for your insight and the compliment ,Mark. You confirmed what I’d suspected. Trying to move from WP to Blogger would probably be a huge hassle. I just hate being dependent on others when I get into a problem. I feel helpless. And almost all the bloggers I know use Blogger; so I have no friends to turn to.

The problem with inserting a photo mysteriously cleared on its own thank goodness. I do have a couple more questions if you don’t mind.

1. Do you know if you can change from Comment Luv to Disqus without losing all your old comments?
2.Could you recommend any ad friendly WP themes?

Message: Hi Mark,

Followed your tutorial on YouTube but want to have the Home tab on the left and the blog tab next to it on the right. How do I switch them around please?

regards

Graham

@Graham – Check out this custom menu tutorial. If your theme doesn’t support custom menus, I encourage you to switch to one that does. It will make your WordPress life much easier.

@Michele – I have used Disqus on a few sites, but I decided after that to stick with the standard WordPress comments because Disqus did not seem to be working well for search engine optimization. WordPress comments are indexed just like the rest of the text on a page. Disqus comments, at least when I used them, were not indexed as part of the page. In general, though, I’m not a great one to ask about comments since I have not used anything other than Disqus and WordPress.

For themes, I like
http://woothemes.com/
http://studiopress.com/
http://themeforest.net/
Colleagues of mine in the Seattle WordPress Meetup, Bob Dunn and Sheila Hoffman, love the Headway theme framework. I think all of these have themes made for ads.

Thanks for the info kiddo. You’re a virtual cornucopia of information. I really do appreciate it.

Hi, I have watched your videos on youtube and are very useful. Is that possible for you to create a instruction video that shows how to convert html base website to wordpress and also would be really good if you add to it how to use 301 to the links of html website.
Thanks again.

Hi My problem is that when I type in my url example.com I only get a very small part of my page but when I click “view page” from my edit munue tab it takes me to example.com/?p=1 which has the whole page. How can I change it so that people see the whole page when the go to my site?

@Fredd – It looks like you fixed the problem. I don’t see it.

I set up my first site through wordpress as I was told it is good for seo and etc.

My issue is I have 3 old posts on my page from Sept. 10th it only shows the tags and dates of them but it looks bad. How can I fix this. I have tried everything to take them off.

Thank u

@Dylan Ace – It looks like you don’t have this problem any more. Did you figure out how to fix it? I checked out your site. Nice! Looks like you are quite an entertainer! Sweet pics of you with Sinbad. That is awesome.

Here’s an SEO tip for you. When you enter your URL anywhere, you don’t need to include “www.” as in “www.dylanace.wordpress.com” – You should use only http://dylanace.wordpress.com

But here’s an even better tip. Register your own domain name on WordPress.com and start using that right away. Let me know if you need help.

I have been watching your videos, and they have been extremely informative and helpful! However, there is one thing that I am having extreme difficulty with and I was hoping that I could get some assistance from you.

I have recently started a small video game blogging site that I would like to use to highlight gamers in the community and some of the icons in the industry. The visual method that I would like to use is something similar to this layout: http://www.empireonline.com/features/50-greatest-video-game-characters/default.asp?film=45. What really catches my interest is how the image is shown behind the cinema border style.

If you could point me in the right direction, I would be deeply grateful and appreciative for it! Thank you for whatever you could help me with!

@Jesse Valentino – This is an advanced web design technique. I agree it looks very cool! The designer has done two things: One is to add the “film strip” effect to the sides of the image above the text. The other is to add a background image behind the text that duplicates the film strip effect along the sides of the area where the text appears.

You can see my tutorial about how to put text on top of an image. But the main thing you will need is to see how the page is divided into different parts and how each of those parts is put together in a seamless way so that it looks like just one piece of film strip. That’s too difficult for me to walk through here.

I do recommend that you check out http://getfirebug.com and install the Firebug add-on for Firefox. The HTML window of Firebug will show you the parts of the page you are hoping to replicate. You can copy the HTML code and see if you can recreate the same effect on your own page.

I hired someone to create my site and now they have “moved on” without advising me how to do updates on the (Testimonials)slider plug-in. I found the plug in but not where the actual testimonial text is located and cannot add any more testimon ials.
I cannot find the Header – so cannot make changes – I wanted to add a tagline.
I previously used Yahoo Site Builder and did everything myself – wondering if I should go back to that.

@Joan Bell – Your site looks great. I would recommend that you stick with WordPress. The two things you mention are very minor – certainly not the kind of roadblock that would warrant going back to Site Builder. Contact me via the Contact form and I can refer you to someone to help you find your testimonials and modify your header.

Since your web designer left you without telling you how to update your testimonials, they may not have told you other basic (and critically important) things like how to backup your site.

Whether you manage your own site or someone else is responsible for it, you need to know how to backup your site files on the server and how to backup your database. My colleague Bob Dunn swears by BackupBuddy. You can also figure out how to do WordPress backups yourself.

The header file is called header.php and you can change it using Appearance > Editor. However, be sure to make a backup of header.php before making changes. Adding a tagline should be done by putting text over the banner background image or by adding text to the image (with an image editor like Photoshop). Those are both fairly advanced techniques. I’m not sure what level of web dev skills you possess.

To find the testimonials, I think you probably need to poke around in the theme. It’s possible they are in a text file somewhere. It’s hard to know without access to the dashboard and the theme files.

Switching to WordPress can be a bit difficult at first. Stick with it. You will be glad you did!

There are some great resources for WordPress. Take a look at http://www.wp101.com/ and http://www.bobwp.com/ Shawn Hesketh and Bob Dunn both do awesome work. Bob’s community site would be one way to lessen the pain of your initial ramp up as you look for things like your missing testimonials input box. Let me know if you need more resources.

