I know, it’s been a while since I posted an article here at WordPress PAD. I have a good excuse, I’ve been hard at work developing websites using WordPress as a CMS (and blog). In the past few months I have learned a great deal about what WordPress can and cannot do…mostly what can be done to it with a little grease, time and patience.

With that said, working on a current project where I had to implement a bbpress forum with a current wordpress blog installation, I realized that bbPress, although a sister software of WordPress, is not the best solution for WordPress forum integration for two reasons. One, it’s quite buggy and two, it’s not a smooth integration.

I like simplicity because of it’s elegance. Awkward moments and people, unnecessarily complicated tasks, and so forth are my pet peeves. With that said, when WordPress 2.6 came out and I noticed I couldn’t simply float left or right my images in my post, let’s just say I had a little “fit”. I love WordPress, but this is a silly bug that shouldn’t even exist. I could fix this by adding style="float:left;" to each image, but that could prove to be annoying after a while. So, here’s a simple solution. Add the default styles for the alignleft, alignright, etc. classes that WordPress assigns to your images when you click the left, right, center, etc. buttons anyway:

If you’ve been searching for a new WordPress theme recently, or have done so in the past, chances are you’ve visited themes.wordpress.net. It’s not a bad theme directory and it is quite substantion. It’s just not very user-friendly. Fortunately, WordPress is working on a new themes directory that will make it easier to search for themes and, if you’re a theme developer, upload your themes as well.

Three upgrades in less than a couple of months is a little annoying, but WordPress aims to please so I forgive. Anyway, the latest greatest version of WordPress is here, WordPress 2.6. There are quite a few little fixes, but I’ll highlight the major ones that are the most useful to most of us:

Sorry I have been so bad with consistent posts lately. I’m working on a couple of WordPress projects that are diverting my attention and which I’ll share with you once they’re up (in beta). Anyway, on one of the current projects I installed the WordPress plugin, AJAXed WordPress, and implemented a trick to compress my CSS stylesheets to decrease load time.

Recently I’ve had to manipulate my OPML files to get some feeds and a blogroll to work the way I want. I found that there are fortunately quite a few options to get links and rss feed URLs to read and link the way I need and thought I would share these options with y’all. What is an OPML file you ask? Well, let me show you rather than tell you. Add “wp-links-opml.php” to the end of your home page URL for your WordPress blog (example: http://www.wordpresspad.com/wp-links-opml.php). See all that XML code gibberish, that’s your blogroll (list of links) as an outline.

I’ve been quite a busy bee these past few weeks and been so inconsistent with posting at The WordPress PAD. Other than learning how to use Drupal and Joomla content management systems, and the new WordPress 2.5, I’m also starting a blogging network for bloggers in the City of Oakland where I live, work and play…mostly. In doing the research for the design and development of the blog network, I’ve come a cross some great information, plugins and trends in blogging that all relate in a sense to a term I’ve just recently learned about yet apparently I have always been wanting to express in the perfect (in my mind) web presence. It’s called Lifestreaming. Lifestreaming is basically pulling all your web activities from multiple sources online on to one space, your web site.

The reason the WordPress PAD was off for a couple of weeks recently is because I was working on a new project dear to my heart. Oh, My! Oakland is a blog, directory and all around homage to the City of Oakland, where I live, work and play. Months and months ago I wanted to create a directory of Oakland businesses because I love Oakland and unlike other major and more organized surrounding cities like San Francisco, Oakland has a scattered web presence as far as websites dedicated to Oakland entertainment, information, business or anything for that matter outside of newspapers and official City of Oakland websites. A couple of weeks ago I decided to take the Oakland Photo Blog I created months back and expand it to a website completely devoted to promoting the positive in Oakland which includes a directory of other websites that are Oakland-centric. using a fabulous WordPress Directory Plugin that is truly impressive and customizable.