WordPress Designers and Developers in Minneapolis, MN

How to Import PodPress Audio URLs

January 18th, 2012 — Blog Post, Thoughts, Wordpress

I ran into a real bugger of a problem tonight when attempting to import a WordPress site using the Importer plugin. The problem arose, because the importer does not get all of the data out of the “wp_postmeta” table. In fact, it misses or messes up the audio urls that PodPress uses.

The solution I found was the following:

1. MAKE A BACKUP OF BOTH YOUR OLD SITE’S AND NEW SITE’S DATABASES!!! (Following the steps below can seriously and permanently mess up your site. Call a WordPress pro if this message scares you. Seriously.)
2. Go into the old site’s phpMyAdmin and export the “wp_postmeta” and “wp_posts” tables.
3. Go into the new site’s phpMyAdmin and import the “wp_postmeta” and “wp_posts” tables that you just saved in step 1 above. (Note: If your target installation uses the same “wp_” prefix, then you will need to change the title of the tables before importing them.)
4. In the new site’s phpMyAdmin, run the following query:

   REPLACE
   INTO wp_posts
   SELECT *
   FROM wp_ww_posts
   ;

That did it for me. How about you?

(Thanks, FCW and NTM!)

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WordPress Classes in Minneapolis and St. Paul

October 28th, 2011 — Blog Post, Thoughts, Wordpress

I am working on a series of beginner WordPress classes for College of Visual Arts in St. Paul and CoCo in Minneapolis.  So far I have found creating a curriculum to be difficult.  The central question that I am wrestling with is, “Who is a WordPress beginner?”

There are beginners who fully understand the WordPress interface and are ready to move on to CSS and PHP, just as there are beginners who have probably never used a computer before.  There are beginners who want to blog, and there are beginners who want to set up an e-commerce website.  There are beginners who understand the web, and there are beginners who find logging into gmail to be a continual challenge.

A WordPress class can’t be everything to everyone, but hopefully it touches enough bases to make the majority of students feel like they got their money’s worth.  But this is the struggle.  Where is that sweet spot?

I have taught a number of WordPress classes via Minneapolis Community Education, and, by-and-large, those have been huge successes.  Most of the students who came through those classes left feeling like they were in a better position to go forth into the world of WordPress than when they began.

But those classes cost only $20.  We are looking at much higher price points outside of that environment.  And to paraphrase Spider Man, “With bigger prices comes bigger responsibility.”

I have considered all sorts of options including:

• Beginner WordPress.com
• Beginner WordPress (self-installation)
• Getting Started with CSS in WordPress
• Building Your First WordPress Theme
• WordPress for Small Businesses
• Beginner PHP in WordPress
• WordPress for Bloggers
• WordPress for E-Commerce
• WordPress Multi-Site for Beginners
• Building Your First WordPress Plugin
• Fun with Functions.php
• Photoshop for WordPress Users
• Advanced PHP for WordPress

I don’t know that any of the above truly meet a majority of people’s needs, but I am guessing that the masses want a WordPress class that gives them the basics of how to create posts/pages/links, insert images/video, and do some other basic things.

So, I think I will start there.

What  WordPress class would you like to see taught in the Twin Cities?