Thank you so much Mark for the quick response and advice. I will look into the suggestions you offered. This is a great learning curve and I am sure I will be able to learn what I need to stay with WordPress now that I have these resources.

Thanks again, Joan

Best of luck to you! I need to put together a more comprehensive resources page. In the meantime, here’s one good place to look: http://wordpress.tv/ Use the search feature at the top of the page to find specific topics. There are some good presentations, especially from WordCamps.

Thanks Mark, you’re a star!

Joan

Marie Stuckey

Sep 26, 2011

11:35 AM

I am new to blogging, but have a background in marketing and writing. I’ve watched several of your WordPress videos. They are very helpful. My goal ultimately is to profit from my blog, which I will very much enjoy working hard at. I envision needing some flexibility in my blog functionality and design. Since I am not technically proficient with the back end of blogging, access to support would probably also be helpful. My questions are: For my first blog should I invest in WP.org vs. WP.com, and how do I go about choosing and understanding which theme (also premium vice free) will really work for me and not cause trouble later? I am not against investing some money into this, but just want to start off the smartest way possible for a smooth road ahead. Any suggestions on the best way to get past this and get my project moving? Also, is WordPress really the best choice or is there a simpler blog site that will allow me to be just as successful? Thanks so much. ~ Marie

@Marie Stuckey – These are important questions. WordPress is not the only solution available. But at the moment it’s the best. Granted, one reason I recommend WordPress is that I know it better than anything else.* There are many, many more WordPress users out there like me, as well as a huge number of WordPress developers and designers. All of us are passionate about WordPress and we like to share what we know, So if you or I have a question about WordPress, there are thousands of resources to turn to.

If you want to get a site up and running quickly, WordPress is a great way to do it. You can create a site on http://wordpress.com in about 15 minutes. That’s a good place to start. It’s free and easy. See the tutorials at http://wp101.com and you are on your way.

The most important question you need to answer is whether to use WordPress.com or WordPress.org. And WordPress.com makes it easy to postpone that question by registering or using your own already-registered domain name. When you are serious about using your site for the foreseeable future, you need to use your own domain name. This is the one essential bit of advice I give anyone who is starting a blog or website with WordPress. Use your own domain.

There are a number of things you cannot do on WordPress.com that you can do on WordPress.org. (When I say “WordPress.org”, I mean a self-hosted WordPress site.) But as long as you use your own domain name on .com, the transition will be relatively painless when and if you decide to switch your site to over .org. (More about .com vs. .org here.)

If you do start a site on .com, and you think you know the domain you would register to do so, I’d also suggest that you use the same name as a username on the WordPress.com site. For example, you could use mariestuckey as your WordPress.com username, so your wordpress.com domain will be mariestuckey.wordpress.com and the domain you register for your long-term site should be mariestuckey.com

Starting with .com also makes it easy to try hundreds of themes to see how they work – without having to worry about hosting. That way, when you go looking at premium themes and free themes that aren’t available on WordPress.com, you will know what you like and don’t like.

*I have used Blogger.com, Dreamweaver, Microsoft FrontPage, Yahoo Site Builder, custom .NET content management systems and Drupal. And I have built and worked with dozens of hand-coded HTML websites, and sites built with Adobe (used to be Macromedia) Flash.

Why does an edited post that I updated not show up revised on either Mozilla or Explorer?

Hello I have added a logo to my site however it has turned out massive, it is set at 220 x 185 pixels, I have tried decreasing that but obviously it doesn’t help as the size has nothing to do with pixels, so I just wanted to know if theres anything I can do to make the logo smaller, thank you. :)

@Manj – Looks like you solved your problem. Did you figure it out?

Dashboard foot line, which reads, “Thank you for creating with WordPress. • Documentation • Freedoms • Feedback • Credits “, messes up theme options MORE IMPORTENTLY , the instillation of a commission junction plugin called, “ CJNIche”. I really want this cool plugin, however the foot line words overlap the “save settings” button and I can’t get it to work. Is there anyway to remove this dashboard foot line. Do you know anyone who has a video on how to do this. I would pay money to find out.

Hi Mark, I am a wordpress novice that needs help! I have a blog attached to my website (besealed.ca/blog). I can’t seem to eliminate large spaces between text and pix from showing up when previewed and published. Also I tried the gallery approach to adding photos that you suggested in a tutorial but WP would not let me make 2 galleries so I could have text in between. Do you mind having a look at the two most recent posts on my blog and point me in the right direction? Just cant seem to get it!
thank you,
Victoria

@Victoria – I can’t see any large spaces. Things look fine. What web browser are you on? PC or Mac? Send me some URLs of pages that look bad. Or send some screen shots. Check out the tutorials at http://wp101.com (McBuzz is not an affiliate. These are tutorials are worth the cost.) Also check out WP FancyZoom WordPress Plugin. And here’s a better gallery plugin for WordPress. The one that comes with WordPress is pretty basic.

GERALD PARKIN

Oct 13, 2011

3:11 AM

i have a number of post on my blog working well. To my knowledge i have not altered any settings,but on visiting site the other day all my post were not showing on my blog When i go to edit each post they are all in their original format so i refresh , updated, even redone and published some, but when going to view them nothing appears on site.

GERALD PARKIN

Oct 13, 2011

3:18 AM

On my blog header to the bottom the categories of the post keep appearing i have tried to delete these with no success as i do not want them to show please any help appreciated
– regards g. parkin

@GERALD PARKIN – This is confusing. I’d suggest using Tools > Export to create an xml export file. Make a new test installation of WordPress in a subdirectory of your site. Then use Tools > Import to import the xml file into the test installation and try a few different themes, including Twenty Eleven, to see if your posts show up. Start by leaving all your current plugins inactive. You have a lot going on in terms of ads and promotions. It’s hard to tell where the content for those posts really is. Try using a Latest Posts menu in your sidebar to see if links to full pages show up there.

