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How to Use the WordPress Media Manager Gallery

As of December 2012 and the release of WordPress Version 3.5, the new Media Manager has changed the way photo galleries are created. If you are new to WordPress, or have been using one of the photo gallery plugins and themes, then this post might help you use the built-in WordPress Media Manager to display photographs on your site.

Place your cursor at the point on your post or page where you want the photo galley to appear, and follow the following easy steps:

  1. Click on the Add Media button on the left, just above the Editor quick menu bar.
  2. Click on Create Gallery
  3. Click on the image you want to add
  4. Under Attachment Details fill in the following fields:
    • Title
    • Caption
    • Alt Text
    • Description
  5. Add as many photos from your media library into the gallery as required, repeating 3 and 4 above for each
  6. Click on Create a new gallery
  7. At the Edit Gallery screen drag the images into the required order.
  8. Under Gallery Settings Select the number of columns of thumbnails to display
  9. Click on Insert Gallery to finish.

You can then preview or publish your gallery of photographs in the usual way. If you decide that you need to add more photographs to the gallery, or change the order the pictures display, follow the following steps:

  1. Edit the post containing the gallery.
  2. Click on Visual editor tab, if not already selected.
  3. Click on the gallery you want to edit
  4. Click on the top left icon in the gallery (a camera picture)
  5. To add new images click on Add to Galley and proceed as before.
  6. Reorder or make any other required changes then click on Update Gallery.

That is it! All you need to do to use the new Media Manager to display photographs on your WordPress site.

For more information about using the built-in WordPress Media Manager, including a video of inserting a gallery then click here to visit How to Insert a WordPress Photo Gallery into Your Blog

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Update Atahualpa WordPress Theme

Expert WordPress users and regular readers of this blog will know that we recommend updating to the latest WordPress version regularly, to ensure that the any known security vulnerabilities are patched. Many people also take that opportunity to upgrade their favorite plugins and theme to ensure continued compatibility.

But what if you are using a highly configurable theme like Atahualpa? How do upgrade and yet keep all your custom settings, header images and favicon after the upgrade. The good news is that most of the theme settings for Atahualpa are stored in the database so that an upgrade will not lose that customization.

So how do you update the Atahualpa WordPress Theme when the time comes?

Before you update WordPress, your plugins or theme, backup your database, wp-content folder and wp-config.php files to make sure you can reverse out of the change in the event that there is a problem.

If you have used custom header images or made any changes to the page code in the Atahualpa theme, or set a shortcut icon, Web site icon, URL icon, or bookmark icon (favicon) than you will need to use the manual method to update the theme. If you are using the theme with default header images etc. or have a quick way to restore them after an upgrade, then you can use the WordPress update facility. However, the way we recommend is to Upgrade the theme manually, as follows:

  1. Backup your database.
  2. Backup the wp-content folder, which contains your themes, favicon and header images.
  3. Download the latest version of the theme to your computer.
  4. Unzip the file and copy in your custom images and delete the ones supplied.
  5. Check for any Atahualpa theme patches and apply them.
  6. Update any code changes you made in the previous version (experts only!)
  7. Add any custom templates you use to the new theme folder.
  8. Upload the theme folder to the ‘wp-content/themes’ themes folder on your host.
  9. Activate the the new theme via WordPress Dashboard, and test.

The new theme should now display correctly. But if you have a problem you can revert to the earlier version using Dashboard again. Common causes of problems are as follows:

  • Code customization which has not been correctly installed or has a negative impact in the new theme. Solution recheck the code is complete and in the correct location and retest.
  • Images using the full path name not displaying. Solution – Verify URL Names in WordPress options, or avoid using where possible.
  • WordPress menus not displaying. Solution – reselect the menus in Dashboard, Appearances, Menu.

So now we know how to update the Atahualpa WordPress Theme, which should make the task easier the next time!

Other Resources

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Have You Updated WordPress?

Unbelievable as it may seem, there are plenty of WordPress users who do not upgrade their installations to the latest version when they are released. This post should encourage every WordPress site administrator to Update WordPress as soon as possible.

