You can get rid of the big one in the widget area easily. Just place any widget or an empty text box widget inside the secondary widget area and tada, it wlll be gone. If you want to place it somewhere else then drag it from the unused widgets and place it wherever you please. You can use the OL widget in any template.

You won’t be able to remove the footer from the standard template though, unless you have the Custom CSS Plugin enabled.

You can of coure switch to another template. Free templates often have credits or a link bank to the author’s website. If you are paying for something then obviously you can have it removed, though I wonder how many paying customers are persuaded into promoting someone else’s website? But if what you are getting is completely free, where do you stand? There’s no such thing as a free lunch, so chances are you’ll just have to put up with it.

For a small fee (a bit larger if you are commercially orientated), we’ll upload your template and it will be available only to you.

Templates must be tried and tested by you before we upload them. We expect you to do this thoroughly in a test environment. If you have paid someone to make you a theme, don’t sign it off until it is working completely as you expected in the test environment.

Feel free to get in touch for advice – for the more powerful your theme the longer it will take you to get to grips with it. There are cheaper alternatives too.

Themes must pass all our tests too, we’ll be looking for hidden backlinks and other dirty tricks. If a template doesn’t pass muster we won’t charge you.

If you want hands on help with changing your theme, configuring and managing it, we can do that too. This service is not free, but you may be surprised at how affordable it is compared with the DIY option.

In-line styles are great, but great care is needed or you’ll break the look of the website if the divs aren’t closed correctly. Each time you open a div it must be closed. Also beware of closing a div that isn’t open (e.g. you are removing stray divs from a hasty copy paste and miss one).

Every time you leave a div open or close one that has not been created, if the editor doesn’t catch them (and most of the time it will – phew!), it may cause problems outside of the post or page.

So if your widgets are appearing in strange places, check the last post you edited before you spotted the problem and see if you can track down the problem there.

You also should remember that the styles of your template govern what your readers will see. They can be overridden, but more often than not you’ll get unexpected results.

If you have a long standing love affair with WORD, that’s cool. Longer docs and ones that are a bit fiddly to create (you want to chew things over, and polish again and again) can be created in WORD and then simply pasted into the Visual Editor.

Problem 1: The formats are all funny. Well that’s because you pasted in the text with the WORD formatting. WORD formatting may contain a complex array of fiddly formats that will take an age to strip out.

Instead why not try using the Paste from WORD button (it maybe hidden on the kitchen sink) or even better the Paste as TEXT (right next to it). The latter strips out any inconvenient and hidden formatting.

You may need to sort our a few stray paragraph breaks, but your text should then appear as the template designed it.

Problem 2: I’ve lost the original text – how do I get rid of the horrible formatting now? Easy. View the page or edit using the visual editor, select it all and copy it. Now paste using the Paste as Text button.

Your ourlocality website uses permalinks. These are human friendly ways of writing the unique URL or address of each post/page. The permalink is created on the fly when you first give your article a title (even if you forget and people do), chopping out unnecessary link words and removing spaces. When you forget the title (there are only a few times when you would do this deliberately), the system simply replaces it with a unique id for the post.

The way these links are displayed is controlled by your permalink settings. You can alter the structure and include e.g. the full date and the title or simply display the title. Some argue that the latter is optimal.

All that said, the permalinks can go screwy and the Page not found symptom is mostly likely a permalink problem.

Solution? Just switch the Settings > Permalink to the default and then set your preferred option.

In 99.9% of cases that will fix your problem.

If you want a workaday hosted solution, with ftp access and a Mysql database we can help with that, but it is not free!

If you are the site owner, remember to delete this PAGE and get writing!

Help for Beginners

What are posts?
Posts are articles or news and the lifeblood of your new website. Keep your site alive by posting articles regularly.

What are categories?
Make your articles easy to find by creating and assigning posts to categories and tagging them with suitable index or key words (but no need to over-do it).

Can I upload pictures?
Sure. Resize images before you upload (for web publishing the size needs to be optimised – e.g. 800-1000px wide at most) AND ensure you have permission to use the image. Great storage is available on photo sharing sites like flickr.com and picasa.com if you have significant image management demands.

What about comments?
Remember to configure your settings appropriately, especially those relating to user registration and comments. By default comments are CLOSED, but if you want interaction makes sure the SPAM settings are activated and ENABLE comments, post by post or universally.

What Themes can I use?
Our themes may look basic, but conceal many hidden functions. Sign up to plus! to get more and Automattic css style editor (just like on WordPress.com). More themes are also available at wordpress.org. Ask very nicely or pay us and we’ll consider adding a new theme just for you. Pick wisely and make sure it is WP3.0 enabled.

