ProPhoto - Premium Wordpress Theme for Professional Photographers - Single Column, big pictures - Blog Template

I finally finished creating some new videos showing and explaining the new WordPress 2.5 admin interface, and here they are. If you’re already pretty familiar with WordPress, these might be a little basic, but if you’re new to WordPress, there is a lot of info covered here that might be useful to you.

Of special note might be the first video, which explains in some detail most of the posting and image uploading features in WordPress 2.5. The image upload feature especially has stumped some people (it is kind of counter-intuitive), so it might be worth watching.

NOTE: I’m pretty sure there is a bug in WP 2.5 that makes uploading and inserting images almost impossible if you are using Internet Explorer 7. Use Firefox instead and you should be fine. I’m pretty confident WP will fix this soon. But, why are you using Internet Explorer anyway? Firefox is faster, safer, and more powerful. But I’ll save that rant for another day…

Let me know if these videos are useful!

Video: WP Admin Area - Writing Posts

Video: WP Admin Area - Manage Tab

Video: WP Admin Area - Design Tab

Video: WP Admin Area - Comments

Video: WP Admin Area - Settings Tab

Video: WP Admin Area - Plugins

Video: WP Admin Area - Users

Here’s a quick tip to optimize your blog a bit: update your list of ping services. Pinging is kind of like announcing to the web world whenever you have a new post or new content, and helps get your posts and pages indexed by search engines faster.

To update your ping services go to “Settings” (”Options” in WP 2.3.3 and earlier) –> “Writing” and scroll down to the bottom of the page. Then paste in the following (fairly exhaustive) list of pinging services:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.newsgator.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://www.wasalive.com/ping/
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

Click to update changes, and you’re all set. Now your voice got a little bit louder in the blogosphere.

This past Saturday, March 29, WordPress released it’s most significant upgrade in many months, version 2.5. Unless you just installed or are an uber-geek like me and have been playing around with unstable pre-releases, that means you’re probably getting the above message in your WordPress Admin panel. I’m going to have a lot more info and a video or two in the days to come about this, but for now here are a couple important things to know

1. Do you need to upgrade? Yes, eventually, but there’s no extreme hurry. In fact, unless you’re a very confident WP user, I recommend not upgrading just yet because I’m going to come out with some very helpful upgrading info soon. You’ll be fine to wait a week or two or even several months. You should eventually upgrade though, because there are security improvements, and you want to keep a few steps ahead of hackers and spammers.
2. Will ProPhoto still work with 2.5? Yes, ProPhoto works smashingly with WordPress 2.5. If you have lots of 3rd party plugins, I can’t vouch for all of those working perfectly, but ProPhoto and its standard plugins work great. No need to worry. NOTE: there was a small glitch discovered between ProPhoto and WP 2.5 related to maximum photo width in posts, but I’ve already fixed it, and I’ve written up the fix in here for those upgrading to WP 2.5 who downloaded ProPhoto before I fixed the glitch.
3. What’s in the upgrade? The biggest thing about this upgrade is a huge overhaul to the Admin area. It’s simpler, less cluttered, more intuitive, and more powerful. It’s got better post-writing features and cool things like the ability to upload many photos at once (yay!).
4. Are you going to update the videos on your site? Yup. My tutorial videos are pretty much all out of date now, so they’ll be replaced soon. I needed to replace them anyway, I cranked them all out in one evening waaaay to fast.

If you are a WP veteran and want to upgrade right now, go for it. Otherwise, wait a few days and keep checking here for lots more info on how to upgrade. If you are upgrading now, here are the basic steps:

1. Backup your mySQL database, wp-content/uploads folder, and wp-config.php file.
2. Deactivate ALL your plugins.
3. Delete the old WordPress files off your server, except DO NOT delete the wp-content folder OR the wp-config.php file.
4. Upload all the new files (get the .zip file from here), except except DO NOT upload the wp-content folder. In fact, remove it before you upload anything just to be safe.
5. Try to login to your admin area, and you will be prompted to upgrade your database. Do it.
6. Open a can of delicious Coke Zero to celebrate your successful upgrade while you tour the new admin interface.

Without a doubt, I have a number one all time, inter-galactic champion, most important tip ever for ProPhoto blog users:

THOU SHALT BE COMPLETELY OBSESSED WITH PAGE LOAD SPEED ABOVE ALL ELSE.

What do I mean by that? Well, the great strength of the ProPhoto theme is also it’s tragic flaw: huge pictures. Huge pictures make our blogs awesome. They can also make them very slow to load. Our friends and fans and clients will not put up with sites that take forever to load. Remember, we as photographers tend to have really good high-speed internet connections because of our unique needs (4GB uploads to Pictage ring a bell for anyone?), but most people are not so lucky. The last thing you want to do is frustrate your users because your site takes forever to load.

What to do? I’m glad you asked. Here are 5 ways to dramatically improve your page load speeds:

1. Reduce the number of posts that appear on each page. This is the most important single thing you can do to reduce page load times. I heartily recommend keeping your posts per page somewhere between 4 and 6. If you tend to post a lot of pictures per post, I’d go for 4 posts. If you only post a few pictures per post, 6 might be fine. This can be changed by going to “Options” –> “Reading” (or “Settings” –> “Reading” if you’re on WP 2.5 already) and putting a number other than the default 10 in where it says: “Blog Posts: Show at most: _____ posts”
2. Optimize, Optimize, Optimize. Most of you post images that are 900px by 600px, since this is the size the blog was created for. (Some of you post even bigger pictures than that–Mark Ridout does.) These pictures should be about 100k - 200k in file size, depending on the complexity of the image. If your pictures are consistently bigger than that, you should probably tweak your export settings out of Photoshop or Lightroom. I usually use Photoshop’s “Save for Web and Devices” export dialog and set it to JPG –> Quality 80. (more on this…)
3. Optimize your logo, biopic, and masthead (flash fader) images as well. See if you can shrink the file sizes on all these images at all without losing too much quality, to speed up page load.
4. Background image beware! A lot of you have taken advantage of ProPhoto’s ability for you to upload your own background image. This image, even more so then your other images, should be extremely lightweight. I recommend keeping it below 100k (below 50k is better) if possible. Small, repeating GIF files work great for this. A few of you have tried to use background images that were several megabytes in size. That’s way to big.
5. Check back for a post coming soon about a plugin you can (and should) install that can shave up to a second or two off every single page load. This deserves its whole own post, so I will write it up later.

I honestly think having a speedy blog makes it much more user friendly, and much more likely that people will keep coming back day after day to see your pictures. So, be a Nazi about page load speeds! In fact, next time your somewhere with slow internet (dial-up even), check your blog to get a good read on what lots of people might experience with your site.

Related Post: What size images should I post? How do I resize & optimize them?

There’s a little bug in the ProPhoto template files that you may want to take a moment to fix. Basically, your bio picture shows up on your blog’s main page, but if you scroll down to the bottom of the page and click “Older Posts”, the bio picture disappears on other pages.

Props to Petra for pointing this out to me. The fix is pretty easy. Just open up your “Theme Editor” (under “Presentation” in WP 2.3 and earlier, or under “Design” in WP 2.5) and click to edit the file called “bio.php.”

Then, look for this line/chunk:

<!-- path to filename of bio pic --> <img src="wp-content/themes/prophoto/images/biopic.jpg" width="215" height="312" id="biopic" />

And change it to:

<!-- path to filename of bio pic --> <img src="<?php bloginfo('template_directory') ?>/images/biopic.jpg" width="215" height="312" id="biopic" />

Save your changes and you should be good to go!