One of the nicest new features in WordPress 2.7 for self-hosted sites is the ability to install WordPress plugins directly from within the admin console – no more having to FTP files around (note that this only works with plugins that are listed in the WordPress plugins list – for others that aren’t in the list you still have to use the old method).

No such luck with WordPress Themes however; for self-hosted sites you still have to manually upload the files to your hosting account before you can activate them, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see this change in a future release – watch this space.

In this tutorial I’ll walk you through the steps to find and install a new Theme using the cPanel File Manager:

1. Find a new Theme
2. Download the Theme to your computer
3. Upload the Theme to your hosting account
4. Unzip the Theme
5. Activate the Theme

Find a new Theme

One of the many great things about WordPress is the vast array of free and premium themes that are available to style your site how you like – particularly if you’re graphically challenged like me! The obvious place to start your search for a new theme is the WordPress Theme Directory; if you don’t find anything to your liking, there are also plenty of other options available. For instance the other day I came across the BuckMaker site which has some eyecatching free themes.

Most places will allow you to preview what different themes look like to help you decide if they’re right for your site; it’s worth checking these out before you continue or you could find yourself uploading multiple different themes to your hosting account before you settle on one.

Download the Theme to your computer

Once you’ve found a theme you like, simply click the download link and save it to your computer – all the theme files should come bundled in a single zip file. Simple.

Upload the Theme to your hosting account

The next step is to upload the zip file to your hosting account. You could use a program like FileZilla to FTP the files, but for the sake of this tutorial I’ll be using the cPanel File Manager. So you’ll need to log into your cPanel account, then open the File Manager by clicking on the icon (pictured). The resulting window resembles your operating system file manager: a list of folders on the left, with the selected folder’s files displayed on the right.

• navigate to your /wp-content/themes folder (as shown)
• click the Upload button, then navigate to the zip file you downloaded in the previous step. After a brief pause (depending on the speed of your internet connection), a copy of the file should show up in your File Manager.

Unzip the Theme

Still in the File Manager window, select the zip file you’ve just uploaded, then click the Extract button. This unpacks all the theme’s files from the zip file onto the file system, ready to use.

Activate the Theme

The final step is to go to the Appearance > Themes section of your WordPress admin console – you should now see the new Theme available for selection alongside any others that were there to start with. Selecting the theme gives you the opportunity to preview it showing your own content, but without affecting the way visitors see your site. At this point you can either Activate the new theme (top right-hand corner) or back out (top left-hand corner).

And that’s it. It’s a slightly long-winded process, but taking into account that you most likely won’t be changing your theme very often, I’m sure you’ll agree it’s not too arduous!

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1. How to widen the sidebar in WordPress K2
2. Managing images with the WordPress media manager
3. How to use FTP to transfer files

Courtesy of 3nhanced.comYou may or may not have realised there are two different flavours of WordPress, denoted by the TLD extension. WordPress.com is where you can sign up to a free blog, hosted for you courtesy of Automattic, the company behind WordPress. WordPress.org is where you can download the software for use on your own web server – a so-called self-hosted installation.

So why two versions, and what are their different strengths and weaknesses? Essentially it’s a trade-off between flexibility and ease of use. For more detail, check out this WordPress support page that lists some of the main differences between the two.

The importance of your own domain

With a free WordPress.com account, your blog is assigned a wordpress.com sub-domain of your choosing (as long as you don’t choose one that’s already taken, that is). So, it’ll be something of the form

http://your-name.wordpress.com

The main problem with this, in my opinion, is that you have no right of ownership over your site’s url – it is, after all, a sub-domain of wordpress.com, which means that it cannot exist independently of the main domain. If the company should (perish the thought) go bust, your url will disappear with it!

Now, to be fair, WordPress.com gives you the option of registering and using your own domain instead of the default wordpress.com sub-domain. Unfortunately this isn’t free – it’s a paid upgrade – but one well worth doing if you want to be taken seriously. I think it’s fairly safe to say that virtually all the big, well-known blogs have their own domain. You can read more about the ins and outs of how to do this in the WordPress.com forum.

Apart from credibility, the other reason for using your own domain is that your promotional efforts are an investment in your own brand, rather than someone else’s. And if you should one day decide to move to a self-hosted website or WordPress.org installation, you will be able to carry all your backlinks right along with you, meaning you don’t have to start from scratch building your traffic all over again.