How about pages?
Pages are like the static pages of old fashioned websites. They contain infrequently changing blurb about you or your organisation – e.g. Contact Us or About Us. Many of the nice features that posts have are missing on pages, but pages do have their uses. Keep your post to page balance as high as possible.

Can I change Menus?
In WordPress 3.0 you can configure the menus very flexibly, but you will need a WP3.0 enabled theme.

What about the right hand column and footer?
The column contains Widgets which can be configured to suit your taste. This template has a footer too, that will take 4 columns of widgets.

And if want to make my website private?
Plenty of options. You can stop search engines, e.g. during site development, in Settings > Privacy. Once public News is also published on ourlocality.org/news. Single articles can be made private or password protected.

You can find this article, and others at http://ourlocality.org/manager/

We now have access to a number of videos that should be handy to get you up and running

http://ourlocality.org/wp-admin/admin.php?page=video-user-manuals/plugin.php

And if you prefer a longer read

http://ourlocality.org/wp-admin/admin.php?page=manual-options

For community support:

http://support.ourlocality.org/

Signing up for the first time, comments and hiding email addresses.

Why? It helps us keep on top of spam websites and helps you keep on top of spam comments.

We’ve just changed the software that runs the recaptcha, as the old one wasn’t working like we wanted, at least for registrations.

It remains for now on individual sites.

You can use it in your own websites in exactly the same way, but you must remember to chose your own secret keys, if you own a domain name.

Some poor souls caught during the changes will have experienced the odd error and we apologise for any inconvenience that caused.

Hopefully most people that contact you using the form will give their name again when they sign off.

This happens because people – and that includes me – forget one or all of the folllowing:

• their username
• which email address they registered with
• their password

Resetting your password is not such a bad thing, and it probably means you are not using the same credentials as an important service like your email or the bank (right?) and you reserve memory for the more important things in life, like birthdays etc.

The next most common problem is the password reset email doesn’t arrive.

Now this may be to do with not remembering which email address you used to register, but most likely it is caused by aggressive SPAM protection.

Always check your spam box before trying again and obviously, have a look in those other accounts next (oh it seemed like such a good idea to have multiple email accounts didn’t it?).

If that fails reset the password. This link may help if you’ve disabled that handy meta box with links to your login page.

http://ourlocality.org/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword

Now when you want to add a link, there is an option to “link to existing content” i.e. to any other page on your site, with a handy search option.

OK, it’s not clever enough to deal with broken links or external links … but you never know that could come one day.

• Nothing endures but change.
  • From Lives of the Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius
  • Variant translations:
    There is nothing permanent except change.
    Nothing is permanent except change.
    The only constant is change.
    Change is the only constant.
    Change alone is unchanging.

In other words we have to change things on ourlocality from time to time. To keep up with the Joneses? Well not really. To you keep you (that also means us) safe and secure? Yes.

We are almost always bang up to date with our software, but in a small number of cases we either get caught out, the update breaks something, or we forget that we changed something ourselves and the update doesn’t work as expected!

In most cases, it’ll be fixed in less time than you’d think. Just compare how long it would take a government website to update some link or a private company?

And you haven’t even paid for the service, yet.

Can’t be bad.

Some of you may be aware that WordPress employs short codes to do magic things. Short code terms are wrapped in square brackets and will not show normally.

If you link refuses persistently to automatically embed with the advice above you can wrap the link url, including the http:// bit like with the special shortcode which is simply

[embed]the link goes here[/embed]

.

[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQEmaj9C6ko&feature=fvwrel[/embed]

• This reply was modified 134 days ago by  Our Locality.
• This reply was modified 134 days ago by  Our Locality.
• This reply was modified 134 days ago by  Our Locality.

Is this fixable?

Well the answer is simple, they are not permitted file types.

If you must use these formats to create your docs, then we recommend the following options:

• use a publishing service like issuu.com or scribd.com, which accepts the above and you will then be able to embed links very simply into your pages, just like youtube links
• convert your documents to PDF or portable document format and upload these instead, subject to our usual size limits
• upload and covert them using Google Docs and link to these instead. Google Docs can also save as PDF, along with a string of other formats.

It is not that we don’t like Microsoft products or anything like that …

Posts are automatically archived by month and anyway are superceded by more recent articles.

The only reason to delete posts may be to cover your tracks.

Pages are a different matter and may need to be taken out circulation.

But instead of deleting pages or posts there are a great many other options to consider.

Remove pages from menus, re-assign them, make them private, make them pending, password protect them.

Select a home page from any of your existing pages (not posts sorry!)

Select a News page. This is the only tricky bit. You’ll have to create a Page called News (or whatever you want) with absolutely nothing in it. This will tell the system to push all new posts to this page by magic.

• This reply was modified 188 days ago by  ecomonkey.
• This reply was modified 188 days ago by  ecomonkey.