For some reason im not able to add images to my new products anymore. One minute it was fine then next i cant. the box across from it now has ‘By h3ercule-32 TN-Hax0r Fr0m Metouia’ but i never put it there and now im stuck.

can you help please

Mark!!!!!
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!! I just get finished making a beautiful page and all of a sudden I get a bunch of words with double green underlines, “Text enhancers”, throughout my beautiful page. Did I get a virus? How do I get rid of them? How do I find out who did it so I can send an Ebomb. Help me out Mark.

@Tim – If you did not enable that feature, you are facing some serious spam. Are you sure you did not install that yourself? First, go to your plugins page and deactivate each plugin, one at a time, to see if the links disappear. Check after each plugin you deactivate. Obviously, if there is a plugin that’s adding text enhancers without your consent, you need to get rid of that plugin.

If that’s not it. Try switching themes. Your theme might be doing it, or you theme may have been hacked.

Let me know what you find out. And please do so on a single page of my site.

My question is probably very elementary but here goes.
I want to have my Pages listed along with my Posts in the Category List but for some reason they are not showing up.
I tried to put this list in a widget but the only ones that show up are the first 2 I set up originally. All the others, for some reason, do not add to the list.
Do you have a tutorial on this issue? Or know where I can go to find the answer?

Sorry for the bother but I am going crazy and wasting a lot of time on this silly issue.

thanks,
ken (a.k.a. oldest son)

I just recently got this error Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 9 bytes) in /data/19/2/58/133/2547296/user/2791707/htdocs/blog1/wp-includes/pomo/streams.php on line 86 and i can no longer log into my word press account. The last change i made was that i tried to add a plug in for having google ad sense on my website, and soon after i haven’t been able to properly go to my website. Here and there it will let me log in or use one of the links i have saved to go to one of the pages on my site. Most of the time though i can’t log in to word press backend of the site or go to the temporary domain. I’m looking for any kind of support or a way to go back to before i added the adsense plug in because im assuming that it is the cause of my problem

@Chris Francois – Using FTP, delete the plugin files for the AdSense plugin. You can find a folder containing those files in the wp-content > plugins folder for your site. If you don’t know how to use FTP software, contact your web hosting provider. Normally, you can use their control panel for FTP.

@Ken – See the Menus tutorial on WordPress 101 http://wp101.com Make sure your theme supports custom menus by looking in the dashboard under Appearance > Menus.

Mark, I have viewed your excellent video on how to upload and link PDF, Word and etc. files into WordPress. No problem with PDF files and I have no problem uploading and attaching Word files, however when I click their links in WordPress the file is copied to my hard drive in downloads. My desire is for them to come up on a separate screen (like the PDF files). I can’t find anything in the forums and like your video they all suggest that what I’ve done should get my desired result. Any thought or direction you can send me will be more than appreciated.

@Dan – This is not something you control. It’s determined by the user’s browser. Most web browsers open PDFs in the same or a new browser window by default using integrated support for the PDF file format (usually using Acrobat Reader), but browsers aren’t capable of opening Word docs. Word docs and Excel files can be opened with Google Docs, for example. If you use Gmail and you receive a Word doc as an email attachment, Gmail gives you the option to download it or to view it in your web browser using Google Docs. But that’s not something you can control from a web page where you offer a user a download link.

You could search for a plugin of some kind that would give visitors the option to open a file in Google Docs by clicking a link, but they would need to be logged into Gmail or something like that. That’s beyond my capabilities and understanding, though. So I can’t be of much more help.

Thank you Mark. I will continue to search for a plugin workaround. If I find it I’ll post that finding here.

Williow Livingston

Oct 28, 2011

12:16 AM

Hi Mr mcbuzz
I recently registered a website and got a wordpress blog about that website, I’m new to this Could you please please tell me how do I connect my wordpress blog to my website. Thank you!

@Willow Livingston – If your site is new, I recommend you build the whole thing with WordPress. You don’t need to attach a WordPress blog to a separate website. If you have an existing site that is not built with WordPress, you can install WordPress in a subdirectory, like http://www.example.com/blog/ But it sounds like you can build the whole site with WordPress. See if your web host has a tutorial on how to install WordPress. Here’s a WordPress install tutorial I did for Bluehost. Google “install wordpress bluehost” and you will find that Bluehost has its own tutorials. Other hosts are similar. What host are you using?

And check out WordPress 101 tutorials by Shawn Hesketh.

Hello! I’m having problems with our online store on http://www.thistlycrosscider.co.uk. We are getting the Payment Confirmation emails from Paypal but only sometimes get the Purchase Receipts from WordPress indicating what the customer has ordered and their details. Please can you help?! Many thanks

@julia – That will depend on your WordPress theme (which looks great, by the way). Who built your theme? Have you checked with them?

Hi
I have a different site called freegooglesketchuptutorials.com which for some reason has recently jumped from around 300 hits per month to around 2000 hits per month. I’m not sure why it has jumped like this but the other thing that has been happening lately is that I have been getting thousands of comments posted. nearly all of these comments are non specific and all have links to other web sites which makes me think they are sent out on mass. I have accepted about 200 of them and am not sure if I should continue accepting them. I don’t know if they are good for my site or bad as they cam at the same time as the extra traffic.

@Fredd – General comments are very likely spam. Look at the URLs they use. They are bad for your site.

Hi Mark

Thanks for your reply

I have looked at the urls and they are not related to my site.
I was just worried that if I remove them the increase in traffic might stop.
Or do you think that the increase in traffic is un related to the number of comments that I am getting?

