junesix

Also, WP doesn’t come with my-hacks.php installed. You have to create it in your root directory and then dump in the hack code, making sure there are no spaces before or after <?php and ?>. Where available, you should try to use plugins though since they’re a bit more “friendly.”

Use <div> with CSS. Check out
https://www.cssvault.com
https://www.csszengarden.com
for brilliant evidence of the power of CSS.

unpoedic,
I think you haven’t added your user unpoedic_hannah to the db yet. Tick ‘ALL’ and click on the ‘Add User to Db’ button. That should attach the user you defined to the unpoedic_wordpress database.

Make a copy of index.php and name it archive.php. In your .htaccess file, change line 4 from
RewriteRule ^archives/category/?(.*) /index.php?category_name=$1 [QSA]
to
RewriteRule ^archives/category/?(.*) /archive.php?category_name=$1 [QSA]
Now archive.php is your template for archive pages. Customize it as desired.

You should use wp_list_cats instead of list_cats. With list_cats, you have to provide a value for every parameter which is very tedious. With wp_list_cats, you only provide string arguments for parameters you want to change, and the function fills in the remaining parameters with default values. (wp_list_cats actually takes your arguments and fills in the blanks before passing it on to list_cats).
In the case of category post counts, use wp_list_cats('optioncount=1'). If you wanted to do the same thing with list_cats, you’d have to use list_cats(0, 'All', 'ID', 'asc', '', true, 0, 1, 1, 1, true, 0, 0, 0, '', '', '').

From what I’ve seen, anything that’s possible with MT is possible on WP. Excellent example is diveintomark.org which is now powered by WP. IMO WP still doesn’t have all the documentation and fully-established community of MT but the dev team and users on this forum and the IRC chan are eager to help.
Personally, I think MT’ers have the most difficulty with .htaccess/mod_rewrite in WP. The PHP-enabled functions/tags generate dynamic content but it’s the mod_rewrite rules that generate the dynamic file and archive structure. With MT, whenever you made changes or posted new content, you clicked on Rebuild to generate the pages into static HTML. With WP, you take one step back and it’s almost like you’re letting the user click on Rebuild, except they’re only “rebuilding” what they want to see. Say a visitor wanted the post titled “blah” on May 28, 2004, which would be located at https://yourdomain.com/2004/05/28/blah. With MT, the server offers up the static HTML page generated for that date with that title. With WP, the mod_rewrite rules collect the info from the URI, pass it to index.php which retrieves the data from your MySQL database, and WP literally builds the post on the spot with the data.
Once you understand how WP works, you actually begin to see that it’s not really all that different from MT. How did you build a static page with MT? Copy another page, rename, customize, and add a static link from your front page to it. Same with WP.
With that said, I think you should make a shopping list of what you want on your new WP site and then tackle them one by one. So far, I’ve seen everything you want on your list either answered in the wiki or answered in a forum thread. If you browse through my forum history you’ll see some of the things you asked for.

If you chmod 666 the wp-comments.php file, you can make changes to it directly within WP. Click on Templates, and under Common Files, there is a link to the Comments template.

You may also want to think about using “members only” posts. Some ways of accomplishing this are discussed in this thread.
https://www.ads-software.com/support/10/5799

About the 825. I looked it up here and line 825 is only called for upgrades.
cleanhttps://www.junesix.org/xref/beta/nav.php?wp-admin/upgrade-functions.php.source.php#l825
If you have direct ftp access, why not bypass Fantastico altogether? Clean out everything in the root dir where you want WP (except files/directories your host put there). Upload 1.2 and just run the 5-min install. If you get the 825 again, something has gone wrong because upgrade-functions.php should not be used at all for fresh installs.

Actually you can have any number of different layouts for subcategories, you just need to build the templates. I have different templates for my About, Archives Index, and Photos pages. You simply make a copy of index.php for each, rename it to say archives.php for your Archives Index, customize, and then modify the category mod_rewrite rule so that archive directories use say archives.php instead of index.php.
Not trying to single you out, but I think a lot of users coming from MT have difficulty picking up the WP architecture and the mod_rewrite rules. These rules essentially serve the dual purpose of specifying the directory structure of your archives and which template to use. If you peek in the .htaccess you’ll see that every archive rule makes use of index.php. Once you change that to another file, you’ve begun using a new template.

Reading this thread got me thinking… isn’t the additional /archives/ essentially cruft in itself? I know I’m probably opening a can of worms on this one.
If a front page is https://yourdomain.com then https://yourdomain.com/year/month/ and https://yourdomain.com/category/ should imply archive pages. It just seems like the additional /archives/ directory doesn’t do much besides lengthen the URIs. For me, this makes even more sense as my “static” pages like About and Photos aren’t really static pages but actually archive pages using custom templates.

Maybe I’m not understanding this correctly, but if you’re doing a fresh install, shouldn’t you be using install instead of upgrade?

This topic was asked in earlier threads.
https://www.ads-software.com/support/4/5426
https://www.ads-software.com/support/4/5788
At this point there is no official solution to this as the

tags are hardcoded into the get_links_list() function. You’ll have to hack up the function yourself or write a my-hacks.php hack.
I put up a WP reference so you can look up the get_links_list() function here and get an idea of what you’ll need to change. The

tags you’ll need to modify are quite visible.
https://www.junesix.org/xref/stable/nav.php?_functions/index.php

Here’s your solution. It involves running a separate loop for each category. So if you had 11 categories, you’d be calling 11 separate loops from the mySQL database. If you have a lot of categories, this is going to be very memory-intensive on your server and you might want to think about a different way of organizing your archives index.
https://www.ads-software.com/support/index.php?action=vthread&forum=10&topic=6012&page=0

Dunstan actually uses date-based archives showing post titles. If you’re looking for something like that, there’s Jon’s All Archives https://imagesafari.com/hacks/all_archives/
For the category-based “headlines” page that you’re referring to, I’ll have to figure out a hack or see if anyone else has come up with anything.