At this time I am also developing a new theme for this site and will submit a similar version of that new theme to the WordPress Repository for inclusion there, also. Hopefully, I will have the new theme, which I believe will be titled “Skyline Colors” uploaded to this site in the next week or so. There will be several theme options and multiple color options, too.

Below you will see some of the different color options available in the new theme.

Skyline Colors (Red Style)

Skyline Colors (Yellow Style)

Skyline Colors (Blue Style)

Skyline Colors (Green Style)

Skyline Colors (Magenta Style)

Skyline Colors (Gray Style)

The theme I recently released on the WordPress Repository, Wordsmith Anvil, has a number of features and some custom page templates. After taking a quick look at several sites that have downloaded this theme, I have made a few observations and thought it would be a good idea to make not of a few of them.

The font size for the title is designed to be fairly large. As a result, if the title of the blog has more than 15-18 characters it will not display very well (up through version 1.6.3). If your title contains more characters, you will need to edit the file main.css, located in the stylesheets directory. Decrease the font size until your title displays correctly … or select a blog title with less characters. NOTE: You will most likely need to also adjust the height, margin and/or padding on the header elements to accommodate your changes. DOWNLOAD VERSION 1.6.6 … I fixed it for you.

I have also seen several sites where someone has attempted to edit the pages and the end result is that the pages do not display correctly. I cannot provide an easy explanation that will address every possible edit to the pages in this theme. However, the best caveat is to save a backup of the page before you attempt to edit it. That way, if you delete something that breaks the page, you can always revert to the original version of the page and try again. One of the most common errors I have seen is removing an opening <div> or a closing </div> tag; and not deleting the companion tag. Every opening tag needs a closing tag. Otherwise, you end up with unexpected results. Your sidebar may not display correctly, or maybe your footer, or the widget areas above the footer, or the page itself may not display properly.

If you would like to use any of the page templates, take a few minutes to read through the FAQs, which you can find here. Without reading the FAQs, it is not likely you will be able to setup the page templates. You will need to understand what the custom fields are, and the directory structure.

I have also seen where a different header image has been uploaded which displays a title or other text. Unless you comment out the site title in the header.php file, you will see the title of your blog displayed over the top of the text in your header image; which, is not likely your intent. I may consider adding the option to enable or disable display of the site title in a subsequent version; as I have done for the tagline, and logo.

I have also seen where people have tried to hardcode in elements that are already made available in the theme options page; or install a plugin that does not have theme styling already built in. Unless you are very comfortable editing php code and comfortable with editing stylesheets your best bet is using the theme options to perform the functions they are designed to perform. If there is not a theme option available, then feel free to make a suggestion about other functionality you would like to see in future versions of this theme. Also, you might find other plugins that will perform functions that are not already built in.

Theme options include:

• Remove those pesky auto p tags
• Custom Logo options
• Custom Header Backgrounds
• Custom Background Options
• Custom Menus
• Five Widget Areas
• Tagline Display Option
• RSS and Social Network linking options
• Feedburner Subscribe Options
• External Feed Display Option
• Coupon or Special Text Display Box Options
• Footer Links Display Options
• Copyright Text Display Option

The current version can be downloaded from the WordPress Repository. At the time of this post, the current version available for download is 1.6.2. There was a minor display issue which only affected certain versions of Internet Explorer. This was corrected in version 1.6.3. If you have downloaded 1.6.2 and are wondering how to correct the display issue, you can find the solution here.

If you have a comment on this post, feel free to leave one here. If you have questions about the theme, or would like to have the theme customized for you, then use the links above. This post was not intended to be a Q & A Forum, or support page for the theme. … However, I may not have made that clear on the theme options page until version 1.6.8. So, because of that, there are a number of Q & A and support related comments found here. For future use, to centralize the support-related threads for the Wordsmith Anvil theme, please use the Feedback & Support Forum Page on the theme’s demo site.

Toms Real Estate Plug-In is being released to compliment the Realty One Theme; which was released three days ago. For your site visitors, they benefit from the added value of seeing listings that contain much more information about the property than they will find on other sites.