Fred Wright

@Fredd – The increase in traffic is one reason you are getting those comments. But spam comments are not good for your site. Spammers (in general, “spammers” means automated software used by people who want to fill your site with links to their web properties) look for sites that already have spam comments on them. So if you leave those comments on your site, you will get lots more.

Thanks for the tip Mark.
I will remove them from my site.

The back-end of my website has been suspended. I can still find the front end of the web site with all the affiliate links in tact. When I attempt to login I’m told “site suspended”. I do not know what I did to get suspended. Can you assist.

Hey Mark,
I hope this message finds you in good health. Early on when I first started to work in WordPress, I remember having the ability to enhance the text in a page or post, visible mode. Now, it seems to be gone, very limiting. Whether I am in html mode or visible mode, I can’t size the text, or color it. I am wondering if I clicked a wrong button somewhere and turned that feature off. Any insight would be appreciated.
Thanks
Tim

@Tim – Resizing text is not possible with the standard Visual editing tools, unless you use the Format dropdown menu. Default there is Paragraph but you can select Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, blockquote, etc. You can ad color to text with the color selector dropdown. If you don’t see these, click the kitchen sink button (scroll down this page to see the kitchen sink button).

Under Users > Your Profile > Personal Options > Visual Editor there is a check box for “Disable the visual editor when writing”. Make sure that is not unchecked.

There are plugins that enhance the Visual editor like ckeditor for WordPress. Worth checking out.

Your site is amazing and very helpful.

I could use some help building my WP site. I recently left Rapidweaver (Mac Program) cause of the lack options with blogging.

I have two main things I want to set up on my site.

E-Commerce and Blogging

Right now I am only concentrating on Blogging.

I am using ifeatures theme and have it setup but still working on the style.

I want to know what plugins i need and how to configure my blog so that when i post something, it goes directly to a mailing list of subscribers.

I am developing a site for a small publishing company that is mine also, to promote spiritual development and awareness.

Please can you help or direct me on what steps to take.

Much appreciated and look forward to hearing from you.

A video demo never hurts

Cheers
Jazz

@Jazz – For a mailing list, I recommend FeedBurner. I’m not able to find any great video tutorials. Here’s one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PE9A7w5bF3A You can skip to minute 3. It’s slow going. Here’s another. Then try the Feedsmith plugin for WordPress, but first check to see if your theme allows you to input the FeedBurner URL directly using the dashboard. Here are a couple more videos about adding FeedBurner feeds. http://www.bobwp.com/using-and-setting-up-your-rss-with-google-feedburner/ http://www.bobwp.com/how-create-custom-rss-email-signup-widget/

Hi Mark

Someone also mentioned to try Subcriber2 plugin. What is your professional take on it. Advantage and disadvantages vs feed burner?

Thanks

Jazz

@Jazz – I’m not familiar with the Subscribe2 plugin. But the reviews look pretty good. Worth a look. FeedBurner can be confusing. Still, I think FeedBurner is the standard and it’s owned by Google, although, in my opinion, support for FeedBurner is very weak.

I recently modified a theme and switched domain names, everything works except I have one place where the images aren’t showing and are attaching this to the beginning of the image url: home/username_here/public_html/

Do you have any idea where I’d go about changing this?

im baffled… if you type in the url of the website i designed you get this unknown page come up instead of the HOME page… how do i fix this and have the intended homepage the first thing people see.
please someone help.. i’m new to wordpress but my clients wanted their site designed in this.

I have a question about posts versus pages. When it come to SEO, is one better over the other? I know posts can be searched, but pages can list the title in the URL. I would like to know your thoughts

Hi Mark, Am I being Spammed?
I have been receiving many positive comments on my blogs. But, I am suspicious that the comments are “canned”, because I never come across a negative remark and I am wondering if anyone really reads the blogs. Some post a website with their comments but most come from Google, Yahoo, and Bing. They come from all over the world. Do you have some insight on this , I feel I am about to learn something.
Notice the comments below and feel free to look at the blog comments on my site.
Chyna
bing.com/
engr_civil@usask.ca
109.230.216.60
Submitted on 2011/11/26 at 10:53 pm
This piece was a lifejaekct that saved me from drowning. Attack of the Teachers
10#

Rocky
yahoo.com/
barbara.gimenez@bbcr.com.br
109.230.216.60
Submitted on 2011/11/26 at 10:35 pm | In reply to iphone 5 leaked.
Wham bam thank you, ma’am, my qeustinos are answered!
Unapprove | Reply | Quick Edit | Edit | Spam | Trash

Reggie
yahoo.com/
tickets@fesztivalvaros.hu
109.230.216.60
Notice the IP address is the same but the email is different…. Is that possible? Are these real comments or am I being Spammed?
Thanks
Tim

@Tim – That’s spam. Normally these come with a URL to a product or service page of some kind. It’s a cheap SEO tactic. You can see just how bogus the comments are by putting a piece of one in quotes and searching on Google. You get 36 results for “This piece was a lifejacket…” I would delete any comment that you find like that, basically anything that makes no real statement about your post or your website.

Hi Mark i am glad that i found your website, My name is Zan, and would like to ask you a question, i am trying to build website for 6pages and 1 page has all the offer of the product. is there a way that i could only set this 1 page as a word press page and the other page build by Dreamweaver & uploaded via Filezilla. So i can update offer product as when require through wordpress.

@Zan – You can install WordPress in a subdirectory called “products” (or whatever you want to call it) and put your Dreamweaver pages in the top-level/root directory. See the Bluehost install tutorial here. Most hosts that offer WordPress make this easy to do. In the long run, I think you are better off using WordPress to build the whole site. You’ll need to figure out how to make Dreamweaver pages and the Products page look the same by customizing the WordPress theme. As long as you are going to do that, you might as well customize the theme in WordPress and use it for the other pages. It’s worth the effort. (But I understand your desire to get something up quickly when you know how to use Dreamweaver.)