WordPress plugins

I’ve written quite a lot about plugins on this blog, and in my opinion this is one of the most powerful features of WordPress. Unfortunately you are not able to install or utilise any plugins in the WordPress.com world, which severely limits your options to monetise your content or otherwise customise your site. This is the downside of the tradeoff between ease-of-use and flexibility.

Having said that, the core WordPress functionality is impressive, and is continuously integrating some of the best plugin features, so this is probably less of a hindrance than it perhaps once was.

Termination

Another consequence of going with a WordPress.com hosted blog is that you have to play by their rules. Granted, they don’t appear particularly onerous, but I always shudder slightly when I read stuff like:

Automattic may terminate your access to all or any part of the Website at any time, with or without cause, with or without notice, effective immediately.

Basically you’re at their mercy, and if for some reason they stop wanting to be your friend, there’s very little you can do about it. Of course, if you’ve been paranoid sensible and kept your own backups you’ll be able to get back up on your feet fairly easily – but I wonder how many people actually do this – after all, one of the stated benefits of having a WordPress.com blog is precisely that you don’t have to bother about this level of technical detail.

I love WordPress.com!

By now you might have gotten the impression that I’m opposed to WordPress.com – but actually that’s not the case. I just think you should go into it with your eyes open, and plan ahead a little. In my opinion, new bloggers should definitely go and get themselves a WordPress.com blog to play around with before going to the trouble of setting up a self-hosted blog. This will allow you to become familiar with the platform and the process involved in blogging without getting bogged down in technical details.

Later on, once you’ve gotten to grips with the basics, you can make a more informed decision about what niche to target, what domain to use, where to find hosting, how to go about installing WordPress for yourself, the wonderful world of plugins, etc. WordPress.com can be a great launchpad into all this, when you’re ready.

Which one do you choose?

I think ultimately this comes down to your individual circumstances: your level of technical ability, the amount of time you’re prepared to put into the technical aspects of your blog, and what your goals are for your blog.

It’ll be interesting to see which version is being used most by readers of this blog – why not take part in our poll? Feel free to leave a comment as well!

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1. WordPress.com statistics plugin
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3. WordPress statistics plugin

I always recommend using self-hosted WordPress instead of the free version, as you end up having much more control over your site. However, one area in which I’ve always felt a bit cheated with WordPress.org sites is the lack of built-in stats monitoring. I guess this is why most bloggers end up using sites like Google Analytics to keep track of things – myself included.

There are also third-party WordPress plugins available which provide some of this functionality – I wrote about one such statistics plugin a few months back. But a couple of days ago I stumbled across another plugin – that provides the bona fide WordPress.com stats within a WordPress.org blog! Now, this is not a new plugin – it’s been around for a couple of years already by the looks of it – but it’s the first I’d heard of it.

Plugin overview

As you can see, these are not statistics from my site. Because I only installed it a few days ago, it has not yet collected enough data to be of much use, so I lifted the screenshot from the plugin’s download page (I figured that was OK, since I’m promoting the plugin ).

The following information is displayed on the overview page:

• Recent traffic
• Referrers
• Most popular content
• Search engine phrases that have brought visitors
• Links on your site that visitors clicked
• Incoming links to your site

And each result allows you to drill down further to pull up more detailed stats on a particular post, referrer or search term.

Plugin installation and configuration

Installation of this plugin is very simple – copy it to your wp-content/plugins folder and activate it via the admin console as usual. The only slight complication is that you need a WordPress.com API key to use it – but this shouldn’t be a problem if you use Aksimet because you can use the same one. If you’re not an Akismet user, simply sign up for a free WordPress.com account to get one. It’s as simple as that.

As I mentioned earlier, it only starts collecting your stats once you’ve set it up, so the information you can get from it will be a bit limited for the first few days.

Conclusion

Because I haven’t had the chance to use it much yet, I’ll still have to see how the information weighs up against what I already get from Google Analytics. My feeling is that I’ll use the plugin stats mainly for day-to-day monitoring, but will use Analytics for more in-depth analysis.

If you’ve used the WordPress.com stats, either on a free or self-hosted blog, please feel free to leave a comment and share your experience, or add anything I’ve missed.

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3. WordPress Roles and Capabilities

Following on from my last post about translating your website, Dennis alerted me to the fact that there are WordPress plugins to do this too. Well, I don’t know why I didn’t think of that – I haven’t yet been able to think up a desirable bit of functionality that isn’t contained in a plugin – why should website translation be any different!

Sure enough, a quick search turned up several candidates. The Global Translator plugin looked the best, so I went right ahead and installed it – it’s those bunch of flags near the top of my sidebar.

