Let’s take a look at each usage:-

Pages
Pages are intended for a topic you write once, like the main page, a contact us page, a testimonial page, a services you provide page, etc…

Posts
Posts on the other hand are suited for topics you want to write about frequently. In this case you will need to organize your posts into categories. Like for example, if you teach and want to create a site about your teaching methods, you can have categories like:
- Sample lessons, News (write about relevant news only),  Updates, Calligraphy, Pedagogy, Famous people, Book Review (review relevant books and write your opinion about them), Country profiles (pick countries where the language is spoken), ….

If you write about real estate, you can create categories about: New listings in a neighborhood, Another New listings in a different neighborhood, Open House (open houses that you think are worth visiting), Rentals (your pick of good deal rentals), mortgage rate updates,….

Remember, you want your site to be like an interesting magazine with multiple sections /or categories that can bring repeat visitors who ultimately will think about and contact you if they need further help.

Regards.

The key is making following 2 changes to your site:

First, make sure to add Arabic files into a directory that you create under the wp-includes directory of your wordpress installation. You can just upload languages.zip file into wp-includes directory and unzip it. (languages file)

Second is your wp-config.php file. Open this file in your admin area and edit the following line.

define (‘WPLANG’, ‘ar’);

By default it is in English. All you need to do is add ‘ar’, which stands for Arabic.

The only challenge you might find is if your theme doesn’t justify text to the right. Here you will have to look into the style sheet of the theme and update it.

I am using the The 2010 theme for WordPress ( default theme) in my project and it is working fine.

If you want to download all WordPress files for a given language, you might find it here.

To write Arabic even without an Arabic keyboard, check here.

First double check that your hosting provider has PHP 5.2.4 and MySQL database version 5.0 or higher. Those are now the minimum requirements for the new version of WordPress 3.2. Don’t worry, most major hosting providers have already upgraded. If you are not sure, just contact your hosting provider to double check.

My 2 favorite features:

Performance: It is unbelievable now how much performance gain you can get by just upgrading. If you couple the upgrade with a a plugin like W3 Total Cache, your site will feel like a static html site. Database queries have been optimized such that visitors will not even notice that it is a database driven site.

Editor: A new option has been added to the visual editor, that will enlarge the editor to fullscreen and hide all the elements, letting you focus on what you want to write. This will help you focus on your writing material… assuming you don’t distract yourself with other stuff around you To get our of the fullscreen mode when done, just hover the mouse to the top and click on “Exit fullscreen”.

WordPress fullscreen mode toggle

As with any other upgrade, remember to backup your site first, deactivate all the plugins and then upgrade.

Regards.

The easiest way to use the menu, if you wish to customize your blog, is to use it with the Atahualpa WordPress theme. I found this post to be very helpful in showing how to integrate this menu with the theme. Also, don’t forget to check out what some readers posted. Some did very nice designs using this menu.

The sliding door menu is based on mootools, a javascript framework  which you can download separately, if you wish to install it and try it out.

Regards.

It is simple to install and caches the archive content, so it’s loads faster. You can see it in action here, and since I don’t write so much… I made a simple change to not display the date of the post.

Regards.

This is a security upgrade that should protect your site against Cross-site Scripting vulnerabilities (XSS). I know it has been not too long ago, since WordPress came with a major release 3.0. Usually following a major release come multiple smaller release fixes to bring the major release to a stable state.

Remember to have a backup first and then simply go to you dashboard and click on the link to update.

Regards.

The theme will take you a while to get through all the options ( 268 options ), but it is time worth it, if you want to create a unique/original looking WordPress site, without having to edit and upload/ftp files. Great theme, I recommend it.

Here is some of the features by the authors:

Up to 4 sidebars, fixed or flexible width layout, custom widget areas, drop down menus, SEO features, rotating header images and an active support forum with over 30,000 posts. New: Style import / export feature and improved speed.

Note: Each post has only one permalink, so if you tie your post to 2 categories and have designated %category% in your permalink, wordpress will assign only one category to your post. Keep this in mind when planning your new site.

There are 2 main steps to be used:

1- Setting up the .htaccess to allow the url

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

2- Picking up your favorite url style by choosing the variable of your choise.

Following are available choices that are self explanatory:
%year% for example: 2010
%monthnum% for example 05
%day% example 28
%hour%
%minute%
%second%
%postname%, as per wordpress tutorial: Starting your Permalink with %postname% is strongly not recommended for performance reasons..
%post_id%
%category% as per wordpress tutorial: Starting your Permalink with %category% is strongly not recommended for performance reasons.
%tag% as per wordpress tutorial: Starting your Permalink with %tag% is strongly not recommended for performance reasons.
%author%

You might have noticed, my blog’s url starts with %catagory%, which is not the most efficient way of setting up a permalink. I wasn’t aware of it back then when I started. Now it’s too late to make a change, since some of my posts already have back links and page rank. Since I don’t have the time to write more frequently, that’s fine for the time being.

Regards.

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.