That said, I’ll begin by mentioning that I’ve been working extensively lately with the WPMU DEV WordPress Membership plugin (the Premium version) and I just have to say it’s one beautiful beast! But it’s also incredibly complex, and while I’ve been working out tutorials lately to help people come to grips with it, lo and behold, the WPMU DEV team made a major push in getting some tutorials released.

And they done a mighty fine job too! Here’s the latest!

http://wpmu.org/create-a-simple-tutorial-site-with-the-wpmu-dev-membership-plugin/

I’ve been reyling on Artisteer for quite a while now to provide me with some basic website layouts upon which I can build. But I’ve grown weary of constantly having to use FTP to make extensive code changes or even layout alterations.

Headway allows me to handle just about everything involved in the layout, design and development process directly from the admin area, even otherwise laborious PHP code changes. And while it’s only for WordPress (Artsiteer handles Joomla and Drupal themes plus some),  with it, I’m able to rather easily achieve just about anything I would otherwise only be capable of easily doing through Drupal.

Needless to say, this is going to be an exciting move for myself. And as a testament to how awesome the theme is, I was able to migrate the gist of the Artisteer-based design from this site over to Headway in a matter of an hour.

While the article doesn’t focus on WPMU Dev’s Pop-over Plugin, it does point to the perfect use of the search-based ad concept using that plugin. And it just so happens that this plugin really was the best candidate for the job. In fact, I integrated this code roughly a week before having learned of the WPMU Dev job availability, having chosen this plugin as the best method for achieving my goal.

http://www.wordpressexploit.com/

Being that plugins really provide the crux of features people popularly rely on, it’s good they decided to list plugin-related exploits as well. It’s just a fact that the more plugins you have running on a WordPress site, the more opportunities hackers will have of finding an exploit, but at least this list of reported exploits will aid in the security process.

The easiest way I’ve found to achieve this is as follows:

From the main menu, navigate to System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts.

Locate the category Desktop then locate the action Log Out. Click on the Ctrl-Alt-Del text and you should see the text change to “New Shortcut…”. Press a sequence of keys to change this, preferably something unobtrusive like “Ctrl-Alt-Escape”.

Now, click the Add button at the bottom and enter something like “System Monitor” for the Name and for the Command, enter “gnome-system-monitor”. Press Apply to add it.

Find this newly added shortcut at the bottom of the listing under “Custom”. Notice the “disabled” text under the Shortcut column. Click on this and press Ctrl-Alt-Del to make this the new key sequence.

Press Close and you’re all done.

To hide the admin menubar in a Buddypress installation, you’ll want to either alter or create a file called “bp-custom.php” in the wp-content/plugins folder on your server. To clarify, if this file doesn’t exist in that folder, you’ll have to create it.

In this “bp-custom.php” file, you’ll want to copy and paste the following:

define('BP_DISABLE_ADMIN_BAR', true);

If the file is empty, just copy and paste it right into that empty file and if the file already has more in it, this can be pasted safely at the beginning or end of the file.

The home page title should no longer show on the home page as an article.

This post is a slight variation on my previous post regarding the removal of the header title from WordPress blogs. The method used in that previous post to remove the title text from the header section of WordPress blogs will not work with Artisteer 2 generated WordPress templates, though it turns out that such removal is actually quite intuitive.

To remove the title text, simply open the style.css file located in the generated template folder and find the section that reads h1.logo-name. That portion of the file should read similarly to the following:

h1.logo-name
{
display: block;

Simply change the block to read none as follows:

h1.logo-name
{
display: none;

One more quick change and we’re done. Following that section above, there should be a similar section which reads as follows:

.logo-text
{
display: block;

Change that block to read none as follows:

.logo-text
{
display: none;

And we’re done. The blog title should no longer show as text, leaving us with just the pretty background logo we’ve created.

The problem: WordPress displays the title of a blog in the header section even if there is an underlying graphic that is meant to replace the text title.

The solution: In the template being used, add the following line anywhere in the style.css file:

#header h1 { display:none }

To be sure, there are other methods of removing the textual title, but they have their problems. For instance, just deleting the title name from the WordPress admin interface has the effect of displaying no title name on the browser window and the title will also not show in search engines and rss feeds. Another possibility is editing the header.php file to remove the title display, but again, the browser wouldn’t display the title either. Editing the css rather than the php has the benefit of having no bad side-effects.

So, in searching Google for something to the effect of “Flash z-order”, I ultimately came to some pages explaining that the more recent browsers/browser versions came equipped with capabilities which allow Flash swfs to operate alongside DHTML elements as if the two were meant to work together.

Basically, the code calling the Flash swf just needs to state something to the effect of <param value="opaque" name="wmode" />.

The following is the precise code used to call my particular swf, reformers.swf:

I’m not sure how long this site will be in its current state, but for now at least, the following link should illustrate the meshing of the DHTML and Flash swf.

http://haveatulip.com