Foster Solutions (FSI)

This was an email posted in the wwwac.org listserv.  It's a nice overview of the pros and cons of the "big three" open source CMSs. WordPress is wonderful for a basic content site, especially for blogs and personal stuff. Lots of plugins to add fun...

If you need to migrate WordPress to another server, sometimes it will have a different URL. That will break all the image links in the content of the pages. The best thing to do is do a bulk replace in MySQL.  The command is as follows update wp_p...

Sometimes you want to show future posts, likely when you have posts that are events. <?php // ------------ added for events to show future if(is_category('events')) query_posts($query_string . '&order=ASC&post_status=future'); while (...

Whether you’re a beginner in SEO or a seasoned pro, it’s important to keep up on how your pages will be displayed in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) across each engine. Every engine displays your page differently and depending on what yo...

One must be very wary of paying for SEO on their site. Click HERE for a harsh critique of those making a living doing SEO. Here is a useful short video from Google saying they don't use meta keyword tags at all:

Thanks Matt Varone on this function to check if the current page is a subpage.  WP should have made this a core function http://www.mattvarone.com/wordpress/is_subpage-function/ A useful companion item is to create a template for a parent page w...

Cursors are frowned upon, but I have found times when performance of update query sets are too slow.  I believe this happens when the recovery model is full. The T-SQL below creates a cursor on a table and then steps through each record and updates...

WordPress is an amazing product, and Fantastico Deluxe helps with the install, but there are some issues and best practices. When installing WP using Fantastico, make sure the permissions are secure after installation.  Fantastico usually sets perm...

After my latest Wordpress update (manually exporting mysql) I ended up with all my apostrophes appearing as “â€TM” –stupid junk characters.  I finally figured out the solution, even though I don't know exactly why it happened. It was quit...

It would be nice for SQL Server to copy rows like Excel. It is a pain to include all the fields.  Below is dynamic SQL to copy the entire row based on the auto id number: [code] declare @sql varchar(8000) DECLARE @TableName varchar(100) SELECT...

Floats field types have their perils.  It is the field type that often defaults on an import from Excel, where the field type has to be guessed. If you try to change the field type to VarChar you get something like "4.00309e+006" You can first c...

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are all the rage, though both systems are merely new approaches to age-old marketing principles that successful companies have always benefited from. Wikipedia defines SEO as the proc...

If you want to create a clickable area right over the logo background image, here is what you do. You can't just copy the #header div, position it over the logo, make the content invisible and enclose it in an anchor-tag. That would be broken HTML, ...

Every system or framework has its idiosyncrasies.  One for WordPress is embedding Flash files.  It doesn't happen easily. Usually you could just embed an object right in the header.php or template file and it will work.  But for some reason nothi...

I've installed a lot of WordPress sites, and on some hosting sites there is a problem with file permissions, where WordPress doesn't have the ability to use FTP, and prompts the user in the admin section to enter the FTP information.  This is a pain, ...