As an intermediate step, do a Google search for “wordpress custom page template tutorial” and you can figure out how to convert your Dreamweaver pages into custom page templates in WordPress: http://www.expand2web.com/blog/custom-page-template-wordpress/
http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-themes/how-to-create-a-custom-page-in-wordpress/ (This page opens with an advertisement. Just ignore it and click the X to close the popup.)

Hi

I am new to wordpress and I usually use drupal for building websites. I have come across something that I want to implement but don’t know how to do it.

What I am after doing is adding a captcha challenge to the publish “widget” in the “add new post” section of the admin dashboard. This is because I have made it so that people can sign up and contribute to my website.

I have looked into using capabilities instead so that every submission has to be approved. However this would be too time consuming so I want to add captcha to avoid any spam submissions.

Please could you advise me on how I could achieve this. I am not a coder so I don’t have a clue where to start with this.

I appreciate any help you can give.

Thanks
Simon

@Simon – You are talking about modifying the dashboard or WordPress “backend” as opposed to adding captcha for comments, is that right? I don’t know of a solution offhand, but googling “add captcha to wordpress plugin” will give you some ideas. There may be something like this available, but the obvious question is, If you have already granted someone the ability to login to your site and contribute to it, why do you need to have them complete a captcha? Why not stick with WordPress comments (and Akismet – preinstalled with WordPress), or maybe Disqus, rather than having to artificially restrict your contributors?

Yeah I am after putting capture in the dashboard as a challenge before they publish. My reason for it is highlighted pretty well in the hubpages forum at http://hubpages.com/forum/topic/49767

I basically want to reduce the chance of bot submissions using a previously registered account so it prevents what happened to the site mentioned in the thread I provided.

Do you have any ideas on how to implement what i propose.

Thanks
Simon

Hi, got a problem – I transferred from a free wordpress blog (www.tobecomeawriter.wordpress.com) to one hosted at Godaddy (www.tobecomeawriter.com). I’ve installed WordPress through Godaddy and successfully transferred the xml file so I have all my posts, but there are far fewer widgets available in the self-hosted one (thru Godaddy). There is no email subscription, Facebook like button, Image widget and many more – why are they available thru the free wordpress site but not through Godaddy? Any ideas? Also, is there a way to transfer my email subscriptions from one blog to the other?
Thanks!
Renee

HTTP Error 500 (Internal Server Error): An unexpected condition was encountered while the server was attempting to fulfill the request.

My site is displaying this message on all pages barring homepage and I am at a loss as to why or how to fit it. I recently installed Counterize. I tried disabling the plugins but this did nothing. please help?

@Kathleen – In Google, type in “wordpress” and the error message “HTTP Error 500 (Internal Server Error): An unexpected condition was encountered while the server was attempting to fulfill the request.” and you’ll get a bunch of support answers about the same issue. If you have FTP, delete plugins one by one from the plugin folder starting with the most suspicious one. Disabling won’t always work, but deleting them from the plugins folder will. Your web hosting provider can show you how to delete folders from the WordPress installation using FTP or the hosting control panel.

If you don’t have a good backup system in place, be sure to get one once you get things straightened out.

Can you login to WordPress?

Hi Mark,

I don’t know how to get FTP. I was logged into wordpress but the support was a bit beyond me and told me basically to pay someone to fix it, which I would in an ideal world. I don’t know how to back up in fact I don’t know a whole lot of IT it was a friend who set the website up and I think he is sick of me asking him to maintain it all the time.

Hi Mark thanks for your help last time :) I have another query I want to build a website where it has logo,navigation bar, header image(swf file)body area and footer but I don’t want sidebar is there any templates like that? and can I embed a swf file for my header image which will continues play.

Hey… Please help me in this.. I have a premium theme which i bought. But the site is in English language, but i want it to be in dhivehi language. i have been trying for this since last month. further more, it has a front page slider which is on left side (as its english language), and i want this also to be in right side as our language is from right to left. Please help me in this.. :(

Hi I have an error that is coming up and I dont know how to handle I am not code savvy. The error come up when I click on my widgets area under appearance:
Fatal error: Call to undefined method _WP_Editors::editor_settings() in /home/remax721/public_html/wp-admin/includes/deprecated.php on line 728

@David – Might be a plugin conflict after updating to WordPress version 3.3. Looks like you posted in the WordPress forum. That’s the best place to check for a solution. You can find more by Googling Call to undefined method _WP_Editors::editor_settings().

Have you tried deactivating plugins one by one to see if the problem goes away?

totally new to the wordpress, found a template i like -that’s NOT on the WP site, how do i use it –without FTP and i DO NOT have the install button….please help!

@e – When you use WordPress.com hosting, you are limited to the themes they offer. Despite this, there are many advantages to hosting on WordPress.com, like the fact that it’s free, they take care of database backup, they do all the software updates and you can now purchase premium themes. If you want to use a theme that they don’t offer, you can use self-hosted WordPress. If you already have a lot of content on your WordPress.com site, consider using their “Guided Transfer” service. It’s inexpensive and will save you a lot of trouble.

Hello,
I would like to lower the text of my tagline on my header, be able to organize the description of my pages in another order besides alphabetical, learn how to add share option below a post, and not have page titles be the same as description titles in the blog post for that page (e.g., “Home”). Thank you

@Alex – For the tagline, you need to play around to find the right value.
In style.css in your theme files, find the following

#headerimg h1 {
text-align: left;
font-size: 29px;
padding: 23px 0 0;
}

You need to change the padding to “padding: 25px;” or something. Try removing the two zeros. It’s hard to tell what will work without testing it.