There may be a number of reasons why you might want to upgrade WordPress, including:

  • A security fix has been released
  • Some useful new functionality has become available
  • You have seen a message at the top of your Dashboard telling you that a new release is available

The latest version of WordPress (3.4.1 at time of writing) comes with an impressive array of improvements including embedded Tweets, custom header from Media Library, and performance boosts under the hood, and of course all the latest security patches to ensure that your Blog is as secure as it can be.

Twitter Embeds
This is a great new feature which allows you to share Tweets with style. You can now embed individual tweets in posts, so that you can make a feature of a reference to another author or micro-blogger, or just highlight one of your own. Great for your personal marketing!

It includes action links that allow readers to reply to, retweet, and favorite the tweet, all without leaving your site. To use the feature, all you have to do is paste a tweet URL on its own line. When you save the post, it will look something like this:


This works with URLs from some other sites, too. For more, see the Codex article on Embeds.

Choose from Media Library
This useful feature of Custom Headers allows you to choose header images from your media library to customize your theme, rather than having to upload the same custom header image every time you check out a new theme.

Live Theme Previews
It is now possible to try out new themes and update the header and background before the theme is activated. This removes the panic to update those details as soon as you activate a new theme. Please note that this feature is only available for installed themes.

You can also use the live preview mode to customize your current theme by using the Customize link on the Themes screen.

Flexible Header Image Sizes
If your theme supports the feature, you can now decide for yourself how tall or wide your custom header image should be. From now on, themes will provide a recommended image size for custom headers rather than a fixed requirement.

Please note that not all current themes will support this feature, so contact your theme designer and ask them for the latest version of your theme.

Performance Boosts
Among the Performance Boosts available in the latest release of WordPress are the following:

  • Faster WP_Query – Post queries have been optimized to improve performance, especially for sites with large databases.
  • Faster Translations – The number of strings loaded in the WordPress front end has been greatly reduced, resulting in faster front page load times for localized installations. Also provides better support for East Asian languages, right-to-left languages, theme translations, and more.
  • Themes API – Key procedures in WordPress (WP_Theme, wp_get_themes(), wp_get_theme()) are faster, uses less memory, and makes use of persistent caching.

For more information about WordPress see WordPress Codex – Updating WordPress

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Featured Blog Raspberry Pi

Our featured WordPress blog this month is the site of Raspberry Pi, the official home of for the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

This site is attracting interesting because it provides news and information about the amazing, innovative, low-cost Raspberry Pi mini PC, which is claimed to sell for $25, which at UK prices is £31.86 inc VAT and shipping.

For those of you who have not heard about this wonder of modern electronics, the Raspberry Pi is a fully programmable ARM computer which is claimed to run almost any Linux distribution. It makes use of an on board GPU which is capable of high definition video playback, fast 3D processing capabilities and outputs to an HDMI or RCA video port. For a device the size of a credit card that is truly amazing!

Anyway, back to the Featured Blog, Raspberry Pi. This site uses the standard Twenty Eleven theme which comes installed with WordPress. Among the plugins, installed are Search by Google, which adds a Google search form widget, which replaces the WordPress default search. There is also WP Comment Master which is an alternative solution to display long lists of comments.

OK, to be strictly accurate this site is more interesting for being the home site for the amazing Raspberry Pi, and the opportunity to bring Linux to the masses, than for WordPress. Anyway visit the site and make up your own mind. Meanwhile we are waiting for delivery of our first Raspberry Pi!

Links

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Block Spam from WordPress Contact Page

Have you been having trouble with Spam from your Contact Page on your WordPress blog? This is a quick way to Block Spam from a WordPress Contact Page.

Every good website has a Contact page to ensure that users can get questions answers, and customers can engage before buying goods and services. The trouble is that every bad robot spider trawling the web knows that too, and targets input forms and contact pages. Pretty soon after putting your Contact Page live you can expect to start receiving emails about Viagra, poorly crafted meaningless comments containing back links, or just random strings of characters. While the delete key handles these things quickly and efficiently, the net effect is to dilute our energy which should be directed a answering the real questions from our customers. What we need is a better solution.

What Stops The Bots?
To stop the spiders from even posting the contact form we need to install a WordPress CAPTCHA plugin. A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a challenge-response test used to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer or Bot. It can be as simple as identifying if a picture of an animal is a cat or a dog, which is easy for a human, but a challenge for a Bot. The most common forms use distorted images of letters and numbers, which the human eye can easily distinguish due to pattern matching capabilities within our brains. Go humans!