From what I’ve seen so far, this plugin has the following benefits over using the plain Google widget:

• Translation occurs at the site level

  What I mean by that is that once you select a language, any other pages from the site will be shown to you in the same language (as opposed to the widget approach where you have to translate each page individually). This makes for a much more seamless user experience.

• Choice of translation service

  The plugin currently supports four translation services: Google Translation Engine, Babel Fish, Promt and FreeTranslations.com. Which one you use is completely up to you, and invisible to your site visitors. So if one isn’t giving you the results you need, you can switch to a different one in the background without a problem.

• Translated pages are cached

  Translated versions of your pages and posts are stored locally within your site, from where they can be served directly to visitors without having to be re-translated with each request. For medium- to high-traffic sites this drastically reduces the load on the translation service, which is to your benefit because if you make too many requests to these services you risk being banned – this is certainly the case with the Google service; I’m not sure about the others.

• The cache is non-intrusive

  Cached pages are created in ordinary files, not in your database. To be honest, I can’t see that it would be a problem if they were in the database – most other plugins don’t have any such qualms – but there you go. And before you start worrying about how much space this is going to consume, relax – there is an option to compress the cache, which seems to work just fine.

• Automatic locale-specific URLs

  The plugin automatically inserts specific language codes into the URLs of your translated pages. So, for example the German version of a post becomes http://some-domain.com/de/the-url, the Dutch becomes http://some-domain.com/nl/the-url, etc. An interesting question is how these are handled by the search engine bots, and whether these translated pages will start to show up in other-locale versions of Google etc? I’m speculating a little bit here, but because the URL is unique for each language-version of the page, I think they will be viewed (and thus indexed) as seperate pages. And because they’re in different languages, they will not be regarded as duplicate content. If this is the case, it seems to me like a great way of attracting more search traffic – you can bet I’ll be watching my stats over the next couple of weeks to see if this is indeed the case!

• Aesthetics

  This is pure personal taste, but I prefer the look of the flags to the Google widget, and you also have more control over how they’re displayed.

Banned for excessive numbers of requests

I’ve seen various references around and about to the translation services banning different sites because of making too many (or too frequent) requests. I believe this issue has been resolved in the Global Translator plugin by building in a configurable throttle setting to prevent this from happening (this is also where the cache comes into its own). Because of this though, don’t expect your entire site to be indexed immediately. With a 5-minute delay between requests (the default), it’s going to take a few days for most average-size sites to be translated into all 30-odd languages that are available.

Conclusion

All-in-all this looks like a nifty bit of code, so hats off to the guys at Nothing2Hide for all the hard work. I for one am looking forward to seeing how it performs over the next few weeks.

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I bet you log into WordPress as an Administrator, right? Yup, so do I. Nothing wrong with that – after all, most of us run single-user blogs. But did you know that WordPress has built-in support for a wide range of Roles and Capabilities?

WordPress Roles

By default there are five Roles, each of which has progressively more power:

• Subscriber
• Contributor
• Author
• Editor
• Administrator

WordPress Capabilities

Capabilities represent the various tasks that you can perform in WordPress, stuff like:

• publishing, editing and deleting posts and pages
• moderating comments
• managing users
• managing themes and plugins

See the WordPress codex for a full list of capabilities and how these are mapped to the default Roles.

Role Manager Plugin

If the out-the-box functionality doesn’t meet your requirements, you might like to check out Thomas Schneider’s role manager plugin, which allows you to edit the capabilities of existing roles, or even create completely new roles with arbitrary collections of capabilities!

What can you do with Roles and Capabilities?

This feature comes into play on multi-user blogs, when you want to assign greater levels of responsibility to some users than others. Generally you would not want more than one or two Administrators on a site – with great power comes great responsibility and all that.

• Membership sites

Probably the most common use of Roles other than Administrator is when you allow (or require) members of the public to register in order to access content or post comments.

• Team blogs

You may also wish to allow guest bloggers or members of a team to submit posts directly to the site, pending review by an Editor or Administrator before being published.

• Community sites

Or perhaps you want to create a community site where individual users are responsible for their own content, but cannot for example edit others’ posts, or install plugins or change themes.

All these and more are possible by assigning users appropriate Roles and Capabilities. I have a project coming up in the new year where I’ll need to approve content that’s been submitted for review before being published, so this is of particular interest to me right now. I’d be interested to hear from any of you that have experience in this area – please share your expertise in the comments below.

