Hav­ing trou­ble with Word­Press’ auto update fea­ture? Con­fronting errors like “could not copy file…”  or is Word­Press ask­ing for FTP information?

Your prob­lem is most likely server per­mis­sions. If you have shell access to your own VPS/dedicated server, use the lines below. If you’re using a shared host­ing setup, try option #4 below, or con­tact your admin­is­tra­tor for help.

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Why Zen Theme?

The Zen theme is the nat­ural first step when them­ing Dru­pal. It reduces Dru­pal down to the essen­tials, allow­ing for a solid foun­da­tion to build up from. The alter­na­tive? Copy­ing files from the core themes is messy, and start­ing from scratch is time-consuming.

Down­load the Zen Theme. Included is the base zen theme and sub-theme tem­plate, STARTERKIT.

Copy every­thing into sites/all/themes/zen on your web server. Move the STARTERKIT folder up a level into sites/all/themes. Separating the base theme makes upgrad­ing zen the sim­ple mat­ter of over­writ­ing the zen folder with the newer ver­sion. Files within the zen folder will remain unal­tered. All con­fig­u­ra­tion is done within the STARTERKIT sub-theme. Read More

Basic Web Server

MAMP is great. It’s an easy way to host your PHP/MySQL site locally for test­ing and devel­op­ment. But, if you want to take advan­tage of Snow Leopard’s built in web server capa­bil­i­ties, OS X makes it easy. Go into Sys­tem Pref­er­ences > Shar­ing, and check the “Web Shar­ing” box.

That’s it. You can now setup an HTML-only web­site locally. Where do you put the files? The default folder is /Library/WebServer/Documents/. While we’re at it, let’s setup PHP and MySQL to work locally, as well.

Test it. http://localhost. No need for a port as it will use apache’s default port 80.

PHP and MySQL will now need to be setup for a full func­tion­ing local host. Read More

It’s a con­stant strug­gle to be noticed in this ever expand­ing inter­net land­scape. The prac­tice of SEO (Search Engine Opti­miza­tion) pro­vides the bright­est bea­con for our robot friends. In that effort, head­ings are cru­cial ele­ments. No mat­ter what advances may come, infor­ma­tion hier­ar­chy will remain. Read More