How To Block Spam from a WordPress Contact Page
If you are using the Contact Form 7 plugin, there is a Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin which integrates right in to the Contact Form 7. While not strongly secure, it will at least stop the script kiddies and bots having an open door. To install it carry out the following steps:

  • In the Plugins section of the Dashboard, click on Add New
  • Search for plugins by keyword Term Really Simple CAPTCHA
  • Next to Really Simple CAPTCHA, click on Install Now

What Else Can Block Spam
If the Really Simple CAPTCHA plugin does not meet the requirements, there are a number of other measures we can use to block Spam from WordPress contact pages, including:

  • Secure CAPTCHA, which uses hard to break and easy to read secure CAPTCHA images from SecureCAPTCHA.net.
  • Contact Form by ContactMe.com, which is a fully customizable contact form which automatically adds your contacts to a free online contacts database.
  • Fast Secure Contact Form which supports sending mail to multiple departments, and redirects to any URL after the message is sent.

Hopefully using one of these methods we can see the back of spam contacts from the contacts page, and get back to the business of responding to or customers and genuine visitors.

Finally, some useful Resources to help block Spam from a WordPress Contact Page

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WordPress Update Out Of Memory Error Fixed

Have you had a problem in upgrading your WordPress version on a website hosted on 1and1? This problem has been reported on sites hosted on both 1and1.co.uk or 1and1.com, but may occur on sites hosted with other providers too. It occurs when you attempt an automatic upgrade on a working WordPress site to elevate to WordPress 3.0 or greater.

WordPress Update Error
The first thing you know about the problem is an error part way through the automatic update process, which looks something like this:

Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 28835840) (tried to allocate 3981531 bytes) in [Blog root path]/wp-includes/class-http.php on line 1426

According to numerous postings on other sites, this appears to relate to PHP memory allocation on shared servers, although checking the memory_limit on one of our problem sites using phpinfo() gives a much higher value than the problem scripts appear to require.

The error messages are not always the same, but samples which have been seen include:

  • Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 28835840) (tried to allocate 3981531 bytes) in [Blog root path]/wp-includes/class-http.php on line 1426
  • (similar message) in [Blog root path]/wp-admin/admin.php on line 40
  • (similar message) in [Blog root path]/wp-admin/includes/media.php on line 268

We host and support a large number of WordPress sites, most of which have upgraded without experiencing this problem. However, where it has occurred it is a challenge, as you should always update WordPress to the latest version to ensure that any security fixes are installed.

After trying a number of suggested cures unsuccessfully, including

  • Setting memory_limit = 48M in php.ini (No difference)
  • Editing the file with the error to add ini_set(’memory_limit’, ‘48M’); (No difference)
  • Adding define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ’64M’); to wp-settings.php. (Yep! No difference)
  • Adding a line php_value memory_limit 32M in .htaccess file (Which causes a fatal Internal Server Error)

WordPress Update Out Of Memory Error Solution
The fix for the WordPress Out Of Memory Error, on the problem site at least, was to disable all the installed plugins, and then carry out the automatic upgrade again. This time it ran like a dream, and the site was back in order once the plugins had been re-enabled, with WordPress 3.2.1 installed.

The only regret in finding the solution is that we did not disable the plugins one at a time, in order to see which one was the trigger. However, on a working site with a large following, that extra delay it did not seem appropriate.

Thanks for this blindingly simple solution to the Out Of Memory Error when upgrading WordPress go to David Orlo at DavidOrlo.com.
Click here to see how he found the fix

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Important WordPress Security Update Announced

In a direct email from Matt Mullenweg via the WordPress.org announcement list, news has reached our ears about an important WordPress Security Update, WordPress version 3.0.4.

Apparently, they have fixed a critical vulnerability in WordPress’ core HTML sanitation library, and because this library is used lots of places it’s important that everyone update as soon as possible.

We have already been busy updating dozens of WordPress sites we support, mostly without incident. We recommend you back up your site before upgrading, but upgrade soon.

We would like to wish all our readers, supporters and colleagues a merry Christmas break and a Happy New Year. Blog On!