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Despite all best intentions, broken links are a fact of life on any website that’s been going for longer than a few months. Even if you rigorously follow the advice I gave a few days ago about redirecting urls, you can only control your own urls this way. But what about all those external pages you point to in your posts? If one of those sites closes down, or is less conscientious about maintaining the integrity of their site, broken links appear on your site!

Now, there is no shortage of link checkers on the internet, but for all you WordPress-ers, there’s an easier way – the broken link checker plugin. I recently installed and ran it on one of the sites I look after, and it came up with a list of more than 20 broken links – I had no idea!

Broken Link Checker plugin

This nifty plugin runs in the background anytime you’ve got your admin console open, and produces a report in the dashboard if it finds any dud links or missing images. Each row in the table also has a number of options that allow you to fix the problem without leaving the admin console, so it’s quick and easy to fix them.

Configuration

As you can see, configuration is straightforward:

• Status – this alerts you to any problems found, with a link to the management page. You can also manually restart the scanning process, although this should rarely be necessary.
• Check every post – here you can configure how frequently your site will be checked.
• Broken link CSS – until they are fixed, by default any broken links will be displayed as crossed out, as a visual cue to your visitors.
• Exclusion list – I haven’t found a need to use this as yet.
• Work session length – pretty self-explanatory!
• “Delete Post” option – the plugin author doesn’t recommend you use this, and neither do I!

If you change any of these values, don’t forget to click the Update Options button.

Fixing broken links

The management screen displays a table, with each row representing a broken link or missing image. It looks like this:

Here’s a brief explanation of each of the columns:

• Post – displays the title of the post or page which has the broken link
• Link text – displays the link text
• URL – displays the faulty URL, along with an Edit option for you to correct it
• View – this allows you to view the post or page, as seen by your visitors
• Edit Post – this takes you to the post editor so you can make changes in context
• Discard – this removes the row from the table, although it will reappear with the next scan if the link hasn’t been fixed.
• Unlink – this gives you the option to remove the link from the post, whilst retaining the link text.

Conclusion

Perhaps the best thing about this plugin is that once you’ve set it up, you can more or less forget about it, and just leave it to run in the background, safe in the knowledge that it’s got your back, and will notify you of any problems. Definitely one to go on the must have list!

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Every blogger or website owner should check their stats regularly to measure the progress (or lack thereof) of their site – things like:

• traffic
• subscribers
• revenue from ads and affiliates

The key, as with so many other things in life, is not to overdo it. Every minute you spend checking your stats is a minute you could have spent crafting that latest post or networking with other sites via commenting, social bookmarking, or whatever other means you choose to build your traffic.

I know I’m as guilty as anyone when it comes to this, which is why I was thrilled the other day to come across a plugin that automates the process for you and brings your stats right into the WordPress dashboard.

WordPress Reports plugin

WordPress Reports currently integrates with FeedBurner and Google Analytics, two of the most commonly used packages for tracking web stats, although the author says he may consider adding support for others in the future. Note that you configure each service independently in the plugin, so can choose to use only one if you wish. It’s probably obvious, but I’ll say it anyway: you need to sign up to each service that you want to use. Here’s a screenshot of the kind of reports the plugin produces (and no, those aren’t my stats ):

Configuration settings

Unfortunately there is no option to change the 7-day range of the reports, but I guess if you want to do more in-depth analysis you can login to Analytics or FeedBurner directly. It does however have options for the kind of reports you’d like displayed from Analytics. You can choose any or all of:

• Daily Visits
• Daily Pageviews
• Average pageviews per visit
• Inbound sources
• Rising sources
• Outbound links
• Popular content
• Rising content
• Falling content
• Entry pages
• New and returning visitors

Each of these will produce its own graph, so it can be a little slow to load with them all enabled.

With FeedBurner, you have the option of displaying more than one feed if you wish, so for example you could view subscriptions to your comments next to your main content subscriptions if you wish.

The plugin also has a couple of extra features which I’m not currently using – it can manage your Analytics tracking code for you so you don’t need to modify your template or use a different plugin, and also has a widget for displaying your most popular content.

More plugins

One of the things I love about WordPress is the availability of loads of really great plugins which extend the core functionality in all kinds of directions. Dale over at A Few Good Pens has recently published a list of some excellent ones, one or two of which I’d never come across.

The worst bit about having all these plugins is having to choose which ones to use; if you use too many it can have a negative impact on your page-load times. And I’ve also heard of cases where different ones interfere with each other, although thankfully I’ve never had that happen to me so far.

