Before we begin let me tell you that I am talking about WordPress blog themes.

Why only WordPress?

Because if you haven’t noticed yet I love WordPress blogs. As far as I am concerned if you are blogging there is no better blog platform than WordPress. It offers the most flexibility, the most options, the most plugins and the most themes. Plus it is free.

With that said, as you can probably guess, this will be about WordPress themes and only WordPress themes.

There are literally thousands of themes you can get for WordPress covering almost any niche you might be blogging about. But if you are like me you can never seem to find that one theme that is perfect for you.

You know what I am saying, you find a theme with a perfect header but it is three columns and you only want two.

You find a theme with three columns but they are all on the left and you know that the columns on the right do better in the search engines (a little tip for you there).

You find a theme you really like but you want to change the header to personalize it and you get totally confused when you try to change it because the CSS doesn’t work with your modification.

Basically, if you are looking for the perfect theme you need to know enough to create your own theme to modify the average WordPress theme to your liking.

Or do you?

Enter the Mandigo theme from the guys at OneHertz

pefect wordpress theme

The Mandigo theme is special because it does something I have neve seen in a theme before. I adds a theme options link and a html inserts link into the control panel for WordPress.

The theme options lets you quickly and easily choose:

• One column
• Two columns
• Three Columns
• Change the sidebars widths
• Put sidebars above your content, below your content or both.
• Seven different color schemes and headers (or you can rotate through all of them at random)
• Two different widths for your blog (800px or 1024px)
• Change the background color for the page, the sidebars and the content with an easy click and choose color selector
• Choose a different background image
• Put your own custom header on just by uploading the image
• Use a smaller header
• Create different headers for different pages
• Create dropcaps for your posts on the fly
• Turn individual pages on or off in the header navigation
• Turn comments on of off on your pages
• Automatically fix layout problems and long links breaking your content when inserted in the comments.
• Search Engine Optimization built in
• And a bunch of other cool things

ALL WITH A CLICK OF YOUR MOUSE!

This doesn’t even come close to what you can do and I didn’t even talk about the HTML inserts.

If you are looking for a WordPress theme that even a beginner can make their own this is as close to perfect as I have found.

If you get stuck with anything they have one of the best wikis I have ever seen letting you know how you can edit and change the theme. They even show you how to make your own page templates.

By the way the creators also offer premium WordPress themes, unique WordPress themes and custom services at very reasonable prices.

This is the theme used on this site and the only theme recommended by Blogging Beginners.

All I can say is try it. You will love it.

I have been playing with the newly released WordPress 2.7 trying to decide if I like it or not. The functions that they have added are nice once you get them working.

What did I say? Did I say once you get them to work?

Yes, I did. I personally had a problem using the new feature which automatically installs plugins from the WordPress Plugin Directory. It took a lot of testing on different blogs to see if it was the host or my site or the script running WordPress 2.7.

Here is what was happening, I would find the plugin I wanted and click on the install link. The plugin would download to my site but when it started to unpack it would freeze and the plugin wouldn’t be installed.

It didn’t matter if my site was running suPHP or not, if I lost you with that, suPHP is a protection program that runs on your site. This makes running WordPress much easier because you don’t have to set permission for every folder or file it is changing and you don’t have to add your FTP information to the script to complete the process.

It didn’t matter if I used the automatic install or if I was using the upload and install feature it would freeze when it was unpacking.

I tried it on three different hosting services so I was getting to the point where I thought it was a scripting error in WordPress 2.7 and I hit the WordPress Support Forum. There were tons of comments and problems about 2.7 but I didn’t see anything about the automatic plugin install.

I posted my problem and then did a search of the support forum to find there was a similar problem with the automatic plugin upgrade that was part of the WordPress 2.5 and to my surprise it was related to the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin.

So, logged back into the admin area and deactivated the plugin and boom everything worked fine for the automatic plugin installer.

If you have the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin installed deactivate it when you install WP 2.7.

Besides this plugin is officially retired and WordPress 2.7 has the feature built in.

Like I said there were a bunch of other problems at the support forum but most of them were like mine personal to the person.

One that seemed to affect a lot of people with different plugins was losing all the links in the admin section. This happens with some of the admin navigation plugins that work like WP Admin Bar (although this one seems to work fine) the problem is you need to deactivate the plugin to get the links to show and you need the links to deactivate the plugin.

There are a couple of ways around this:

One is to FTP to the plugins folder on your site and rename or delete the plugin so that it won’t be activated.

The other is to go directly to the plugin page in your admin area after you login and deactivate it there.

To go directly to the page you will go to the admin section and log in.

Once you are logged in go to the address bar in your browser and where it says index.php change that to plugins.php and hit enter or go.

This should bring you to the plugin page and you should be able to deactivate the plugin. Once it is deactivated you should be able to see your admin links again. Just in a different spot.

WordPress 2.7 A new look, a new feel , a better command center?

That is still up for grabs but it definitely has possibilities.

WordPress 2.7 is code name “Coltrane” after the jazz musician John Coltrane because you are supposed to be able to improvise and modify your way to a better admin area. Again whether this is true or not has yet to be seen but here are some of the new features in WordPress 2.7:

Fewer Clicks – I used to use a great plugin called WordPress Admin Bar to navigate the admin area just to save a few clicks. With WordPress 2.7 Coltrane they have re-organized and relabeled the admin navigation links. Almost everything is only one click away now. The one handy thing that the plugin offered that WordPress 2.7 doesn’t offer is to be able to go to anywhere in the admin area while you are viewing the site. This can be solved by still using the WP Admin Bar (yes, it still works with WP 2.7) or opening the site in a new tab.

Flexible layout – now you can decide where everything goes and if you don’t want to see any particular section of the control panel you can shrink it to an icon and move it where you want.

Built in Sticky posts – you can now make one post a sticky post that will always display on your home page. This means that you no longer have to create a special page for your homepage you can just choose your favorite post and when you get a new favorite put that on front and center instead with a simple click.

Create posts and reply to comments right from the dashboard – Yes, you can create your posts and reply to comments right from the dashboard front page. I will probably use this for the comment replies but I will still go to the write post page for my posts so that I can add my SEO features and categories.

Post without logging in using the “Press This” feature – This is another new feature that I can’t seem to get to work yet but I will figure it out sooner or later. Basically, it is suppose to enable you to post while you are browsing and grab text, video, images, etc. from the page you are on, let you edit and then post without logging into the admin area.

Add images without opening a post – I have wanted to do this for a while. You can now build your library of images that you might use in the future directly in the media library. Before you had to actually go to the write or edit post page to be able to upload an image.

Built in plugin browser with automatic install – you can now search through the WordPress.org plugins and install them with one click from your admin area. Or so they say, it hasn’t worked for me yet, it keeps getting stuck on the unzipping part and I haven’t found a cure, yet but when I do this will be a sweet feature.

One click WordPress upgrade integrated – I haven’t had the chance to use this yet, I have to wait until they have an upgrade and since WP 2.7 just came out about 24 hours ago there is no upgrade yet. I already use the WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin and that works great.

I will have a video of the changes in the Blogging Beginners member’s area shortly.

Remember this is new there are bound to be a few bugs, problems with plugins is the most likely so if you are comfortable with what you have wait until 2.7.1 comes out to avoid most of the “New Release Bugs”. I haven’t read anything about a security upgrade with 2.7 so you should be fine.