As the title of this post suggest, there are three things you need if you want to create a ‘killer’ blog:

1. Start with a great blog software.
2. Get a great design.
3. Produce great content.

The list above is in order of doing, but not the order of importance: content is still king and so you must be able to produce quality content on a regular basis for your blog, otherwise it won’t work.

Let’s look at some details …

Great blog software

You must spend some time to figure out what blog software is best for you. There are many you can choose from (including several CMS’) … and you can even do it manually. This is what you should look for in a blog setup:

• Easy posting of content. The blog should be easy to use.
• Syndication – automatic RSS feed creation.
• Built in search.
• Gravatar (universal avatar) support.

I personally use Wordpress because it meets all of the above and it has a huge community of people actively extending its’ functionality. That said, there are many other good choices out there … one of them may be better for you than my choice.

Great design

When I am talking design, I am talking about both how it looks (aesthetics) and I am also taking about how easy it is (from the user s perspective) to use it. Again, you will have to investigate this yourself because many times, this is personal taste.

Great content

The first rule of web design that I learned back in 1994, was that content was king. You can have the best looking blog/web site in the world but if the content sucks, no one will come back.

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

I just wanted to announce that my video tutorials on installing and using Wordpress are being featured in the latest edition of Web Designer Magazine.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com

Let’s take it from the source:

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

From a community members point of view, what’s cool about gravatars is that you don’t have to upload your avatar image on every blog, forum or community that you are a member of. And from the community owner’s point of view, you can now add a little pizazz to your blog or forum with your members gravatars.

You can read more about gravatars in the magazine.

In a nutshell:

Both are web based applications/software designed to allow many people to contribute content (typically articles … but podcast and videos are becoming more common) to a website.

I would say the basic difference is that a CMS (Ex: Drupal) is a closed system where only certain people can add or edit content to the website/cms.

On the other hand, a wiki is an open system where anyone can edit and add content. The idea behind a wiki is that the masses will eventually correct any false information – with the help of editors.

My thoughts:

I’m no wiki expert, but I see wiki’s being more suitable to general encyclopedic information. If you need a tighter structure and control over what is being posted on your site, I would be leaning towards a CMS rather than a WIKI.

That said, I am sure that the differences between the two types of software has room for a lot of gray area – I’m sure some CMS software have WIKI like functionality and vice versa.

How about blogs?

Blogs are kinda like a CMS for one person. One other distinction would be that the blog traditionally is date driven – where newer articles are posted to the front page of the blog. As with the WIKI/CMS blurring of the lines, you see the same with blogs and CMS software.

For example: Wordpress (a popular blog program) has CMS like features:

• Multiple users can post articles.
• You can have static non date affected pages. Wordpress call these ‘pages’.

Beyond the CMS-like features built into the core Wordpress package, Wordpress has a huge number of plug-ins out there that extend it’s capability considerably … bringing it even closer inline with a true CMS.

A few links:

Wordpress home page: www.wordpress.org
Drupal home page: http://drupal.org
Another popular CMS – Joomla: joomla.org
Wiki software: Media Wiki

Ciao,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

This first article is meant to give you a global picture about creating Wordpress themes. Let’s start by answering a few common questions.

Do you need to know PHP to create or edit Wordpress themes?

The short answer is no. It would help to know some PHP but many theme designers don’t, and they do just fine.

Do you need to understand MySQL to create or edit Wordpress themes?

Again, no. Mysql is the database that drives Wordpress and is a key component … nonetheless, it has no impact on creating themes. So don’t worry about it.

What do you need to know in order to be able to edit or create a Wordpress theme?

I would say that you need to know three basic things:

1. HTML/XHTML
2. CSS
3. The Wordpress page hierarchy and behavior.

I think the first two are obvious, but the last needs some more explaining.

What is the Wordpress page hierarchy and behavior?

In a nutshell: Wordpress has a hierarchy of template pages that it follows whenever someone request a post.

… If Wordpress can’t find a certain template, it will fall back and use the default (index.php) to display the information. If this doesn’t make sense, please check out the diagram below … it should help:

For example:

Let’s say a visitor uses the built-in Wordpress search capability. To display the search results, the Wordpress engine will first try to load the ’search.php’ template page. If it can’t find it, Wordpress will use the ‘index.php’ instead.

So what the diagram shows you, is that the index.php page is kinda the ‘master template’ … and if any of the other templates can’t be found, the Wordpress engine can always use index.php.

… I hope this makes a little sense.

Why do you have to understand this?

Now that we understand how the Wordpress engine looks for page templates in a theme, we now know what page templates we need to build.