For page titles, see the Custom Menu tutorial at http://wp101.com

For a share option, look at http://sharethis.com or http://addthis.com

I’m not sure what you mean by “description of my pages”.

Thanks Mark! Removing the double 0’s was the key. Now how do I move it further left? 0.o
By description of my pages I mean that the menu title and the main page title are always synched (e.g., on the home page it says “home” in both locations). Is there any way to turn this feature off? At least on the home page for the main post title.
The clickable area for the header image is not mapped on very well to the graphic and I’d like to be able to fix this.
I love this service and am telling my friends about it too!

To move that further left – hmm – check out http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_padding.asp
You need to set the left side padding to zero

padding: 25px 0px 0px 0px;

But that may not work. You may need to tweak another section of the page. Give it a try and let me know.

To change the title if the page so it’s different than “Home”, see the Custom Menus tutorial I mentioned.

I am new to WP. I suddenly started getting flooded with spam comments, to the tune of 1,200 in two days. What is going on, and what can I do? Thanks for you help. Hank

@Hank Weit – It’s a good sign in that your blog’s topic area is popular and highly visible. You are writing about something people want to read. And so, spambots love you! :) Of course, it’s a drag to get all that spam. Does WordPress.com offer a captcha for comments? Why isn’t Akismet doing its job? Since you are hosted on WordPress.com, I would search http://en.support.wordpress.com/ and http://en.forums.wordpress.com/ for “comment spam” or “block comment spam”.

@Mark – padding worked brilliantly but needed to change it in a different section. Now I somehow messed up my footer (the theme along the edges is missing). Help! And can you tell me how to make the whole header graphic clickable? Only part of the “what really scares you” logo is active right now. Thanks :)

I should also add that my urls have funky endings that I didn’t notice before (e.g., .Tw08cG9SRuM). I changed my permalinks to /%postname% but don’t know why this is showing up or how to erase them

@Alex – Sounds like you’re ready for a handy editing tool like the Chrome browser’s “inspect element” feature. Use the Chrome browser to view your site, then right click and select “Inspect element”. You’ll see the HTML for the page, with CSS in a sidebar on the right. Rollover the HTML and it will highlight elements on the web page. This is how I found the CSS for your #header div. This will also show you the HTML for the clickable area in the header #headerimg. You can tweak the HTML to change the size of that area. Remove the padding on the left side of #headerimg, for example. Look at the HTML in the #headerimg div and you will find a <h1> tag and a <a> tag inside of that. The <a> tag is the clickable “anchor” tag. You need to reposition it using CSS for the <h1> and the #headerimg div.

Here’s a screen shot of the Google Chrome Inspect Element feature.

As for the endings on your URLs, are you using an analytics plugin of some kind? That would be my first guess. It might be from a social sharing plugin like the AddThis button or a web stats plugin. It’s probably something you installed. You can deactivate plugins one by one to see if those endings go away.

I installed WP on a host of my LAN, actually on a Synology NAS.
The LAN is connected to the WEB via a router which uses portmapping
to direct requests from the WEB to the NAS. Furthermore, the router’s
IP is connected to a domain (www.jsesoft.org) via DynDNS.

Now, inside my LAN, WP works fine. However, from the WEB, there is a problem: Though my Blog is reachable from the WEB (www.jsesoft.org/wordpress), no links can be followed. The reason is the permalink: it’s base URL is
http://192.168.1.3/… (actually the IP of the NAS in my LAN), which obviously unreachable from the WEB.

I tried to change the site-url to http://www.jsesoft.org/wordpress in ‘General Settings’.
But I get ‘The Site address you entered did not appear to be a valid URL. Please enter a valid URL’.

What can I do to solve the problem? How can I access my local WP from the WEB including following the links? How to fix the permalink thing?

Thank you.

@Klaus Wiederänders – Thanks for the tough questions. Sorry to say, these issues are beyond my knowledge of HTTP on a LAN vs. Web HTTP and what you need to do on the server to make your site visible. The forums on wordpress.org are one good place to look. I have also found http://premium.wpmudev.org/forums/ to be helpful.

UPDATE –
Klaus Wiederänders replied to me to say:
Thanks to henkg, I’ve found the answer: See http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=41946#p163557

Here is my problem I’m setting up a website using wordpress to sell furniture approx 100 different products but each product has a choice of 400 different fabrics to cover the furniture with. Is there a way to copy all 400 different fabric numbers to each of the 100 products without typing all of them in for each product under variation header.

Hi Mark,

I have been trying to solve this question so far no one has been able to help. I need to send a post when a category lets say F is chosen to the People page(on my site). This page is currently using a different theme then the rest of the site. I need that page to also act as the homepage of that theme not its page template. So in the end i would have two homepages the main and the people page. Hope you can help!

Mark, I hope this note finds you well. I am having a problem with “text enhance pop-ups” through-out my sites. Can you tell me what action I should take? I have searched youtube and google and have tried a couple things. But clearly I need help. Is there a plug-in or something out there?
Thanks
Tim

Jan,
Though this depends on what e-commerce solution you are using, since each product basically has 400 different options, each product post would need to have the options added to it. Depending on how you have it setup, you might be able to copy and paste in the 400 different options instead of having to type them all in each time.

Lance,
If I understand you correctly, I think the best way to get two homepages would be two separate installs of WordPress. One for your main site and one for your People site. You could do just one install if you use a page template for the People pages, but not if you need two dedicated homepages.

@Tim – Does this help? http://jasondenaro.com/RemoveTextEnhanceGreenWords.htm

Helping a friend with her website. She reset her theme under coda and now the header and menus are doing this weird thing on all the pages. Could you please take a look and any suggestions you have on how to fix it would be much appreciated. Thanks!

