asechrest

LesterChan’s DB plugin allows automatic scheduling of optimization.

If I understand his/her problem correctly, it’s that his/her theme doesn’t provide a “home” tab, I assume since it might use wp_list_pages() for the navigation bar.

I had the same issue on the theme I use, and if I remember correctly I just hard-coded it and wrapped it in an if statement since my navigation bar highlights the page I’m on.

[EDIT] – Ok, I just reread the most recent post and I’m confused as well. Perhaps this isn’t what he/she wants.

Try switching to the default or another WordPress theme and see if widgets work there.

You are pressing Save Changes after dragging them over to the sidebar, right?

You’ll need to go a bit more in depth than “won’t work.” What doesn’t work?

Also, note this about the_excerpt():

Displays the excerpt of the current post with […] at the end, which is not a “read more” link. If you do not provide an explicit excerpt to a post (in the post editor’s optional excerpt field), it will display a teaser which refers to the first 55 words of the post’s content. Also in the latter case, HTML tags and graphics are stripped from the excerpt’s content. This tag must be within The Loop.

Check out Adminimize (hide modules for specific roles) and/or CMS Post Control and Level2Categories 2.

After you add the widget, hit the Save Changes button, THEN edit the text widget.

no, I want there to be a word limit for every post on my homepage.

the_excerpt() does this, but perhaps that plugin linked by Kudama is best for you.

It’s not really clear what you want.

Do you want just a teaser of posts showing a certain number of letters of that post on the homepage, and then you click on the post to go to a new page showing the full post?

If so, check out the_excerpt() and this.

This is the only means of getting “support”…

FYI, there’s plenty of paid support options.

Is this forum help free or what?

Assign the super special non-visible secret post a specific category. Maybe something like Super Secret Non Visible.

Then use a plugin, such as Advanced Category Excluder, to exclude posts of that category from your page(s). You can also hard-code this exclusion. Now the post still exists, do with it what you will. But be gentle, secret posts have feelings too.

Profit.

I run 2.7.1 and Role Manger does still seem to work. I have no WordPress experience prior to WP2.7.0, so I can’t be sure whether Role Manger retains full functionality, but I’ve not found a case where it doesn’t work for me, and I know many others still use it.

Eventually I hope that role management becomes native to WP.

Re: Page Templates –

I just copied my default template (page.php for most themes), renamed it per this tutorial, deleted the sections I didn’t need for my specialized page, then modeled my post display loop after the primary WordPress loop except that I utilized the query_posts function. This is coming from someone who’s digging into PHP for the first time, so you may have a much easier time at this.

Perhaps WordPress MU is the way to go, as suggested. The extent of my coding knowledge is a Java course I took 6 years ago, so WordPress MU scared me off.

I’m confident you can make this work. Here’s how I’m doing something similar. My apologies, but I’m at work on lunch break and I don’t have the time to link to the plugins I’m going to list.

* Force new registered users to a specific role (built-in WordPress option)

* Restrict that role’s capabilities (Role Manager plugin)

* Set a default posting category (built-in WordPress functionality)

* Remove the option by that role to assign any category to a post but the one I select (Level2Categories plugin)

* Exclude category from posting to the front page (Advanced Category Excluder plugin)

* [optional for your purposes] – Remove sections of the dashboard that I don’t want a simple user to see/manipulate (Adminimize plugin)

At this point, I think you’ve got a lot of what you need. You’ve got the front page only displaying your (or admin, et al) posts, but users can still create their own posts.

Now all you need to do is A) have user posts show up on their own page and B) have a showcase page where you can promote select user posts.

Just as you suggested, the best way I can think to do this is using Categories. I’ve created a new page with a new page template whererin I use a loop utilizing query_posts only for a certain category(ies).

Now, pick the user post(s) that you want to Showcase, assign them a new Category, and display them however you’d like on the Showcase page.

That’s what I’m doing or have done. Thoughts?

P.S. – I’m really quite a novice with WordPress and coding in general, so I can’t even being to answer your .htacess question. Sorry.

You could create a new page template for the forum page and remove the call to the sidebar.

Or, you could go to your theme’s page.php file and wrap the sidebar call in an if statement checking for !(is_page('forumpageID'));