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Quick Links to WordPress Resources

You probably know by now that WordPress is a world renown blogging platform, with millions of installs and active sites. You also know that at TechCo Systems we understand the need for small business to boost their Internet marketing without spending a fortune on advertising. That is why we recommend using a Blog to give you an Internet presence for boosting your marketing, or getting your message out there.

Here are some Quick Links to useful WordPress resources, which should help you to get started with a Blog based site to increase your marketing:

There is also a warning from Matt Mullenweg, one of the creators of WordPress about taking things too far:

If you want

Finally for those who like to see and hear the speakers tell you how to do things, see WordPress.tv

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The Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age Featured Blog

The featured Blog this week is The Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age, which is a WordPress Blog hosted at WordPress.com. It uses the Freshy theme by Jide and may be described as a comparative newcomer in the blogosphere, with its first post date-stamped on 28th June 2010.

The current headline post dated 8th September 2010 is a leader for a report entitled Better for Less: How to make Government IT deliver saving. This critical report by Liam Maxwell investigates the quagmire of government IT. In fact you might say that he has slammed the whole way that Government IT procurement is handled. The report is linked from the site, and should be read by anyone in government IT with responsibility for procurement.

The main reasons for singling out this site as a featured blog, is more about what it represents rather than it’s august history. This is a Think Tank, close to government which is criticizing the status quo. We consider that at least five of the seven examples of potential saving have merit, and the others may be examples where savings could be made without massive changes to the infrastructure

  • A test environment for development companies with easy access to rack-space
  • Open Source on the desktop through the use of Open Document Format
  • New models sought for software framework (may we suggest Apache, My SQL, PHP for a start)
  • Commoditization of Email and office productivity
  • Common Security Framework
  • Migrating Schools to Free email services
  • Prizes for IT innovation in education

Plaudits to The Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age for hosting this message on WordPress.com and using the most popular blogging platform on the planet – WordPress!

Click here to visit The Network for the Post-Bureaucratic Age

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Theme Update for TechCo Support Site

Those of you who visit TechCo Support regularly will notice that we have now updated our theme to Atahualpa 3.5.1. Atahualpa is a highly configurable WordPress theme which allows you to change hundreds of parameters and features to suit your needs

There are a huge number of configurable items, (268 according to BytesForAll, the theme creators) with five separate categories for changing the header area alone. The theme will support five columns, with one or two sidebars on either side, each of which can have a number of combination such as display on Pages, or Categories, or not. The sidebar combinations alone would fill a substantial article, so let it suffice to say that you can configure them to meet most requirements, no matter what they are.

Atahualpa features a distinctive rotating header image, which changes every time you load a page. This can be further rotated selecting from the WordPress dashboard, Appearance, then Atahualpa Theme Options, Header Images, Rotate header images with Javascript, and setting a value in seconds in the dropdown.

For this to work, you will need a selection of images of the correct header size: 1300 pixels width, by 160 pixels high by default. You can also select to have the images transition by fading out then in, in the same place.

To install the Atahualpa theme, there are two methods:
Automatic Install From the WordPress Dashboard

  • Click on Themes, Under Appearance
  • Select the Install Themes tab
  • Type Atahualpa in the textbox under Search for themes by keyword, author, or tag.
  • Ensure Term is selected in the Dropdown, and click Search
  • When the Atahualpa theme appears below, click Install
  • After the transparant overlay appears, click the Install Now button
  • You should then see messages including the following:
    • Unpacking the package…
    • Installing the theme…
    • Successfully installed the theme Atahualpa 3.4.9.
  • Activate the theme by clicking the Activate link next to Actions, and you are in business!

Manual Install
Alternatively, for those used to manually installing WordPress themes, you can download the package, unpack it and then upload it to the Themes directory on your site. You should end up with a directory called atahualpa351, or whatever is the version number. Atahualpa versions will happily coexist with earlier releases, so if there is something you do not like you can always revert to the earlier version.

This versatile theme from BytesForAll is available currently as version 3.5.3, which we are actively evaluating at the moment. The latest version of Atahualpa also includes support for the new WP 3+ menu system integrated with 2 Menu Locations (called Menu 1 and Menu 2). The original Page Menu Bar and Category Menu Bar will work if you don’t setup a menu with the new system. We will let you know as soon as we apply this update to our live sites

If you are interested in using Atahualpa on your own WordPress blog, then see

  • Bytes For All
  • Atahualpa Support Forum