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Have you ever felt a need to alter one of WordPress’s default page listings so that it doesn’t show up certain pages? I did when I was first starting out with WordPress, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out a satisfactory way of doing it (sure I could have hard-coded the links into my template, but that’s not what I consider a satisfactory solution).

In fact, at the time, I wasn’t even sure if I was supposed to be changing any of my theme’s template files at all, after hearing all those dire warnings not to hack the core. Now that I’m a bit more experienced, it’s obvious that most people use a theme as a starting point for their site, but then customize it to suit their particular needs and taste, and to give their site a unique look.

The specific problem I had was that my theme (K2) inserts a horizontal list of all public pages in the header – not a problem in itself, but I had a couple of pages (Terms of Service, etc) that I didn’t want included as part of the main menu; I prefer to have those kind of pages linked from the footer.

The wp_list_pages function

Eventually I tracked down the WordPress function that generates those listings: the versatile wp_list_pages. The specific line in my header.php file that needed changing was:

and all I needed to do to exclude the specific pages I didn’t want displayed was to change it to:

where the numbers in the exclude list represent the id’s of the pages I wanted hidden.

You can also do it the other way by specifying the list of pages to include, which may make sense if you have a lot of pages, but only want to display a few of them. And there are lots of other ways to customize the display too, but I’ll simply direct you to the WordPress codex rather than trying to explain them all here.

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I’ve recently outlined my strategy for including images in posts, namely:

1. Find an image you’d like to use
2. Resize it with GIMP
3. Upload it to my web server via FilleZilla
4. Include it in a post

Well, guess what? WordPress has a built-in mechanism to streamline this process via its Media Manager. It automatically resizes the image, uploads it to your site, and can even embed it within your post if you wish! As a matter of fact, it can also manage your audio, video and other media files for you too, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.

Configuration

Before we start using the media manager, let’s have a look at how it’s configured in the background. In your admin console, click Settings > Miscellaneous. This brings up the Miscellaneous Settings options page (currently showing the default settings):

You can see it’s divided into two sections. The Uploading section defines where the images you upload will be stored. Unless you have a particular reason to change this, I suggest you leave these settings as they are.

The Image sizes section defines how your images will be scaled when you upload them. The original image will be saved as-is, along with two seperate scaled versions – medium and thumbnail size. These latter two will be sized according to the dimensions you define in this section of the options page. I suggest you untick the crop thumbnail to exact dimensions checkbox, or you may find that only part of the image makes it into the thumbnail.

I like to set the Medium size to just a bit less than the width of my content area; on this blog the content area is 500px wide, so I set the Max Width to 450px.

Don’t forget to click the Save Changes button when you’re finished.

Uploading an image

At the top of the post editor, you will see the media manager toolbar:

Click the Add an Image button to bring up the Choose file dialog.

Click the Choose files to upload button, and select one or more files from your computer to upload. This will transfer the files from your computer to your website, and also create the two scaled versions I mentioned above.

Embedding an image into your post

To use one of the images you’ve uploaded, click the Add an image button again to pull up the media manager, then select the Gallery tab at the top. You should now see a list of all the images you’ve uploaded so far. To use one of them, click the Show link next to it, which will display the following window:

Here’s a rundown of what all those options are for:

• Title – used to provide a title for the image, that may be displayed as a tooltip when a visitor hovers their mouse over it.
• Caption – apart from displaying a caption under the image, using this (and/or the Title) may have benefits for your search engine rankings.
• Description – I’ve never used it.
• Link URL – this defaults to a link to the full-size image, which, if clicked, will display the image by itself in the browser. I don’t use this, and so generally click the None button to remove the link.
• Alignment – this is most useful when displaying thumbnails, as you can align the image to the left or right and have the surrounding text wrap around it. Otherwise, for larger images I generally select None.
• Size – here’s where you select which of the three image sizes you want displayed. For a column-width one I select Medium (you could also use Full size, but for reasons I explain in my article on how to resize images with GIMP, this is not a good idea). Otherwise I tend to use the Thumbnail size and float it left or right.
• Click the Insert into post button to embed the image in your post.

Here’s an example of a thumbnail which I’ve specified to be aligned to the left. Notice how the text flows around it; this can be used to add graphical images to your posts without breaking up the flow of text so much that the reader has to go hunting for its continuation.

Image courtesy of mischiru

Conclusion

I hope that’s given you some idea of how the media manager works. It’s certainly easier to upload and resize images this way than the previous method I spoke about, particularly if you want to do several images at once.