Providing added value to your customers and prospective customers will add value to your site, too. Plus, the administration for this plugin is very simple, yet very comprehensive. Here is a glimpse of Toms Real Estate Plug-In admin pages and options in the WordPress Admin area…

The admin area for this plugin includes:

• Misc Settings: A page for Basic Configuration including Google Map API
• Locations: A page for adding or removing cities, states and countries (All countries and US states are listed)
• Listings: A page for adding and editing listings
• Auctions: A page for adding and editing auctions

The main House for Sale Listings Admin Page displays for each listing:

• ID Number;
• PID Number (Property ID);
• Link to the listing page for this property listing;
• Label / Address;
• Status (Active, Not Active, SOLD) [Not Active Listings will not be displayed on the FRONT END];
• Date Last Updated;
• Edit Listing Link;
• At the top of the page: Displays the total number of listings and total number of listings sold;
• At the top of the page: Displays an Add Listing Link

Toms Real Estate PlugIn Admin Screen Shot 1

Toms Real Estate PlugIn Admin Screen Shot 2

Toms Real Estate PlugIn Admin Screen Shot 3

Toms Real Estate PlugIn Admin Screen Shot 4

• The House for Sale Add Listing Page and Edit Listing Page
  • Images:
    • Able to upload up to 20 images:
    • One image will be a featured image;
    • As each image is uploaded it will automatically create and save three re-sized images, in addition to the featured image;
  • Basic Listing Information:
    • Drop Down Select Lists for:
      • Property Status;
      • Property Type;
      • Neighborhood Info Link
      • Country, State & City;
      • Bedrooms;
      • Baths;
      • Zoned;
      • Property Type;
      • Construction Style;
      • Roof;
      • Insulation;
      • Kitchens;
      • Garages;
      • Garage Type;
      • Parking;
      • Levels;
      • Basement;
      • Water Heater;
      • Water;
      • Sewer;
      • Cooling;
      • Fireplace;
      • Heat Stove;
      • Deck-Balcony;
      • Storage Buildings – Playhouse – Structures;
      • Pool;
      • Hot Tub – Jacuzzi – Spa ;
      • Sauna – Steam;
    • Text Input fields for:
      • Title;
      • Selling Price;
      • House Number;
      • Street Name;
      • Other City (if not already listed in City Drop Down Select);
      • Zip Code;
      • Year Built;
      • Square Footage of Home;
      • Lot size;
      • Annual Taxes;
      • Assessed Value;
      • HOA Fees;
      • Low Fix Up Costs Estimate;
      • High Fix Up Costs Estimate;
      • Current Home Low Value;
      • Current Home High Value;
      • After Fix-Up Low Value;
      • After Fix-Up High Value;
      • BOFA Value;
      • Cyberhomes Value;
      • Eappraisal Value;
      • Home Gain Value;
      • RealQuest Value;
      • ValueCheck Value;
      • Zillow Value;
      • Property ID;
    • TextArea input:
      • Description;
      • Property Condition;
      • Email Blast Notice;
    • Dynamically Filled in Text Fields:
      • Listing URL for email blast (generated after the listing is created and you click UPDATE Listing once);
      • Subscribers Only URL  (generated the second time you click the UPDATE Listing link)
  • Comps (create the following fields for up to 12 comps) NOTE: Comps are taken from various sites and sometimes are in all CAPS, or have extraneous punctuation, or improper uppercase and lowercase, which do not display as desired. So, using some REGEX insure that all addresses display proper case; and for consistency insure that there are no periods displayed following “mi” in the proximity fields and likewise “sq ft” is displayed without periods.
    • Address;
    • Proximity;
    • Sales Price;
    • Sales Date;
    • Beds;
    • Baths;
    • Sq Ft;
    • Year Built;
  • More Options:
    • Interior Features (Six Drop Down Select Menus so that each listing can display up to six interior features)
      • Not Available is selected default
      • Plus 30 other interior feature options
    • Kitchen Features (Six Drop Down Select Menus so that each listing can display up to six kitchen features)
      • Not Available is selected default
      • Plus 25 other kitchen feature options
    • Notable Rooms n Areas (Six Drop Down Select Menus so that each listing can display up to six notable rooms n areas features)
      • Not Available is selected default
      • Plus 21 other notable rooms n areas options
    • Exterior Features (Six Drop Down Select Menus so that each listing can display up to six exterior features)
      • Not Available is selected default
      • Plus 41 other exterior feature options
    • Miscellaneous Features (Six Drop Down Select Menus so that each listing can display up to six miscellaneous features)
      • Not Available is selected default
      • Plus 31 other miscellaneous feature options
    • HOA Benefits (Six Drop Down Select Menus so that each listing can display up to six HOA Benefits)
      • Not Available is selected default
      • Plus 35 other HOA Benefits options
    • Terms (Twelve Drop Down Menus)
      • N/A is selected default
      • Else the option is to display the term
    • Showing Options (Twelve Drop Down Menus)
      • N/A is selected default
      • Else the option is to display the Showing Option
  • Contact Information:
    • Agent/Contact Name;
    • Company Email or Agent Email;
    • Company Fax or Agent Fax;
    • Agent Phone;
    • Special Instructions;
    • Contact Display Options
      • Display Contact Information
      • Display Contact Form
      • Do Display Contact Information

