Found this little tool the other day, comes in handy if you need to reset a wordpress password in database. Check out the “New WordPress password hasher tool”. It used to be md5() but that has changed. When you move and alter WordPress blogs you sometime need to change direct in the db with for example phpMyAdmin.

To create a wordpress theme the easiest way is proably to use the default theme and make a copy. Then you can change and build from there.

The first step
I’ll assume you have a WordPress installation of your own, on your host or your server. You also need an texteditor to write code in (don’t have an editor? check out open-source-editor.com for links to editors). Your themes are located in /wp-content/themes/.

The first thing I want to do is to create a new folder in /wp-content/themes and give it the name I want to use on the theme (no spaces or capital letters).

As you might see from the image above I’m working on a project called Tysslinge Företagare and I therefore name my theme and its folder “tysslinge”.

The next step is to copy all the files in the default theme.

And paste them in the folder “xxx”

WordPress will not understand that this is a new theme yet. You want to open style.css and change these rows:

• Theme Name: (use the same name as the folder you created)
• Theme URI: (the site using the theme)
• Description: (description of the theme)
• Version: (version, maybe not very important if it’s just your own)
• Author: (you)
• Author URI: (your site)

Have a look at mine:

If you are going to use the code from the default theme be sure to give credit to Michael Heilemann fro creating the theme, “Kubrick”.

Time to activate and use the new theme so you can work with it. Login to your wordpress themes admin-panel. Click on “Appearance” in the left menu.

You’ll see that the defalt theme is activated, but under “Available themes” you can find your new theme. Click on “Activate” below the theme-icon.

The site should now show your own theme when you pay it a visit :) Ok, it looks just like the default layout-theme, but now you have a guide to play with and work from. If an error should occur you can just go back to the default theme again. And I will keep writing and show you how to make it look just like you want it to!

We need inspiration to push boundries, so here are WordPressinspiration 1 – Dot Kite. Very nice looking and far from the default WordPress theme, but a bit slow.

I will continue to post great sites developed with WordPress. I doesn’t have to be “flashy”, animated stuff. Just innovative or pretty :)

For better security on your website you can hide the version of WordPress. If you rightclick on your WordPress driven website and select View Source, you will probably see a tag like this one:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.8.4" />

You should keep your installation of WordPress up to date, but for someone trying to hack your site it might be harder to find the possible issues if they don’t know which version it is. The meta-tag can be inserted in the theme in a couple of methods by the theme designer. Open your themes file header.php and look for the tag

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress " />

Remove it or just replace the content with just “WordPress”. Can’t find it? New themes often use another method to show this meta-tag. They use the function wp_head(); to print version and some other information. Look for wp_head(); in your themes header.php

You don’t want to remove wp_head(); all together, because you don’t know what uses it (it can do more then print version). Do it this way: open your themes file functions.php. If you can’t find it among the other theme-files create it. Add this as PHP-code:

<?php remove_action(’wp_head’, ‘wp_generator’); ?>

Save it and your good to go. If you want to show your using WordPress you can still add the tag manually as described above. Good luck!

A good tip for security is to lock your WordPress login. With the plugin “Login Lockdown” you can log failed logins and block the user after a certain number failures. How many incorrect attempts and the length of the stoppage can be set in the optionspage of the plugin. To install: download and put in the folder wp-contens/plugins on your web server. Then, just activate it in Admin-> Plugins and change the settings to your liking.

The content management system WordPress has gained enormous in popularity, but is it a complete CMS or just a blogging tool? In this blog we will try to give you the tools, the freedom, to create what you wan’t with WordPress. It is a very extendable platform which can be easily tweaked with themes and plugins. The large community of users also insures that it is very well documented. Most things you want to do, you can be quite sure someone else has tried before! I’ll be back with some useful tips in a short while.