Personally though, I think I’ll stick to the traditional way. Mainly because:

• I don’t like having three versions of an image taking up my webspace when I only intend using one.
• I had a couple of issues trying to align an image left, with wrapping text, while at the same time displaying a caption. I don’t think there’s any reason why this shouldn’t work; it just didn’t for me. It may be a bug in WordPress…
• On a more subjective note, I guess I just prefer to have a bit more control, and as such like to hand-code the html (I know, I know, this is exactly what WordPress is so good at shielding its users from – maybe just a hangover from my pre-WP days!)

I’d be interested to hear others’ experiences of using media manager, so please feel free to join the discussion by leaving a comment.

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2. How to resize images using GIMP
3. How to widen the sidebar in WordPress K2

I was recently asked by one of my clients to widen the sidebar on her K2-themed WordPress blog. Initially I thought this might be tricky as it would involve tweaking the theme’s template files. But once I started, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was not at all difficult – all that was required was altering a couple of settings in the site’s CSS. And the best part was that I didn’t have to modify any of the theme’s files – this of course makes it much easier to upgrade the theme in the future.

Background

My client was using a default K2 installation, with a single sidebar. It’s also possible to configure K2 to have two sidebars, or none, which is something I really like about the theme. If you’re using one of these configurations, you will have to adapt my advice accordingly. But the principle will be the same. For the rest of this article, I’ll address the single-sidebar scenario.

In this configuration, the main content area is 500 pixels wide, with a 200 pixel sidebar. Overall width is 780 pixels (for the mathematically astute the extra 80 pixels are made up in the column margins). My brief was to increase the sidebar width so it could accomodate two 125×125 pixel buttons next to each other. In case you didn’t know, this is the standard size of graphical advertising logos. So I decided to increase the sidebar width to 260 pixels (again the extra pixels are for padding), and thus the overall blog width to 840 pixels. Here’s how I did it:

1. Create a custom K2 stylesheet
2. Locate the relevant CSS selectors
3. Modify the width values
4. Activate your custom style
5. (optionally) modify the width of the header graphic

Step 1: Create a custom K2 stylesheet

The look and feel of any WordPress theme is controlled by the style.css file located in the theme folder, ie /wp-content/themes/k2/style.css. But K2 allows you to override the settings in this file by creating a custom stylesheet in the wp-content/themes/k2/styles folder. You will find this location already contains a sample folder, which is a good starting point. Create a copy of this folder and give it a unique name. Then rename the sample.css file in your copied folder too – use the same unique name if you wish.

Step 2: Locate the relevant CSS selectors

There are two CSS selectors that control the width that we want to change: sidebar-single #page controls the overall blog width, and sidebar-main controls the width of (you guessed it) the sidebar.

Open up your style.css file in a text editor, and use the search function to find them. They look like this:

.sidebar-single #page {
	width: 780px;
}

and

#sidebar-main {
	float: left;
	width: 200px;
	padding: 10px;
}

Copy these two bits as-is into the custom stylesheet you created earlier. Anywhere will do; I put mine at the bottom.

Step 3: Modify the width values

Now simply change the two width values – from 780px to 840px and from 200px to 260px (see, I told you it was easy). Just make sure you don’t change anything else. Now save the file and upload it to your web server.

Step 4: Activate your custom style

To activate the changes you’ve made, you need to log into your Admin Console, and go to the Design > K2 Options page. About two thirds of the way down there is a Style section with a drop-down list:

You should see the name of the custom stylesheet you created in step one. Select it, then click the Update Options button. View your blog, and check that the size has changed as expected. If for some reason it does not look right, you can easily undo the change by re-selecting the No Style option and once again clicking the Update Options button.

Step 5: (optionally) modify the width of the header graphic

If your site uses a custom header graphic, you may notice (as I did) that it no longer extends the whole width of your site. In this case, all you need to do is open up the image file (you’ll find it in the wp-content/themes/k2/images/headers folder) in an image editor like GIMP, and scale the image to be 840 pixels wide. Then save it with a different name back to the same folder (again this may involve FTP-ing it to your web server, which is beyond the scope of this article). Then, back on the K2 Options page, select the new image from the drop-down list in the Header section, and click the Update Options button.

And that’s all there is to it!

Related posts:

1. How to install WordPress themes using cPanel
2. How to exclude pages from WordPress’s page listings
3. Managing images with the WordPress media manager