I’ve said it many times before – I love WordPress – but, like any other blogging platform, it has a few issues. It doesn’t have a built in gallery, posting code is nearly impossible, and custom fields are too basic. All that aside, one of the most frustrating issues is how WordPress handles the %category% permalink structure.

By default, WordPress does not include a post’s title in its’ URL. Instead, a default URL would be similar to: http://dodesign.us/?p=123. The numbers at the end are the post’s ID number. To rank higher in Google, most bloggers change the URL structure to include the date and name (like this: http://dodesign.us/2009/07/16/sample-post/). That works for most people, but some (like myself) decide to use a custom structure and include a post’s category and title in the URL.

That’s where the problem comes in. If a post has more than one category, WordPress uses the category with the lowest ID number in the URL. It does not let you change a category’s ID number or choose which one is used.

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WordPress is much more powerful than most people think. It can power magazines, work as a CMS, and even display job offerings. It really depends how far you want to go with it. Luckily, with the help of plugins, the possibilities are endless.

I wanted to create a different WordPress theme. I wanted to make a photoblog. With the help of a nice plugin called Yet Another Photoblog, I created a theme called Elegance. Since it is powered by YAPB, images can be easily uploaded and don’t need to be resized. Just upload an image in the highest resolution possible and the plugin will do the rest.

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Here’s a sneak preview at the latest project I’m working on. It’s called Elegance and is a photoblog theme for WordPress powered by a great plugin called “Yet Another Photoblog.” The theme is going to support automatic resizing of photos, EXIF data, comments, and more.

Preview of the soon-to-be released photoblog theme for WordPress

A few months ago I showed how to schedule automatic WordPress backups. In that post, I explained how each WordPress blog has two parts that need to be backed up: files and databases. Without both, a WordPress backup is practically useless.

Trust me, I’ve learned that the hard way. Luckily, last week, when doDesign went down, I had both backed up. I went through the restore process myself and thought I’d explain how to do it.

Prepare the Files

Find the backup files on your computer and see when they were last changed. Next, download a backup of your database that was created as close to the time that the files were backuped. In other words, you want to make sure to select the file and database backups that created (around) the same time.

Be careful! You want to restore a backup that once worked.

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Look, WordPress is great. I use it on doDesign and have become very familiar to it. I’ll never understand, however, why WordPress doesn’t accept code in posts. I recently had to go through all my posts and repost every line of code because some of the characters got messed up. Why is it so hard? Why can’t WordPress support code in posts?

I have no idea. WordPress acknowledges the problem. In fact, they let you vote to fix the problem in WordPress 2.8. Unfortunately it did not make the list. Why? I don’t know.

For now, however, I’ll be using the Syntax Highlighter plugin. It posts the code correctly, but if you edit the post you’ll need repost the code. Oh well…