Ashley,
When you say “reset her theme”, do you mean made changes to the code and now it doesn’t work? If so, does she have a backup of an older version she can re-upload? If she has changed to a different theme, make sure goes to Appearance -> Menus and chooses the menu for her primary navigation again. When you switch themes in WordPress, it saves the Menus you’ve created, but not where they are placed in the theme (since a new theme could have different menu locations).

Hey Mark,

You mentioned I should do two installs to get multiple blogs running on my site. How do I get a page to act as the new blog? So lets say when I click on th epage it points to the second wordpress install?

Jason Loeppky

Mar 2, 2012

11:26 AM

Hey Guys,
just wondering if you can help me out here. I bought a theme, that out of the box features portfolio projects on the home page, but I would like to feature my blog posts on the homepage instead of the latest portfolio projects. Can I have blog preview images come up instead of the latest projects? I have been trying to modify the template-home.php file, or make my own but I’m not having any luck. I am able to work my way around modifying some .php and .css code with using Coda, just wondering if you can point me in the right direction. Thanks. -Jay

Jason,
It would help to know what theme you are using and be able to look at your site, but here are a couple things to try. First, go to Settings -> Reading and make sure the homepage is set to latest posts. Then, if your theme has a home.php file remove it so that the blog is displayed using the index.php file. Another thing to try, if your theme has a blog page template, is to create a page called blog and choose the blog page template from the Page Template dropdown. Then go to your Reading settings again and set that page as the Front Page.

Again, these options might not work depending on how your theme is setup. If your theme came with documentation and a support forum, I would recommend utilizing those as well.

I have two major, related problems that for me (a non-tech guy) are simply driving me crazy. The first may sound simple to some but I have no idea why my site is not loading – it simply does not appear when I start up or enter its URL. I have followed the steps suggested by WordPress support and nothing is helping. This site, which I use in support of my business has now been down for two weeks. Which leads to a very significant 2nd problem: I have contacted WordPress support via email three times in the past 12 days and have gotten no response. No follow up of any sort other than the standard auto-reply that “Your message is flying through cyberspace to us as you read this. We will get back to you as soon as we can.”

So, where is my site, and why no help from WordPress? Help!

Roy,
To answer your first question, there are many reasons why your site might not be loading. Did you change anything on the site that would have made it stop working? Have you moved or edited any important files? You could also contact your hosting service and see if there is an issue with your server. More than likely its not a WordPress specific issue if your entire site is down.

Regarding the WordPress support forums, it is important to remember that it is a volunteer service. The volunteers who contribute to WordPress support do their best to help resolve issues, but there is no guarantee that you will receive help there.

Roy Regalado

Mar 21, 2012

8:33 AM

thanks for your response; I have done nothing to the site. My hosting service is wordpress; as for support – I contacted WordPress Support – not the forums – the Support is supposed to help. They are paid to help. I am a paying customer.

Roy,
Oh, I see. I’m assuming you are using WordPress.com to host your blog and have paid for a premium feature, such as a custom domain name? If that is the case, you would need to contact WordPress.com support again. I have no affiliation with the official WordPress.com organization. Sorry for the confusion.

I’ve been using a theme that supports a drop down menu feature. I’ve been using parent categories and child categories but I really want to use grandchild categories as well. The only problem I’m running into is that the grandchild category just shows up and covers up the next child category in the drop down menu. I want to change that so the grandchild category only shows up when you hover over it’s associate child category and when it does show up, I’d like it to show up to the right of said child category, instead of below it. I’ve been looking at the theme’s code but I just don’t know enough to add or change anything. Any help would be appreciated. I’m using the Motion theme.

Asher,
You would need to edit the CSS to change positioning of the grandchildren menu items. It looks like you would need to target .primary_menu .children ul li a in your CSS. Here is a good tutorial on creating menus using CSS.

Julia Johnson

Mar 28, 2012

8:17 AM

I tried some stupid tutorial and it completely messed up my site, can’t access it!
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_IF, expecting ‘)’ in /home/wjournal/public_html/wp-content/themes/lehigh/functions.php on line 387

^ That keeps happening no matter what!!!!

@Julia Johnson – Jeremy Green might have more insight into this problem. What files did you modify following the tutorial? Did you change your wp-config.php file? Did you change the functions.php file?

Note that you can do a Google search for the error: Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_IF, expecting ‘)’ — be sure to add the word “WordPress”. I did a search for “Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_IF, expecting ‘)’ WordPress” and found lots of WordPress support information. One result suggested restoring the wp-config.php file.

The next thing I would to is use FTP to delete any plugins you may have activated based on the tutorial you used. Your web host can help you to set up FTP.

You need to undo what you did using the tutorial. What were those steps?

@ Jeremy Green

I can’t find ” .primary_menu .children ul li” anywhere in my css and while I’m sure the recommended tutorial site would help others, I have no idea what any of it means in relation to the CSS I’m looking at.

I’ve tried posting on wordpress.org but haven’t gotten any answers. I’m sure there’s something in my CSS that I need to change or add but I have no idea what. I have no clue what I’m looking at.

Q&A WP is not aligning correctly

Latest Q&A WP plugin and latest WP. Ok, the QA is displaying but not correctly, the whole it’s pushed up on top of the main menu, Please can someone tell me how to fix this problem . You can see the problem here
http://krreddy.com/questions/ask/

Can you help me to fix this problem .

Asher,
If you go to Appearance -> Editor you can edit the CSS of your theme. Even if that selector isn’t currently in your CSS, you can still add it to the file. After adding it you can change the attributes to get the list item positioned where you want. If you change the margins you should be able to get it where you want it.

I would also recommend working through a few tutorials on basic CSS. Here is a good place to start learning CSS. The other option would be to hire a web designer to make the changes for you.