Toms Real Estate PlugIn Admin Screen Shot 5

• Other Noteworthy Features & Benefits
  • The House for Auction Add Listing Page and Edit Listing Page
    • This is almost identical to the House for Sale Add Listing Page with a few minor exceptions.
  • The Advanced Search Widget
    • The Search Widget allow your site visitors to search your listings by location, price range, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms and even by number of levels; or by a combination of these different options.
  • The Locations Search Widget
    • The Locations Search Widget allow your site visitors to click on links for cities, states and countries where you have listings.
      • Only Cities, States & Countries where you have listings will be displayed as links in the sidebar, footer or other widgetized area where you place this widget.
  • Display
    • The Google Map displayed on the Homes for Sale Page and on Search result pages displays markers for each of the properties listed.
      • When you click on a marker a small window pops up with the title, price, thumbnail, brief excerpt and link to the property listing page.

You can order Toms Real Estate Listing Plug-In from the link at the bottom of the Order Page.

Toms Skyline Design has developed and bundled a couple of custom plugins to compliment this theme. You have the option of purchasing the theme by itself, or you can purchase the theme and the plugins together, or you can always get the theme now and purchase the plugins separately later.

The delay in releasing this theme and the accompanying plugins was because the first version of the theme had been designed to be compatible with WordPress 2.9.2. However, at about the time it and the associated custom plugins were near completion, a newer version of WordPress was released … WordPress 3 Beta. There were a number of changes in the new version of WordPress and some of the prior code was deprecated. Also, efforts were being focused on another project that was just beginning at that time; which meant there was no time to validate the code in the theme and make any necessary adjustments to make it compatible with the new WordPress 3+ versions. So due to the release of result of WordPress 3.0 and the resulting changes therein, the theme was not released in the summer. Earlier this month I started reviewing the code, made some necessary adjustments and fixed a number of little bugs, too.

As referenced above, the Realty One Theme is available by itself or can also be purchased along with a bundle of custom plug-ins to facilitate listings, require visitors to login to view all or portions of the site, integrate with a comprehensive list application (phpList), as well as, being able to integrate the list application with email blasts that take advantage of sites that require visitors to login. For reference, phpList is an Open Source application that is free to use. NOTE: It does require an intermediate to advanced level of skill and understanding of PHP to fully set it up and integrate phpList with WordPress. Once setup properly both applications can be used on the same site and play well together.

Click to View Realty One Quick View Screen Shots Gallery

Read All the Details About the Realty One Theme on the Theme Description Page …

Realty One Theme Now Only $29.00

Development started using WordPress 2.9.2. Prior to completing the theme, WordPress came out with WP 3 and WP3+. Realty One has not been tested on WP 3+.

Screen Shot of Home Page Featured Slider

Realty One utilizes a couple of back end admin listings pages; with, literally hundreds of options. Adding photos to your listings is a breeze; and all the thumbnails, and various sizes of images are created for you. All you do is upload the large size images you want displayed and the rest of the work is done for you. As a site owner or a site visitor, you will appreciate the Google Maps on the main listings pages and each individual listing pages, too. You can even search the listings by various criteria.