Does a theme have to include ALL the template pages?

If it isn’t already obvious, you can get away with creating a theme with only one template page: index.php.

In this ultra simple theme, all your pages would be exactly the same since the Wordpress engine would be using the same template (index.php) for all the page types. That said, you will also need the default ’styles.css’ file for all your CSS code.

So the bare minimum theme must only have two files:

• index.php
• styles.css

To customize all the possible pages that Wordpress can display, you would need to include all these page templates:

* style.css
* index.php
* home.php
* single.php
* page.php
* archive.php
* category.php
* search.php
* 404.php
* comments.php
* comments-popup.php
* author.php
* date.php

Conclusion

The point of this article was to give you a global understanding of what it takes to create themes in Wordpress.

If you guys want to learn more about creating themes for Wordpress … let me know.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com

First things first: thank you for Akismet!

… I just wanted to offer my sincere appreciation for the Wordpress anti-spam plugin: ‘Askimet’.

This nifty plugin has saved me countless hours (and possibly days) of work by filtering out hundreds of spam post each and every day!

I can easily say that for me, Askimet has proven to be the most important plugin for Wordpress.

… Just in the time it took me to write this post, Askimet has caught 7 spam comments!

If you see a spammer, smack him!

It is clear that blog spammers are among the worst of Web citizens. They are the hyena’s of the Web, trying to steal traffic they don’t deserve.

Blog spam protection tips

Being a high value spam target (the juicier the traffic …), I can offer the following advice:

• If you are a Wordpress user, you should be sure to activate Askimet … it will save you time. Big time!
• By default, keep comments disabled for your post and only enable them manually. And after a little while, shut off the comments.

… I used to keep my comments on by default. Then one day I got hit with so much spam, that it effectively became a denial of service attack – my whole server began to grind to a halt.

How comment spam nearly took down my dedicated server

As you may know, Wordpress can be configured to send you an email alert every time someone post a comment. So when I got hit with thousands of spam comments in the span of an hour, my mail server started to flood with email confirmations from Wordpress.

This in turn flooded my email in-box with thousands of emails and had the PHP engine working overtime. All this put together .. hogs up a lot of server power.

To fix the problem, I first shut off all comments in Wordpress, restarted the web server and then I had to manually flush all the remaining emails from the mail (smtp) server.

Anyway, even with Askimet running, I still found myself up to my neck in spam … because I was a little to relaxed with regards to blog comments.

Final tip

Even if you are not a Wordpress user, you can still use Askimet in your blog or forum – you just need to know a little PHP to hook into it.

Hey .. yet ANOTHER reason to learn PHP!

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com

Hi,

I’ve just released parts 5 and 6 of my video series of configuring Wordpress.

Again, more basic stuff designed to help get people up and running as quickly as possible.

The new videos:

- Configuring Wordpress Part 5
- Configuring Wordpress Part 6
- Configuring Wordpress Part 7
- Configuring Wordpress Part 8

Thanks for reading.

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com

I decided to create a dedicated Wordpress section on killersites.com

Right now, I only a have a few videos (with a bunch more coming) but I am also thinking of maybe some written tutorials etc…

The videos:

So far I’ve only added a few videos but have another 40 minutes of video to edit that should be up this week.

Any comments or suggest are welcome.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com

Though very useful, I found that I needed a few more buttons … and so I figured out how to do it.

I just released a new video tutorial on how to edit the Wordpress text editor:

The Video: Customizing the Wordpress Text Editor

I hope you find it useful!

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com

For the last couple of years I have been preaching that web designers should learn at least one blog or CMS (content management systems) software so that they can then offer blog/CMS installations and customizations to their clients.

The use of blogs/cms’ is also one of the reasons why I think web designers should learn PHP, given that most blogs are created with PHP these days.

I choose to hang my hat on Wordpress for many technical reasons (it is fast, mature, object oriented) and because it is the most popular blog software out there.

Anyway, I am now putting my videos where my mouth is, and I’ve started to create video tutorials on using and customizing Wordpress.

This first video shows you how to install Wordpress:

How to install Wordpress

Yes, not the most exciting for you seasoned Wordpress nerds, but I still felt this video was needid. Don’t worry though, I have several more advanced videos that I am working on that should interest most Wordpress users. This is what I have coming so far:

• How to add and customize buttons in the Wordpress editor.
• Basic Wordpress use and configuration after install.
• Building a Wordpress theme/template from scratch.

You should expect these to come out very soon.

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook

www.killersites.com
www.killerphp.com