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.

However, nine modules are in the Proposed Recommendation stage.

However, historically one of the problems with CSS and the various web browsers is that one browser will support some of the standards and not others, and likewise another browser may support a subset of those standards, or a completely different set of standards. So, building sites that render the same way in each of the popular browsers becomes rather tricky. At the time of this post, it appears that Google Chrome 4.1.x is the most compatible with the current stages of the many CSS3 modules. Unfortunately, from the perspective of the designer or developer, as of February, 2010, Google Chrome only accounts for a little less than 12% of all browsers. However, we could see those numbers change in the future. In fact, statistics show it was only a few years ago that over 55% of all web surfers were using Internet Explorer (IE5, IE6 & IE7) and only 36% were using Firefox. The latest results show that Firefox has nearly 47% of the browser market; while IE8, IE7 & IE6 all combined for only about 35% of the browser market. For many web designers this is a good trend because traditionally, IE has been responsible for countless hours of additional work and headaches in the continuing efforts of web professionals working to get pages that render the same in all other browsers to render the same in IE browsers. According to Microsoft, they plan for IE9 to work much better with the CSS3 modules; getting away from the proprietary nightmares in their pre-IE9 browsers. However, the downside is that with IE9 they will not be supporting Windows XP. So, this may backfire on Microsoft. The other major browsers, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Sarari and even Opera support XP. Plus, in potentially 70% of the world, PC users are still using XP and have not upgraded (term used loosely) to Windows Vista or even to Windows 7. From a designer/developer perspective I will be happy when the proprietary prefixes are not needed and multiple hacks in order to get a page to render the same in one browser as in another.

Also, over the years the display size and color depth that a designer needs to take into consideration have varied considerably. 640 x 480 resolution used to be popular. Then it was 800 x 600 which was most popular. Then 1024 x 768 became a popular screen resolution. Along with this we saw the color depth go from 8 bits, to 16 bits and now 24 to 32 bits is most common. Of course, when there was a large enough demographic using each of those three display resolutions and color depths many companies and website owners would want pages to load the same for each resolution; and colors to be consistent with the lowest common denominator of color depth. With newer technology and wide screen displays, as of January of this year, the 1024 x 768 resolution only accounted for 20% of the current screen size; while a whopping 76% were at higher resolution rates … with 1280 x 1024 being the most common.

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.

If you are familiar with Joomla then you are probably also familiar with Community Builder; a highly favored extension by thousands, to the Joomla CMS. I received word from the Joomlapolis Security Team that Joomlapolitan has advised anyone still using CB 1.1 to immediately update to 1.2.1 for security reasons. If you are running CB 1.1 make sure to update A.S.A.P.

For Joomla site owners and developers that are looking for a classified ad solution, JoomClan Classified Listings component has just released news of several fixes, including:

Fixes that address the following:

• ‘uddstart’ is undefined and other errors in IE8
• Unable to select my PayPal account
• Drop Down Select Option
• Free Ad Post Issue

I purchased and downloaded this component not too long back. I think it had the potential to be one of the best, if not the best classified listings component that runs native on Joomla 1.5.10 rather than the legacy Joomla. However, when I downloaded it (I believe it was their beta version, it still was a bit buggy) there were issues with that version that made in unworkable for my application at that time. I removed the application and they refunded my money promptly. There are only a small handful of options for classified ad extensions to Joomla. The JoomClan component, in my opinion, has the most to offer in its environment.

With that said, I have already downloaded the newly released version of Joomla; and I believe I will go ahead and get it setup and give it a test run on another site.

IE6 is a nightmare for web designers. Pages that are designed and look the same in all other A Grade browsers, will look differently on IE6, unless the website designer has used a bunch of CSS hacks to address these quirks inherent to Internet Explorer 6 and other quirks inherent in prior versions of Internet Explorer. I did have IE6 installed on one of my computers, IE7 on another and IE8 on another; along with Firefox, Safari and Chrome. However, not too long back I was using a computer with IE6 and was unable to even access a couple of sites, including my MySpace page. Unless I used a different browser I could not access those sites. If you have not experienced this yet, you probably will soon. If you have experienced it occasionally, you will likely run into the same problem more often, until your upgrade your browser.

Most likely, if you are using IE6 it is because it came installed on your computer and you do not want to have to install another browser due to fear of compatibility issues or time constraints. Understandably, I remember back when installing AOL, or Netscape would hose your ability to use Internet Explorer. At that time, the browsers did not like to play well with each other. They each wanted to be your only option. Now, it is quire different. You can download the latest versions of Firefox, Safari or Chrome and install any or all of them in a matter of minutes. If you install Firefox or Google Chrome you are prompted to import your IE favorites during the installation process. You can select any one of the browsers to be your default browser, and also you can check the option to have the browser check each time it loads, to see if it is the default browser. At any time, you can change which browser is your default browser.

Firefox, Chrome, Safari and even IE8 all offer tabbed browsing; meaning that you do not need to open new browser windows, unless you want to. Instead you can simply open another tab in the same window. My personal preference is Firefox because of the multitude of additional feature that I can benefit from.

Upgrade your browser and make IE6 a memory!

Apparently, Cricket does not support five digit codes. In fact, I read a post from about eight months ago, when a customer contacted Cricket to ask about making their phones Twitter-friendly. At that time, they did not know who the customer was talking about. Well, eight months later and they still do not have a friendly relationship.

Ping.fm is free to sign up and free to use. You can use it for updating your MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and other accounts, too.

When a mobile user wants to access the internet OpenWeb will take a non-compliant websites and convert those sites; and on the fly they will re-format the pages so that they can be viewed on phones and pda devices. The OpenWeb gateway will split the requested internet and radio transmissions and only deliver the type of information which the phone or mobile device is capable of displaying.

Technologically, this gateway application will render 100% Web 2.0 XHTML/MP content. Not only will the content be compressed for more efficient and faster delivery of pages; users can expect to see more intuitive features that deliver added benefits that save you time. From an advertising and revenue standpoint, this development should open the door to enhanced opportunities for mobile advertising. From the standpoint of the end user, this will enable millions of users to have access to millions of websites they previously would have been unable to access.

Cricket Communications uses OpenWave; so hopefully, Cricket users will see the benefit of this new gateway in the near future.

In short, the answer is no, it is not a quick process. Joomla contains thousands of files and if you are upgrading, you should set up a test server that is configured as closely as possible to your live Joomla site and then set up the test site. It can be fairly risky trying to update your live site; and bypass this step. It will take time of course. But, it is better than losing all of your work and countless hours invested.

If you are planning on a fresh install of Joomla, it is best if you have shell access. If you do not, trying to upload the files via ftp is a bit tricky. In fact, I have read that you cannot set it up via ftp. However, that is not entirely true. You can use Dreamweaver or other similar IDE to upload your Joomla files via ftp. However, you will need to open each folder and each sub-folder or sub-directory, and each of the sub-directories below and then only select part of the files to upload at one time. You will need to repeat this process as many times as necessary to upload all of the files. If you simply try to upload all of the files at one time, it may appear that the task completed okay; and you may even get a report that all files were uploaded. The fact is, not all of the files were actually uploaded. This can cause a lot of frustration trying to setup Joomla, if you think all the files are there; when in actuality they are not. So use SSH if you can.

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.