If you don’t have Gimp, download it from here. It’s a high quality image manipulation software that you can download under the GNU license.

Open the image in Gimp

From the Layer menu item, click on Transparency and then click on the “Add Alpha Channel” the first item in the submenu.

Click on the fuzzy selection tool from the Toolbox panel and highlight the background area on your image that you want to make transparent.

Click on the “delete” button on your laptop, or select the menu item “clear” under the Edit menu. You will start seeing the background color change to transparent. Shown in the software as gray squares (see image below).

Now you can save the new image and you should be done.

Under the Appearance menu, click on the Editor menu item.

Then click on the Page Template item, which will allow you to edit the page.php file. This file has the instruction on what to display on a wordpress page.

 You will find that the function responsible for displaying the comment form (comments_template()) is missing. All you will need to add the the code that will instruct php to display the comment form, only if the page id is = 9. In your case, you will replace 9 with the page id that you like to add comments to.

To display the comment form on your page add the code between and including the red boxes below: 

 If you like to display the comment for on only 2 pages, either page 1508 or page 1832, then you can change your if statement like this following one:

Or if you want to display the comment form on any page, except page 1508, then the following applies:

 Regards.

In the sidebar of you site you can just add the following html form code to accept user id and password.

Edit sidebar.php file under your theme. Just pick an area where you want to add the form by adding the following code after any </li> tag depending on where you want to display the form. Ideally you want to display it at the top of your sidebar.

<li>
<?php if (is_user_logged_in()){
echo “<h2>Welcome! </h2>”; ?>

<ul>
<li><a href=”<?php echo wp_logout_url(get_permalink()); ?>”>Logout</a></li>
</ul>
<?php } else { ?>

<form name=”loginform” id=”login” action=”<?php echo get_settings(’siteurl’); ?>/wp-login.php” method=”post”>
<h2>Account Login</h2>
<label for=”userid”>Userid:</label>
<input type=”text” name=”log” value=”" id=”userid” size=”15″/><br />
<label for=”password”>Password:</label>
<input type=”password” name=”pwd” value=”" id=”password” size=”10″/>
<input type=”submit” name=”submit” value=”Login” id=”enter” />
<p><?php wp_register(”, ”); ?>
<p><a href=”<?php bloginfo(’wpurl’); ?>/wp-login.php?action=lostpassword”>Lost your password?</a></p>
</form>

<?php } ?>

</li>

This above php/html will do a basic form where:

<?php if (is_user_logged_in()){

Checks if anyone is logged in, then prints “Welcome registered user”and displays a link to log out, else if no one is logged in, it displays the login form.

This is a basic html form where:

<h2>Account Login</h2>

is the title of the form

<label for=”userid”>Userid:</label>

to assigns an informative label.

<input type=”text” name=”log” value=”" id=”userid” size=”15″/><br />

text box to accept user input to a text field. Note: Here you can add the optional size argument to any size that fits your sidebar area.
There are about 10 specific types to the <input /> tag. In any simple login form you will need to use 3.
1-text: for entering text. 2-password: to enter a password, and 3- submit: which creates a submit button.

<p><?php wp_register(”,”); ?>

you might want to add this line if you want to allow your visitors to register.

Let me know, if you have any questions about it.
Regards.

Expert Wordpress was created by my friend Alex Sysoef and Dimitry Agadzhanov. Their basic offer which is free will allow you to install the wordpress package. And if you do not have any technical knowlege and want to build a blog site on your own, don’t worry, you’ll find it simple to install watching a video that comes with it.

You can use fantastio or the 5 minutes installation guide offer by wordpress (I also wrote about it). Expert wordpress will include a lot of plugins that you can activate if you choose to. Alex picked the most popular and robust plugin and I am sure there will be some of these plugins that will be very benefitial to your site.

I used the package to install a wordpress site and it worked fine for me with no issues.

Here are the main features:

* Expert WordPress Free Download comes with blog installer, the complete package that enables even absolutely non-technical person to install the blog. This is the greatest value for the download.

* Also included is a custom theme with installer that our customers love so much. Theme is activated and configured for you during the install and no extra interaction from you.

* You will get 2 videos that show you step-by-step entire install process and second videos outlines all the unique features of the blog created as result.

* Community Forum is also part of what you get when you decide to download our Expert WordPress installer package.

All you have to do is sign up for his newsletter and you should be able to download the package for free. You can unsubscribe from his newletter later, but I recommend you to stay because he will always send you wordpress relevant information that will keep you on top of your site.

To read more about this software package, click here.

To learn more about affordable hosting with WordPress support, click here.

I highly value efficiency, and this seems to be the focus here. It’s stunning and I like it.

Check out this video presentation. It sums it all up, and I think it’s worth watching.

If you don’t want to download the whole software package, you can just upgrade by downloading the 2 affected file from the wordpress site. ( click here for detail )

I personally don’t recommend downloading this in favor of the next release 2.7 that is scheduled soon. ( November 2008 )

Regards.

You might have heard of SQL injection, which is widely used by hackers. SQL Column Truncation is not widely used however. A malicious user can create a new account using a known user id: admin and gain access to your site through resetting the password.

To learn more about SQL Column truncation, read Stefan Esser’s post “SQL Column Truncation“. He gives a detailed example of how a user id could be cloned, if you allow others to register to your site.

Therefore it is a good idea in general to change the admin id and rename it to an unknown userid, that has the same privileges as admin.

Regards.

A couple of added features, that I really like and will be very handy.

- Track Revisions: You can now track changes to every post and page. When you edit a post scroll down and click on “Post Revisions”. You will see all your changes you have done to a post and be able to click and compare any 2 revisions.
If you like revert an old revision, you can restore it, and bring it current.

- Theme Preview: The other feature that I really like is previewing your theme. I know you can see a lot of demos of themes, but I usually upload a lot of themes and this feature will let me preview the theme with my content, before activating it.

- Word count: Word count feature displayed on the right hand side under the “Save” button.

Added Security features that are worth to consider:

- Admin SSL support: WordPress 2.6 admin can be accessed via normal connection (http) or now SSL( SECURE SOCKET LAYER) which is encrypted and more secure (https), with the option to make admin (https) mandatory.

For taking advantage of SSL connections, you will need to acquire a static IP address and buy a SSL certificate. It is affordable at godaddy.com and I can help you set it up.

- XML_RPC publishing protocol disabled by default: By default installation these features are disabled. If you need to use them, then in your admin area, you will need to go to Settings and choose the “Write Page” option to enable these features.

Check the official video for more features.