Rajendra,
Have you tried what this post suggests? I haven’t used that plugin myself.

I’m hoping someone can help me with the error messages below. If you need to contact me directly for access to the back panel I’d be happy to oblige. Thanks!

Warning: Missing argument 1 for add_custom_image_header(), called in /homepages/30/d374634915/htdocs/SageTheWorld/wp-content/themes/danko/index.php on line 34 and defined in /homepages/30/d374634915/htdocs/SageTheWorld/wp-includes/theme.php on line 1575

Warning: Missing argument 2 for add_custom_image_header(), called in /homepages/30/d374634915/htdocs/SageTheWorld/wp-content/themes/danko/index.php on line 34 and defined in /homepages/30/d374634915/htdocs/SageTheWorld/wp-includes/theme.php on line 1575

By the way I’m using a free theme I from premium theme designer themeskingdom.com. I’m not sure if they will answer my cry for help because the theme is free and they only offer support to paid members.

JXL,
Try and deactivate any plugins and see if the error goes away. If it does, then reactivate each plugin one by one until you isolate the one that is causing the error. If that doesn’t work, then I would send a support request to the theme developer. Even if its a free theme, they should know if their theme isn’t working correctly.

Hey so on hipstercrap.com, a very new site literally set it up 2 days ago, I tired to test out posting a comment on a post but it brought me to an error page. It says;

Bad Request

Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
i was just wondering what was up. thanks

Savannah,
Your server could have been experiencing an issue at the moment you tried to submit the comment. I just went to the site and was able to submit a comment just fine.

I am currently using DMSGuestbook. And lately there has been a lot of spam entries on it, usually always 10 or more in a week. Is there a plug-in that I could use that would help with spam? Or a better guestbook and that would possibly have the option to transfer the current entries over so none would be lost?

Hi Everyone, help, especially with the first issue/question, would be so much appreciated…

1. I published 2 posts today but for some reason they are both marked May 1st rather than April 30th. I would love to fix those two plus make sure it’s not a permanent issue…thoughts/advice?

2. I created an “about” kinda page which I’d like to have a permanent/visible link to always somewhere when people visit the blog. Any advice/easy instructions here?

Thanks so much!!!

Valerie,
Have you activated the CAPTCHA on your guestbook? According to the plugin description it has a CAPTCHA option, which can help minimize the amount of spam postings.

Lish,
1. You can always change the date of any post. It is under the Publish section when you are editing a post. Click on “edit” next to “Published on” and you can change the date. Click update after you choose the correct date.

2. Setup a menu and add your about page to the menu. If your theme is a recent one, it should already support WordPress menus. From your Dashboard, go to Appearance -> Menus to set up the WordPress Menu.

When I tried reCAPTCHA it gave me an error on the guestbook page and wouldn’t work. I installed Akismet and got a API Key, so far so good there hasn’t been any spam this week yet.

Valerie,
Glad to hear that Akismet is working for you. Sounds like the guestbook plugin might have a bug.

Mark,
I hope this message finds you in a joyful mood.
I was hoping you could recommend a couple powerful and highly rated programs to harvest traffic. I have 25 sites, but they might as well be billboards in the middle of the pacific. I need to make my sites SEO rich, or find programs that will aid me in getting Traffic.
I guess what I am saying is, what are the big boys using?
Thanks
Tim

@Tim – I don’t have any “secrets” to share to drive traffic to your sites. I’ll write a short post about this and include the link here since this is a good question. Here it is: Online Marketing Secrets: Driving Traffic to Your Website is Only the Beginning

Thanks Mark,
Very helpful report
Here it is: Online Marketing Secrets: Driving Traffic to Your Website is Only the Beginning
Outstanding
Tim

@Tim – I have the video and audio for the online marketing webinar mentioned in the post: Five Keys to Generating New Business with Online Marketing. I need to combine them and then the recording will be available once I figure out the details with Bridget Brooks, who conducted the webinar. The audio is available for free here: http://www.audioacrobat.com/sa/W9FQR7bQ

Thanks Mark,
More than I expected….. helpful info.
Tim

Hey Mark,
I recently noticed that my blog doesn’t have previous/next page features and I “lose” my older posts. How do I fix this debacle? Thanks!

@Alex – First, make sure you have a good backup system in place. BackupBuddy is one option. Then, to debug and hopefully find the missing old posts, I would try using a backup to create a duplicate of your site in a subdirectory. (BackupBuddy makes this pretty easy.) Use the Settings > Privacy on the duplicate to set it so that it’s not visible to search engines. Or, alternatively, you can also try using Tools > Export to create an xml file of the site and then Tools > Import to import the site file into a new clean installation of WordPress (again in a subdirectory with Privacy set to hide from search engines).

Once you have this kind of test installation up and running, you can switch themes to see if your previous/next page links show up. (Did you have them before and they disappeared or did you never have them? If you never had them, then they are not part of your theme, and you will need to add them to the single.php and/or index.php files. That’s tricky if you are not familiar with PHP and theme modification.

I’m not sure of your level of WordPress skills so let me know how all this sounds and we can go from there.

Hi Mark,
I’m trying to follow your advice about backing up my website but lost you after backupbuddy. Are there alternative plugins you’d recommend that don’t cost an arm and a leg? My understanding is that my theme (Blak Magik) never had previous/next page links…darn it! How do I go about getting those in place? Also, somehow I have Russian letters at the bottom of my website with a bogus link. How did it get there and how do I get rid of it?!

Mark McLaren

Sep 26, 2012

7:12 PM

@Alex – You need to get that Russian text and link out of your theme. That’s bad news. Try http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ultimate-security-checker/ or http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tac/ or http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exploit-scanner/

Here are some backup options. http://bloggersense.net/5-best-wordpress-backup-plugins-2012

Leave a Comment