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.

Option #1: chmod 777

Sure, you could CHMOD 777 your whole site. That would technically work, but it’s switching permissions whenever you need to update is inconvenient. And, leaving permissions this way leaves you open to a whole host of security issues.

chmod -R 777 <path-to-wordpress-dir> (Not Secure!)

Option #2: apache file permission

This gives apache full permissions. This works, but if you use FTP, users no longer have permissions to write files. No good! I want my FTP access intact.

chown -R apache:apache <path-to-wordpress-dir> (No FTP!)

Option #3: apache /w group permissions

I created a “wordpress” group and added my FTP users to it and gave the wp-content directory group write permissions. It’s a bit of a compromise, but it worked for me.

groupadd wordpress
useradd -G wordpress <your-username>
chmod -R 775 <path-to-wordpress-dir>/wp-content/
chown -R apache:wordpress <path-to-wordpress-dir>

Option #4: wp-config constants

Another option for those who are unable to change file permissions and/or have a relatively new version of WordPress, is to bypass entering FTP information by defining your FTP info in your wp-config.php file. More information can be found in the WordPress codex.

define('FS_METHOD', 'ftpext');
define('FTP_BASE', '/path/to/wordpress/');
define('FTP_CONTENT_DIR', '/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/');
define('FTP_PLUGIN_DIR ', '/path/to/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/');
define('FTP_USER', 'username'); 
define('FTP_PASS', 'password');
define('FTP_HOST', 'ftp.example.org');

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.

Installing/enabling the sub-theme

Rename the folder “STARTERKIT” and “STARTERKIT.info.txt” file to match your new theme and remove “.txt” extension. For example, “yourtheme” and “yourtheme.info”. Open that info file and change the following lines:

name = yourtheme
description = A Zen sub-theme

Login to your drupal install, Admin>Appearance and enable yourtheme sub-theme and the zen base theme. Set your sub-theme as default.

Template files

Many of the page templates are included in the Zen package and can be found in sites/all/zen/templates folder. Copy all needed templates to your sub-theme folder (sites/all/yourtheme/templates) folder.

Important note

Remember to deselect “Rebuild theme registry on every page.” in Admin>Appearance>Settings(sub-theme)

Have you used Zen as a starter theme for Drupal 7? Please share your tips and/or experience with the Zen theme in the comments below.

Envirosystems

Built on the ever powerful Drupal CMS. A fully customizable and user-friendly experience, envirosystems.ca gives their management team a flexible means to communicate messages and dynamically add new companies to their expanding portfolio.

Visit envirosystems.ca

Gatemaster Inc.

Gatemaster.ca is used as a first contact to potential customers and to highlight the network of services operated under the Gatemaster Inc. banner. A customized WordPress installation gave them a powerful toolset for managing and creating new content.

Visit gatemaster.ca

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.

Setting up PHP

Open up Terminal (Applications->Utilities->Terminal) and type:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

Go to this line

#LoadModule php5_module        libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

and uncomment the line by removing the hash character

LoadModule php5_module        libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

After saving the file (Control+O) and exiting (Control+X). Restart Apache.

sudo apachectl restart

Configuring PHP

cd /etc
sudo cp php.ini.default php.ini
sudo chmod 666 php.ini
sudo nano php.ini

Find this line and remove the semi-colon

;date.timezone = 

and add your own timezone. A list of timezones can be found here (http://php.net/manual/en/timezones.php)

date.timezone = America/Halifax

You’re halfway there. PHP 5 is now running on your local server.

Setting up MySQL

Download the MySQL package for Mac OS X.5 (32 or 64 bits depending on your machine)
Install everything in the package in this order:

• mysql
• the startup item
• the preference pane.

Now, open /etc/php.ini, find these three lines

pdo_mysql.default_socket=/var/mysql/mysql.sock
mysql.default_socket = /var/mysql/mysql.sock
mysqli.default_socket = /var/mysql/mysql.sock

and replace /var/mysql/ with /tmp/

pdo_mysql.default_socket=/tmp/mysql.sock
mysql.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock
mysqli.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock

After installed, you can start MySQL in the system preferences. To access your database from the Terminal

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -u root

Change your Home Directory

Want your local server’s files to be located somewhere other than the default /Library/WebServer/Documents/? Open /etc/apache2/httpd.conf, and change the next two lines to reflect your new home directory.

DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents"
...
<Directory "/Library/WebServer/Documents">

Drupal Problems?

If you’re getting errors during Drupal installation try linking the MySQL sock file like below

cd /
sudo mkdir /var/mysql
sudo ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock

Drupal’s Clean Urls

Having problems enabling Clean Urls? Find all instances of the following line in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf

AllowOverride None

and change None to All…

AllowOverride All

Studio 11

Studio11 is a halifax based creative agency specializing in marketing and event management. The website was built using a WordPress CMS with fully customizable sidebar.

Visit studio11.ca

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.

Get the most out of your headlines.

H4-h6 are all but discarded as insignificant. Constrain your headings to the highest levels: h1,h2, and h3. Larger emphasis is placed inside these magical tags, so make these words count. Spice your headings with only the most relevant keywords. A word of caution: overuse at your own risk. Too much repetition and these tags will work against your ranking.

WordPress Users: Your blog title is your H1. The H2 is a post title, and H3 is a heading within a post. Tip: On single pages, turn post titles into H1.

The Context

The H1 tag. Quickly describe who you are and what you do. Use one H1 tag near the top of the page. Max 5–7 words. Mirror your title tag with prime keywords. Avoid overuse. It’ll only weaken the impact.

The Content

The H2 tag. Get more specific. If you sell widgets, what sort of widgets? It’s time to do some research and embed the words people use to find your site. Google analytics is a great place to start researching your most popular keywords.