Using the Realty One Theme including all the plugins as initially built, allows the site owner to allow visitors full access to the site, require registration for portions of the site, or require registration for the entire site. Additionally, if the site owner maintains a marketing list, the Realty One Theme is already configured to integrate with a Mailing List application; including a signup page. NOTE: The mailing list application configured with Realty One, is very robust and managed from a separate admin panel.

Click to Play Video

If you are interested in using Realty One for your Real Estate or Manufactured Home related business, please contact me for more information.

When Elsie contacted Toms Skyline Design for this project, she wanted to use the Esther Theme for WordPress. However, the color scheme was not to her liking, she wanted some type of menu boxes on the home page and to compound the navigation issue … there was no menu or navigation system with this theme.

Additionally, the photo frame at the top of the page took up a major portion of the screen; which took up way too much real estate. So, the color theme was changed, the photo frame was reduced for better aesthetics; and a navigation menu was created for use on all pages except the home page. A different menu was created for the home page, using box graphics; which, are carried through the theme, where practical.

On her site, Sonya says she will share

[...] with you inside knowledge of the publishing industry, the process of getting your book published, how to build a platform and additional insights on how to promote yourself.

Interestingly enough, the site does not have its own blog; however, it does link to a blog on one of their new sister sites. LHP says it is their aim to positively impact the world, one book & one magazine at a time. Their mission is to help today’s writers become tomorrow’s authors.

The LHP site is using the latest version of a Bytes for All Atahualpa theme; setup, configured and slightly customized by Toms Skyline Design; who is a Bytes for All Gold Member.

When I talked with Dr Alvarez about the purpose of her site, the plans for her practice and her target audience my suggestion was to create a WordPress site to accommodate the current needs and be flexible and scalable for future usage. Dr Alvarez had some colors she wanted to use and wanted a minimalist Zen-styled look and feel to the site. So, I custom designed a very simple theme that matched the color scheme she wanted and fit the style she was looking for. I titled this WordPress theme, SkylineZen. You will not find any fancy sliders, rotating headers, or ad rotators on this site. However, it does provide the functionality and matches the design that Dr Alavarez desired; and allowed her to be able to have her interim VistaPrint website closed and that url pointed to here new site. In other words, you can access Dr Alvarez at http://www.kathyalvarezmd.com or at http://www.partnersinwellnessswpdx.com SkylineZen is not currently available on the Wordress.org site.

In the past, Dr Wright had maintained this practice as a walk-in clinic. However, Dr Alvarez wanted to convert the practice so that patients scheduled appointments rather than having walk-ins. Accordingly, I asked Dr Alvarez if she wanted her patients to be able to schedule appointments from her site. She thought that would be a great idea, so I added a plugin to the site that would provide this option to visitors on the site. The result of this website and the online scheduling has been a resounding success…

… per a recent comment from Dr Alvarez …

… thanks Tom
the feedback on the website and the scheduling has been all positive!

Dr Alvarez has not yet had time to start blogging, so I have disabled the display of blog posts until she is ready to start blogging and publishing articles on her site.

Let me know if you liked the prior Flash movie header better, or the current header that changes its look when you hover over it.

This WordPress theme includes a slider that utilizes the new set thumbnail functionality in WordPress 2.9.2 and later. The theme includes several options and is a two-column type theme, with a widgetized sidebar and widgetized footer.

I also created this header image of a loupe and documents that I thought I would showcase here as well.

What they wanted was a new WordPress theme that would represent their business and their connection to the local historic aspects of St Johns. Toms Skyline Design created a new site for them, which of course, includes a lot of CSS, PHP and image editing. Now they only need to begin re-adding content. Good Luck to everyone over at Plews Brews.

The site I have been working on is for a local organic restaurant in the St Johns area of Portland, Oregon. Angel, the owner of the restaurant, The LadyBug Cafe, was in need of a face-lift …

and talked with another St Johns business owner, Jeffrey Selin of the Dojo Creative Agency and they decided to make the switch. Jeffrey and the Dojo, whom I perform behind the scene Web & WordPress Development for, asked me to help him make the face-lift for the Ladybug site become a reality.

