It used to be that WordPress 2.0.11 was the only other stable WordPress release available. However, the WP devs have now decided to discontinue support for this legacy version. But not to worry. I’ll show you here how to safely upgrade from 2.0.11 all the way to 2.8.2. You shouldn’t do it in one fell swoop, since there are too many changes close to the bone along the way. Remember, 2.0.11 will be two years old on August 5, so it’s time to retire it and move forward with all that WordPress has to offer.

The key to a successful WP upgrade is a healthy database. If the database is stable and has survived the upgrade, and you don’t have any weird calls to obsolete tags in your templates, you are cleared for takeoff. Here are the steps you should follow to ensure that your database (which contains all your posts, pages, settings and comments, your WP site’s heart and soul) survives intact.

One of the powers of WordPress has always been its custom Pages feature. It’s one of the least understood, most under-utilized, and most often misused feature WP has. In order to harness the power of WordPress, and to drive a non-blog site, understanding and exploiting custom Page templates is essential. I’ll show you here how to create a custom WordPress Page and show you some examples of how we’ve used custom Page templates in our clients’ web sites.

You can read more about WordPress Pages in the WordPress Codex, but in a nutshell, just remember that Pages aren’t generally meant to contain post information. They are used to contain static content on your web site. And since you can’t generally place live PHP code into the “content” area of a Page or Post without a plugin, if you have this type of code in your static content, the solution is to place that code into a special Page template. There are as many ways to use WP’s custom Page templates as your imagination allows. So let’s create a new Page template now, shall we?

Years ago, there was a great WordPress plugin, Image Headlines, that used True Type Fonts and image replacement to generate gorgeous titles on your blog using the fonts of your choosing. This ensured that your site’s viewers saw the fonts you wanted them to see. That plugin hasn’t kept pace with WordPress’s new releases. But TTFTitles has. It’s a great plugin, quite similar in operation to Image Headlines. The author is quite busy and has promised a “cookbook” of codes for quite some time but hasn’t gotten around to it. I’ve been playing around with this plugin while developing a site for a client. I thought I’d share with you the code that works for me.