converting2wp

Is there a timing issue? a delay before one would expect to see the search results? The instructions seem pretty straightforward, the search box shows up, but nothing is returned for search terms that do show up in the site…

[This whole explosion of Google tools has my head spinning. Sorry if this is a silly question.]

Does this post help?

Apologies if this reply is too simple, but you say “newbie” and it took me awhile to understand the WordPress model. [Yes, everything is documented, but it’s sometimes not easy to tell where to start.]

I’m assuming you’re running WordPress on a server where you have FTP access.

The “look and feel” of all your pages and posts is handled by the “theme” files. You’ll find the theme(s) in the wp-content/themes subdirectories. You can install new themes (from, say, themes.wordpress.net) by unzipping the theme files and moving them (via ftp or another tool) to a subdirectory of wp-content/themes. Then, in your browser, go to the WP Admin, Presentation > Themes and select the one you want to use on the site.

Once you’ve got a theme that’s “close” to what you want, you can modify it to have custom HTML features that you’d like. From WP Admin screen, go to Presentation > Theme Editor and you’ll see the files that make up the theme. You can edit them from that window, or, if you have a preferred web development tool you can edit them locally and upload via FTP .

Most theme files are named with a scheme that makes it fairly easy to tell which one you need to edit — to put your picture somewhere in the header file, edit the header.php file (listed as Header in the Theme Editor). You’ll see that these theme file are a “mixture” of PHP and HTML. If you don’t want to change the PHP, just be sure to leave the lines bracketed with <?php and ?> alone.

On the other hand, even if you don’t know PHP, if you’ve any programming experience at all, you may be able to figure out what the pieces of code are doing and modify them. If not, be sure to choose a theme that is “widget enabled” that will allow you to make modifications to the “dynamic” part of the look and feel without editing the theme files.

Key sections of the Codex that help with getting started:

• Stepping Into Templates
• Stepping Into Template Tags
• Template Hierarchy

Hope that helps.

I don’t claim to be an expert in the template hierarchy, but the “category_*.php” is used when displaying a category, i.e. the page that you get when the URL is something like

your_wordpress_address/category/some-category

When you click a link from the list of articles in the category, that takes you to a post which will be displayed in the format defined by single.php (if it exists) or index.php (if there’s no single.php). So, yes, that’s where you’ll need to make a change.

In the page describing the template tag in_category there’s an example of customizing the single.php based on the category ID.

Or you might look at Customizing your sidebar page from the Codex, where there’s a reference to a “related articles” plugin.

Best wishes.

But there’s still no post about 2.0.8 on the blog (so if I hadn’t been over here looking for something else, I’d still be clueless).

One of the *many* things I love about WordPress is the way that information about upgrades is sent out!

[BTW, did I miss the reason the posts in the forum are now marked with relative dates (e.g. “5 days ago,” “1 year ago”) instead of the actual date of the post? Yes, I guess there may be timezone issues, but it is sometimes helpful to know the actual differences between the times of posts with some accuracy.]

I don’t know if the “?” is a problem, but I’m having what may be a similar problem.

I’m trying to redisplay a couple of feeds using WP 2.1 and the RSS widget. I’ve been using the feeds for months and haven’t really noticed any problem in other tools I’ve used to display them.

What’s happening is that more than half the time I seem to get an error (“An error has occured; the feed is probably down. Try again later.”), but if I click the RSS icon used to subscribe to the feed, it comes up just fine.

[Actually, I’m trying to display 4 feeds. Feeds 3 and 4 seem to be rock solid — just the first two seem to be having trouble.]

This WP 2.1 installation is less than 24 hours old, so I don’t have a lot of history here. But if there’s something that might make the feed connections unreliable, I’d be interested to hear about it.

In the meantime, maybe I’ll look into learning more about the widget architecture so I can do something other than treat them as a black box.