And … Woila … here it is

[UPDATE: Sadly, a few months later this establishment in the St Johns area closed its doors and went out of business]

What’s wrong here? I double checked the general settings in the admin site and confirmed my time zone was set to UTC-8, which is PST, where I am located. I tried to change it to a different time zone and back to my time zone and saved the settings; thinking maybe they somehow did not get saved previously. However, that changed nothing. My next thought was that my site host server was generating a wrong timestamp. So, I called them to let them know about the problem. They checked their server and it had the right time.

So, I put together a quick little PHP script to display the time and a message and uploaded it to my site, outside of the WordPress installation. To my surprise the time displayed was correct. The good news is that I had isolated the issue to within WordPress. Now, it was a matter of figuring out which file in the new version was causing this problem.
With a bit of detective work I discovered the file that was causing me the grief. The culprit file was wp-settings.php At about line 21 there were two lines of code that were not in my prior version of WordPress. Those lines looked like this:

if ( function_exists('date_default_timezone_set') )
date_default_timezone_set('UTC');

What has happened is that WordPress hard-coded in UTC as your default time zone. So, regardless what time you set your time zone to in the admin panel, this file was going to override those settings and stamp your posts with UTC time. What is UTC time? UTC is the term used for Coordinated Universal Time. You have probably heard of GMT, too. GMT is the acronym for Greenwich Mean Time. UTC is a more technical time and is the standard for this purpose, rather than GMT; although you may see GMT being used synonymously with UTC. However, historically, UTC displaced GMT as the basis for the main reference time scale in many regions about 38 years ago.

The date_default_timezone_set() is a PHP function.

Inside the (…) the timezone_identifier is placed. If the timezone_identifier is your time zone, then timestamps will display correctly with your current time. However, if the information is for a different time zone than yours, you will not see your current time displayed. Additionally, if the timezone_identifier is not valid, it simply will not work at all … which would create more problems.

So, for me there were two ways to fix the problem. I could either change the second line of code to read:

date_default_timezone_set('UTC-8');
or

date_default_timezone_set('America/Los_Angeles');

Both of those are acceptable timezone_identifiers for PST.

Depending upon where you are located, you may need to enter a different identifier. You can view a list of supported time zones in the second format from the PHP site here; or check this Navy site for an example of various UTC time zone conversions. However, if you want to convert a time from one time zone to another, try this time zone converter.

These are all good questions and most likely you answered yes to one or more of them … and that’s how you found this page.

So, what do I do? How do I get my WordPress site back? How do I recover without losing everything?

Well, fortunately you just backed up your WordPress files earlier today and you can delete all your WordPress files except your wp-config.php file and the wp-content folder; and then upload the files you backed up, right? You didn’t back your files up earlier? Okay … do you have the same version of WordPress files on your computer as you had installed? Or, had you upgraded your installation and have a different version of WordPress on your computer?

It might be this actually happened while you were upgrading from one version to another. Or it could have happened when you were attempting to upgrade a plugin, when you didn’t read the details first. You may have been upgrading WordPress and did not deactivate your plugins first. If either of these scenarios sound familiar, you are probably trying to figure out how to fix this mess. It could be that one of your plugins is incompatible with the newer version of WordPress, too.

Let’s start with first things first. If you do not have all the WordPress files on your computer which you had on your server, you can get a copy of whatever version you had installed by going to the WordPress Download Release Archive. Download the version you need, if applicable. As you get ready to fix the problem, an important caveat is DO NOT overwrite your wp-config.php file because it contains your database name, database username, database password and without this information you will not connect to your WordPress database. That would not be good.

If you delete all the WordPress files on your server, except wp-config.php and the folder wp-content you will be ready to upload the former version that was working. However, depending upon what you were doing when this error occurred, you might also want to consider adding one more step. Create a new folder outside of your WordPress installation and move all your plugin folders to the new folder you created. Now upload the WordPress folders and files and you should have access to your site again.

