Over the past week I have been revamping the custom WordPress theme over at Lucernex to give it a more modern look without changing other aspects of the existing site. Additionally the client also had a number of very specific functions and plugins that they wanted to keep that I had to work around and interact with.

Joe V – The President of Lucernex – says:

Jim – this is excellent, my whole team loves the new site!

Over the last month I created a very cool, challenging custom WordPress theme for the good folks at The National Center for Weight and Wellness. Dr. Kahan is big time, he’s been on numerous national television shows and even talked at TED!

I think it turned out great, and Dr. Kahan just emailed me a thank you, so it’s all good…

Like all projects this custom WordPress theme had it own set of set of priorities and problems, but the client and I both like the way it turned out – so win/win

You can build a social network based on the power and flexibility of WordPress, but BuddyPress is not for the faint of heart – especially if you want to do extensive customization. It is not nearly as simple as creating a custom theme for a WordPress site – but it is very powerful indeed, and if you have a multi-user WordPress powered site it is definitively something that you should investigate.

And if you decide that you need help implementing a custom BuddyPress solution, just let me know – I have extensive experience with not only getting it all working but customizing the look and feel and getting a BuddyPress site bent to my ( and my clients ) will.

Need a custom mobile theme for your WordPress powered site? Get in touch with me – it is very affordable and if your logs are anything like mine more and more of my visitors are viewing my site on a mobile device…

Hey Now, I am very happy to present a new custom WordPress theme – Free to try Offers. Tim said:

Looks awesome! – You’ve really outdone yourself this time. It’s looking beautiful.

I am happy with the way that it is turning out as well – it’s fun creating a funky theme for a good site, and it is always awesome when everyone is happy with the result.

Hey Now – it’s been awhile but here it is – another free WordPress theme for you enjoyment: Danu.

Danu is a free, W3C-compliant, CSS-based WordPress theme featuring: multiple columns for posts, custom background and headers, custom menus, widget support, custom thumbnail images, additional page templates, and much much more… You can see it in action and download it over here.

WordPress is fairly secure – much more so then many other freely available CMS’ out there – but the security of your platform can be compromised by not keeping up to date. When the WordPress developers identify and patch potentially vulnerable holes in their software they announce what they have done – which gives the hackers info about vulnerabilities in older installations that have not been upgraded.

WordPress 3.1.3 is the latest release and beyond the security issues alluded to above it offers many advantages to older versions. I have not run into too many problems while upgrading my or my clients WP installations, but sometimes there can be issues that crop up with incompatible plugins, theme peccadillos, etc. So – the first thing to do is back it all up! Back up your theme, your database, everything – so if you have to roll back you can do so with grace.

Once you are all backed up I suggest going with the one button upgrade through the WordPress admin – it works very well and is easy enough for even my most non-technical clients and will not interfere with installations created by third party tools like fantastico. Once you do this, you can move on to updating your plugins, but do this one at a time and be prepared for issues with plugin upgrades. I have had many more problems upgrading third party plugins then I have upgrading WordPress itself. If you have ftp access, fire up your ftp program and navigate to your plugin directory. If you encounter a problem while upgrading a plugin, and it horks your whole site, you can delete that plugin via ftp and your site will come back up normally.

The 3.1.3 release is mostly security focused – it fixes clickjacking, sniffing out user names of non-authors, and Media security fixes but also fixes the maddening left over file issues if an import does not finish. Beyond that, if you are still using a version less that 3.0 there is a whole new world of features that you are missing out on: Custom Post Types, Specific author templates, menu manager, and more – so, go and get it if you are still using a 2.x – you will be glad you did.

I am working on upgrading a theme and installation for a client right now, I can do the same for you – just get in touch with me and I will send you my very reasonable rates.

I finished up a design and custom WordPress theme for Lindis Courtney over the weekend. I think I got very close to the look she was going for and that her custom theme turned out successfully. She obviously agrees – this is what she said:

Thank you so much! Now I know about widgets too.

You are a good man, James Kendall. I will be back for more projects and
tell all my fellow life coaching friends about you.

Thank you Lindis, great clients make great projects much easier.

If you are going to launch a new WordPress powered site, please host it somewhere reliable and appropriate. Which in a nutshell means not at Yahoo…