I am a huge fan of Wordpress, I’ve been typing entries into the blog-o-sphere for the last four years. In that time, I’ve upgraded countless times, changed plugins, and modified the crap out of it. I stand strong by it as one of the best and most versatile blogging platforms on the net. And it’s free.

Iggy, a local spfldblogger, is having some issues with it after moving from one blogging platform to Wordpress. Now Iggy you get cynical sometimes; so beware, this is not a potshot at you. I just feel like that I’ve been using the software for a great length of time that I have some authority on the subject and I should give back to what has been given to me for free.

Okay first of all…

The issue of your RSS feed being broke after changing themes is not impossible, but more than likely it was your RSS reader that cached your feed and you thought it was broken. My reasoning is because the framework, the code that supplies all the data connections and inter workings to the front end, works independently to what theme you’re working with.

The address to the RSS feed is always going to be http://sitename/wordpress/feed, or if Wordpress is in the root of the site, http://sitename/feed. The feed to comments is http://sitename/comments/feed.

The best way to debug this is to go directly to those pages. Another reason it may have broke is that the feed was invalid after trying to pass an invalid character in the feed. Wordpress should have handled everything, but by an oddball chance that could be your answer.

Next.

Speaking of RSS feeds. Why is the default setting to choose full or partial feed? How come I can’t have both without finding a plug-in to do this for me?

This would require modifying the framework and those nice paths shown up above would have to be modified. Why fix something when it’s not broke? And partial feeds, we’re not on 56k modems anymore.

Picture This.

I have yet to get time to find a plug-in to handle photos the way I want within WordPress.

I don’t know what you’re trying to do with your photos, but the easiest way is to upload them using the upload utility under the post editor. Wordpress does not manage photo albums, but a lot of photo sharing sites allow for easy export or direct publishing from photo sites like Flickr.

Page Me.

Page creation is easy enough but fails miserably all the same. I can’t create a page that has no parent at all. So I create a new category so that I can post the content I want within that category. However there are two problems with this. One the title of the new category wants to take over in the header. Two when I click to post only to the new category within my post. The content is still posted to the main page even though the main page was not selected. I don’t want the content posted on the main page. If I did I wouldn’t be wanting to create a new page or category now would I?

I am confused, so I’ll outline page creation the best way I can. A page is considered a static blog post, but totally seperate from the blog. Like if you wanted to post your contact information. When you create a new page, it will be posted as a link – depending on your theme, on the main page. The only way around this is to edit the header to exclude the link.

k2.

While the K2 theme is far from perfect it does make doing some task simple if you know where to look. Personally I still feel much of this functionality should be included within WordPress as default and set to be controlled under one of the numerous Dashboard tabs.

K2 is awesome, and I am using it on Gotshoo. The GUI presentation manager allows a user to move and configure modules, like Flickr thumbnails or latest posts, around the site with the click of a mouse. It would be cool if it was a default, but I think the reasoning for not using it to manage every type of theme would be that it would break a lot of other themes considering not everyone’s CSS follows the same structure. The K2 theme is special because it was specifically coded to handle those events.

Nope.

I think WordPress either is in denial or doesn’t care that it’s overall user base has changed. Originally the product was designed for web designers and administrators. However many people have sung the praises of WordPress. To the point where many less technical driven users are trying to put the product to use. I think many of these people have given up this endeavor do to the lack of ease of use.

Everything has a learning curve. You can’t go out and drive a Ferrari and expect it to drive flawlessly without knowing how to drive stick or corner hi-speed curves. Post some questions, I’ll do my best to answer.