If you were not upgrading plugins when this happened, you should be able to move your plugin folders back and then reactivate each plugin. On the other hand, if you were upgrading a plugin when this happened you may need to locate the prior version of the plugin and upload it instead. Once you have your site back, make sure to back it up and backup your database, too.

Now, if you were trying to upgrade your WordPress version, make sure to deactivate all your plugins. With current backups, the other consideration is whether or not your WordPress theme will work well with the newer version of WordPress. If you can verify it is compatible, then go ahead and try it again. Once you upgrade, you should be able to reactivate your plugins. You may want to activate them one by one and check to make sure your site is working okay after each plugin activation. This will help you isolate a problem plugin.

If this was helpful, let me know.

Its Another Portland Skyline

Also, several months ago I converted this site over to a WordPress site and also have my old Rants, Raves & Insights blog up and running on this site, too; notwithstanding that I have not posted to it in almost forever it seems. What I noticed was that I had grown tired of the theme I had been using and decided to build a new WordPress theme from the ground up. You are looking at it. I call this WordPress theme, Skyline Two. Website design, coding, Photoshop design and slicing, Flash design and a bunch of PHP coding all go into developing something like this.

This is the second WordPress theme I have built from scratch in the past few weeks. You can see the other theme at Portlands Foreclosures. I also created a landing page for them too. Check out the “Coming Soon” link on that site to see a Real Estate Listings mockup with a nifty Flash intro.

Speaking of Flash … if you haven’t clicked on the PLAY INTRO link on the header image above … do so now. That’s another Flash intro that I am using here; because I Flash adds to a site, but an entire Flash Driven site is not so good for most sites, because Flash still is not as search engine friendly as standard XHTML and CSS driven sites. Nonetheless, Flash still looks cool and adds some pizazz to a site. In fact, I have recently put together a couple other sites that include Flash banners. Check out Just Settle My Debts and Renegotiate My Home Loan websites.

Rather than run on a bunch on this post, I will keep it short by saying that I have also been doing some social media marketing with Facebook and Twitter, some online classified marketing, developed some landing pages, tying some of them to lists and autoresponders. I also put together a few ebooks and done a little bit of work with Joomla, too. I will write more later to update the site.

I am talking about this now, because, you may have noticed my site was down for a few hours today. I didn’t really want it to be down. However, the upside is that I am now working with a really great web hosting service that should make my life easier; so I can focus on positive activity rather than spending my time trying to troubleshoot server and support issues.

I transferred several domains over to my new hosting partner today; and for the most part, everything went off without a hitch. In fact, on one of my other domains I was able to quickly install and configure the newest release of Joomla in a matter of a few minutes. This would have taken me several hours with my former web hosting partner. The biggest issue I had with transferring this site was that my database import said it went okay, however, it missed chunks of data here and there. Also, I did not use shell access and ftp’d everything; which, normally is fine. However, I did discover that some files did not upload the first time around. So, this caused me a little grief. Fortunately, I have experienced that before and was able to recognize where the potential issue was at.

All said, I don’t think I lost more than three or four hours, with the transfers and setup. Now, with a great hosting partner, I can focus on design and marketing.

In the process, I have included a plugin which added a Twitter button on all pages, posts and comments. So, now if you place a comment to any posts on this site you can tweet it, too.

I am using WordPress 2.7.1 and have been unable to upload images using the Flash uploader or image uploader. Every time I try to upload an image Firefox crashes. I am using Firefox 3.0.10. I was not sure what was happening. However, it is a pain when there are plugins that require this method to upload images that can be accessed for their respective application.

I also had been having problems that were specific to Firefox; with being able to add widgets to the right sidebar, using the new dynamic sidebars in WordPress. I really like using Firefox, so these issues have been a little disconcerting. What I discovered about the image uploader crashing is that after I deactivated Google Gears, Firefox does not crash when I try to upload images. So that seemed to be the fix for this issue.

If you are having the same problem, check to see if you have installed the Gears addon. You can find that from the Menu Bar. Click on Tools and you will see Addons in the dropdown menu. Select Addons and see if you have Gears installed and activated. If so, deactivating may be the solution; however, it may be necessary to uninstall it, too.

Hopefully, this will help someone else experiencing the same issue.