The Callouts

The H3 tag. From all accounts, H3 tags do little to improve ranking, and are mainly used to divide sub sections, helping readers digest information quicker. Better reading reduces bounce rate, and encourages return visits.

Chef LIVE!

“Culinary Excellence in the Comfort of you own Home.” These custom catering and culinary experts turn your house into a 5 star restaurant, and make dinner an event to remember. Their website needed to be clean enough to eat off of, and recipes just a click away.

Visit cheflive.ca

Two years of blood, sweat, and bezier curves. That’s what it takes to make your average font family. Two years of painstaking work in an under-appreciated and underpaid industry. Too many years to watch your pockets picked by an internet culture of open source, free distribution. It’s no surprise that @font-face scares the bejesus out of type designers. As a result, progress has been slow and attitudes more cautious about embedded type.

What is @font-face?

@font-face is a CSS rule pointing to server side font files. Instead of relying on system fonts, designers use whatever font they choose.

To the web designer, it means getting the desired look while saving hours that would have been spent setting up hacks and workarounds. To a type designer, it’s like handing your keys to a perfect stranger and hoping they won’t rob you blind.

Where will @font-face work?

• Safari 3.1
• Firefox 3.5
• Opera 10

What about Internet Explorer?

Microsoft has supported web embedding fonts ever since IE 4. Like everything with Microsoft, it’s not that simple. The more secure EOT (Embedded OpenType) format was being developed, but never really took off. The added complexity of creating an EOT file required a special tool (WEFT). It was a valiant effort to obscure font data and add a level of security. Many are still unconvinced, and wait for a better non-proprietary format. Until that time, the traditional TTF (TrueType Font) format and the newer OTF (OpenType Font) formats will not work in Internet Explorer.

Internet Explorers (6,7,8) make up around 40% of users, which means an alternate set of fonts and @font-face declarations, or you’ll be falling back to the font stack like usual.

How do you use @font-face?

1. Copy font file to your server
2. Define @font-face in CSS
3. Declare font in CSS

@font-face {
  font-family: MyFont;
  src: url(MyFont.ttf);
}

body {
  font-family: MyFont, sans-serif;
}

What about legal issues?

All major font foundries now append their End User Licensing Agreements to restrict web embedding. Nearly all commercial-use licenses do NOT give you @font-face permissions. From listening to the TypeCon 2009 Web Fonts Panel there appears to be a growing consensus that embedded opentype will emerge as the future of type on the web.

Fonts were not designed to mix and match. Sure, we can consult the Font Matrix and find an available font. But, tailored web safe typography has always been seen as a luxury. With the proliferation of desktop publishing software, computers are now preloaded with more system fonts than ever before. With greater choice comes greater control.

Where are we now?

There have been some great articles written about CSS font stacks. Designer’s know Gill Sans, Myriad, Tahoma, and Frutiger are not “Arial-based”. But, we live with it. We think that’s the best we can get. After doing some research, I’ve found there’s more than enough system fonts to have font styling the way you want it, without compromise. Below you’ll find a list of font stacks organized by the most popular typeface classifications.

Headline Font Stacks

1   Display Serifs (Delicate details. Best seen at large sizes)

font-family: Perpetua, Baskerville, "Big Caslon", "Palatino Linotype", Palatino, "URW Palladio L", "Nimbus Roman No9 L", serif;

2   Geometric (Low readability. Best seen large in short lines)

CAUTION: At best, 90–95% coverage over all systems. Drop back to Arial to prevent generics.

font-family: "Century Gothic", "Tw Cen MT", Futura, "URW Gothic L", Arial, sans-serif;

3   Modern (High contrast. Thins may disappear at smaller sizes)

WARNING: At best, 70–80% coverage over all systems. Drop back to Transitionals (Georgia, Times, Times New Roman) to prevent generics.

font-family: Didot,"Bodoni MT", "Century Schoolbook", "Niagara Solid", Utopia, Georgia, Times, "Times New Roman", serif;

You may ask, “Where’s the slab serif stack?”. Besides Rockwell (50% on windows), there’s very little coverage. If you’d like to use them one, try one of the many font replacement techniques.

All stacks below guarantee best possible coverage (99%). This is an attempt to retain the same font styling on the most systems.

Sans– Serif Paragraph Font Stacks

4   Neo-Grotesque  (The granddaddy of sans serif. Even strokes, well balanced)

font-family: Corbel, Arial, Helvetica, "Nimbus Sans L", "Liberation Sans", sans-serif;

5   Humanist (Slightly more varied strokes. Some serif features)

font-family: Verdana, Tahoma, "Trebuchet MS", "DejuVu Sans", "Bitstream Vera Sans", sans-serif;

6   Set Small (Crystal clear at x-small. Looks great less than 11 pts)

font-family: Corbel, "Lucida Sans Unicode", "Lucida Grade", "Bitstream Vera Sans", "Luxi Serif", Verdana, sans-serif;

Serif Paragraph Font Stacks

7   Old Style (Unique historic character, often overlooked)

font-family: "Calisto MT", "Bookman Old Style", Bookman, "Goudy Old Style", Garamond, "Hoefler Text", "Bitstream Charter", Georgia, serif;

8   Transitional (The workhorses of the serif. Easy on the eyes. )

font-family: Cambria, Georgia, "New Century Schoolbook", "Century Schoolbook L", "Times New Roman", serif;

Monospace Font Stacks

9    Clear Code (The best monospaced fonts. Easy on a developer’s weary eyes)

font-family: Consolas, "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono", "Andale Mono", Monaco, "DejaVu Sans Mono", "Lucida Console", monospace;

10   I ♥ typewriters (Need I say more?)

font-family: "Courier New", Courier, "Lucida Sans Typewriter", "Lucida Typewriter", monospace;