If someone has ever submitted an ad on your site without any images attached, you’ll notice it uses the “No Image Available” placeholder image. For most people that’s fine but if you didn’t like the wording, color, or wanted to change it to a different language you needed to use image editing software.

Not anymore. Here’s a simple tutorial on how to easily change the default placeholder image without using any editing software.

Some of you have been asking us how to make it easier to distinguish parent categories from sub-categories in your drop-down lists. It’s a great question and pretty easy to do.

Here’s what your drop-down lists should look like currently before the change we are about to make:

Here’s what your drop-down lists should look like after we make the change:

Over the last few months it’s appeared rather quiet here at ClassiPress HQ. In actuality, we’ve been quite busy behind the scenes working on a new update (v3.0.3) and a brand new company web site. We plan on launching the new site early next month (which we’ll announce in a separate post and email to all customers) and then the 3.0.3 update will be released soon thereafter. It’s a bug fix and feature enhancement release so nothing major.

Anyhow, the reason for this post was to provide a handy bit of mySQL code when migrating your ClassiPress site to another domain.

While going through the demo site migration process, we had to change a bunch of legacy meta_values which have the image urls hardcoded in them so the thumbnail and ad images weren’t showing up. Instead of manually having to go through hundreds of records, it made more sense to write a custom sql query to handle the same change in a matter of seconds.

Building WordPress themes (especially as complex as ClassiPress) requires a lot of attention to organization and details. It doesn’t take much to write a bunch of messy code with no comments just as long as it works, right? That’s usually fine if you’re building a theme just for your website but if you plan on selling or giving a theme away for free, it’s very important to write clean code with lots of comments. This is one of the reasons it’s taking me longer than expected to release v3.0.

So great, you write clean code with comments but how do you create a theme and what are the proper standards you should abide by? With WordPress being as popular as it is, you would think there would be hard and fast guidelines on how to develop and release a theme but surprisingly there isn’t much.  Yes, you can find lots of blog posts from people claiming their way is correct but for me, I’ve taken advice and ideas from all sorts of sites. Another great way is to reverse engineer an existing theme by some of the best themers out there today like WooThemes or StudioPress.

If you’ve recently upgraded your Sociable plugin to 3.5.2+, you’ll notice that the image icons on your single ad pages look out of whack like this:

To fix this, go into “Settings” => “Sociable” and check the “Disable sprite usage for images?” box. Save and everything should now be all fixed. If you are using WP Super Cache, you might need to clear the cache first. Also some browsers might need to clear their cache as well (ctrl+ reload page).

If you haven’t heard the name Darren Rowse before then now is the time to listen. He’s a very popular blogger who makes 6-figures a year on his Problogger site and definitely knows his stuff. A while back he put together a month long series called “31 Days to Build a Better Blog” and it was such a hit, he decided to turn it into an e-book.

This downloadable e-book is designed to help you jump-start your blog by giving you 31 tasks that will turn your blog into the powerhouse you’ve always dreamed of. The great thing about Darren’s e-book is that you can do it at your own pace and in your own way. Set a goal of reading a chapter a day and take notes. I usually dog ear and highlight the important pieces and come back to them later.

This is a feature that everyone has been asking for and I’ve finally got around to implementing it. You can now add an HTML WYSIWYG editor to the new ad submission description field. So if you’ve enabled the “Allow HTML Code” option in CP, your customers will be able to do some basic html markup to their ad submission!

This feature will be in v2.9.3 but if you wanted to get a head start and use it now, you can easily add it to your site. Use at your own risk though. This code worked fine for me but your configuration might be different.

If you are familiar with WordPress and the many plugins and themes available for it, you’ve probably come across some strangely named files like .mo, .po, and .pot. If you haven’t then the theme and/or plugin has not been designed for translation.

This article explains how to take a .po file that is included with your WordPress theme download and translate it into your native language.

So what the heck are those .mo, .po, and .pot files anyhow and why are they included in my download?

For the ClassiPress forum I use a free software called phpBB. Up until a few weeks ago, I wasn’t having any problems with forum spam but now it seems the bots have me zeroed in. PhpBB does come with a simple captcha-style anti-bot option but for some reason it doesn’t seem to work very well. I have also enabled a feature to require email verification by clicking on a link before their account becomes active.They beat that too.

I must say, the bot engines out there today are pretty damn smart. They have figured out a way to automate and bypass both of these security measures so they can post spammy links to their products or just be a nuisance. Luckily the spammy forum posts haven’t been porn…at least not yet.

By default, ClassiPress includes listing all categories so your site visitors are able to post a new ad and place it in a category even if it’s empty. Otherwise, they wouldn’t even know the category exists and it’s pointless to even have it. With that being said, a couple of you have asked me how to remove empty categories from the ClassiPress navigation which is actually quite easy.

ClassiPress uses the standard WordPress function wp_list_categories which allows you to pass certain parameters into it and alter the results. All of the parameters have certain default values if you don’t pass anything into the function it just uses the defaults.