My notes from this month's "WordPress Sampler" meeting of WPJax at Modis. Folks in our group range from business owners and students to advanced developers. Here are some of their recommendations and insights, primarily from Elizabeth, Clint, and Jonathan.

Themes and Development

• What WP Theme is That? is especially useful when dissecting what other webmasters have done in building their themes.

• BluChic has WordPress themes for sites, intended for a more feminine look.

• Creative Market is WordPress themes: Hundreds, nay thousands! At reasonable prices.

• The Avada multi-purpose, responsive theme. Comes highly recommended as being one of the most easily customizable and dependable. This is Theme Forest's best-selling theme.

• Canvas, WooTheme's "flagship" theme. Somewhat pricier than the other themes we discussed, this one is just as easy, but a little better for folks who aren't afraid to write just a handful of PHP statements to tweak the perfect theme's functionality.

• Cobalt Apps promises to break down some of the barriers that normally require a bit of coding. It builds child themes for the Genesis theme without having to dig too deeply into PHP or HTML / CSS.

Stock Photos and Shopping

• Death to the Stock Photo sends you free, royalty-free photos. you receive an monthly email. Or subscribe to their entire library for a small fee.

• The Dollar Photo Club has High-resolution and vector images, royalty-free, always $1.00 USD each.

• Embed items in your marketplace from "Square" (using an

Sites:

• Cafe bon Appetit is a site partly coded by Jonathan, showing how something built for large institutions like a university can still be attractive and appealing. The main page operates several sites inside, each catered to a college or corporation cafeteria. This ties together databases, design, and working through procedural and regulatory challenges.

• Jonathan also showed us the behind-the-scenes operation of a new site for a major office furniture designer/manufacturer. The site's theme and plugins enable functions in the WordPress admin screens that permit building nested database-driven detail boxes in the post/page composition process without any coding whatsoever.

Jonathan also shared his experience finding, tracking, and repairing a bug in the WordPress Core that has existed for years.

I encourage you to contact Clint, Jonathan, or Elizabeth for your WordPress design needs. And thanks again to Modis and to Tim and Rebecca for the venue and the refreshments!

Good questions and a bunch of tips from everyone else attending rounded out this excellent session. We've got a great group going, and much talent on the move here in the "Bold New City of the South!"

When installing a new plugin, or upgrading an existing theme, plugin, or WordPress itself, you may be asked for FTP details. But, you say, I thought I had this configured to update directly. Here's how to force WordPress to upgrade without FTP.

In your wp-config.php file, add a line near the top:

define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');

This forces WordPress to write to files directly. Once this is done, you will get error messages that better explain what isn't working.

For example, you may need group write privileges on the wp-content/upgrade directory:

chmod g+w wp-content/upgrade

If you get this error:

Could not remove the old plugin.

you will also need to ensure there is group write on all the plugins themselves:

chmod -R g+w wp-content/plugins

I had already downloaded and installed Flash for Firefox, following these instructions but could not get it to work as a plugin on Chromium.

Success is yours when you type "about:plugins" into the location bar of Chromium and the Flash player appears.

Fortunately, it turned out to be pretty simple to just link Firefox's plugin into Chromium: As root, do this:

cd /usr/lib64/chromium-browser/plugins/
ln -s /usr/lib64/mozilla/plugins-wrapped/nswrapper_32_64.libflashplayer.so .

After reading Justin Tadlock's excellent writeup of Wordpress 3.0 navigation menus (nav-menus), I am seriously disappointed and annoyed at this new feature.

A nightmare to maintain, spaghetti bowl of desynchronization, is what these new menus are. They statically replicate what we already had dynamic widgets for. In database lingo, they violate third normal form.

Post and page descriptions are computed from the page content AT ADD TIME; if you update a post or page, its description is not updated, so you have to remember to manually edit each menu entry each time you edit something. Adding pages, or changing a page’s Order, or changing a page’s Parent, does not change the menu, you have to manually go replicate all your changes in two places.

Nor can I find any way to write a widget that creates menu items, like my http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/hierarchical-pages/ , which would solve the above problems by creating menus on the fly, based on your current page location, the N latest posts, or other inputs.

In short, the new menus should have been a widget, that could be inserted anywhere, instead of a whole new structure. What a mess.