Custom menus are so simple to set up with just a few lines of code needed to get started, and then you can make use of the Appearance -> Menus section within the admin. A simple drag and drop system which allows you to create menus consisting of page, post, category, custom post type, custom taxonomy and custom links. It's so much more flexible.

To get started with custom menus I recommend reading Justin Tadlock's tutorial which tells you everything you need to know – WordPress custom menus. Well, almost everything, there is one item missing from his tutorial (although it may have been added since I last read through it), which is how he has the CSS class, link relationship and description showing in his second screenshot. To get this you need to open up the screen options section up at the top of the screen and you'll see the extra boxes that you can tick to display (or not as the case may be).

We now use custom menus on every new site we set up, and we even use one for the site map as it makes more sense to do so. If you've not already started using them then I highly recommend learning and switching to them.

Rather than writing out and repeating how to do everything, I've decided to just link to the tutorials and sites that I used to learn these features, and just add my own notes instead. However, of course I'm always happy to answer questions and help via the comments section.

Featured Images

This came in WordPress 2.9. Before this specific option, you could still create a featured image by attaching an image to a page or post via the media uploader and then using a bit of querying to pull it out and display it. Trouble was, it was a bit of a hassle and hard to explain to clients or less advanced users. Bring on the Featured Image. A way to allow posts and/or pages to have a single specified image that just required one line of code in your theme file to display.

I think the best post on this subject has to be from Mark Jaquith – Post Thumbnail Images (note, this was their name before it changed to 'Featured Image'). He covers everything you really need to know.

Featured images brings a whole host of new options. It's far simpler to create a photo blog with them for a start, and I can remember helping people out in the past where they used the categories and posts system to hold product details for a catalogue style site. Before it was a case of upload and attach the product photo (or several) to the post, and explain to the client to put the main one at the top using the order system, so that you could code in the theme to pull the first one out larger, and then perhaps show small thumbnails of the rest. Now you can simply tell them to use the featured image which can easily be displayed in product listings, and as a larger image on the main product page, with any additional images added via the media uploader and displayed as thumbnails.

This is just a simple example of how this can be used

From a personal point of view I've been window shopping online and working out everything I need for my wedding which is now in 10 weeks time! It's quite fun, especially as I enjoy shopping!, and we're both really looking forward to the day when it finally arrives. It'll be great to see all of our family and friends, and the food sounds fantastic

Workwise we've been quite busy. I've been working a lot on a calendar availability system using jQuery and PHP to control it, update dynamically and refresh to keep the calendar updated between a number of users. It's a bit of a challenge and a lot of reading to find out how to do things and how to do them the most efficiently, however it's great fun and different from the normal websites we work on.

I've managed to get a migration script in place for my Page Menu Editor plugin for WordPress. About 6 weeks ago I discovered that the developer on the All in one SEO pack plugin had integrated my code into his plugin at the request of a number of users, which rendered mine a bit obsolete when both are running. However, there was no migration script and he'd used different option names to me, so nothing was copied over. Having both plugins on a number of sites myself, it's a pain to sit and copy it all over manually. So I've now set up a simple migration to allow users to do it themselves if they wish, so if you do use both plugins then an upgrade should be coming through soon with the new migration system.

Finally, our new venture Blog Themes Club is going well. We've added a new theme and I've been adding a number of additional page templates to all our themes to hopefully give our users more than just a basic theme. We're looking to add another new theme next month too and have plenty of ideas for themes to keep us going for a while.

It's all going well

Club Membership

The site is primarily a themes club (in case you hadn't already guessed that!), selling 3, 6 and 12 month membership plans which will allow users to sign in, download and use any of our themes available, get updates of the themes as soon as they're available, get quality support via our private support forum and also via a support desk.

The membership prices are below however we've also reduced these until 1st August as we appreciate that starting with 4 themes isn't a large amount, however our prices are based more on support and continued upgrades:

• 3 months membership – $49 $29
• 6 months membership – $79 $49
• 12 months membership – $99 $69

Single Purchases

Going from experience I know a club membership isn't for everyone, and not everyone will need support or want more than one theme, so we've also got the option to purchase themes individually for a single use. This option doesn't come with any support, but the themes themselves go from $19 which we think is a fairly reasonable price.

Also until July 31st 2009 you can get 25% off the purchase of any Single Use purchase by entering the discount code LAUNCH25 during the checkout process.

Theme Designs

Of course we're aiming to cover all the subject areas that a design can be used for with WordPress including Blogging, CMS, Photoblogs, eCommerce and more. We've already got another theme almost ready to go plus a 6th is being planned ready for design soon. We're hoping to add at least one new theme per 2 months and of course keep our current ones up to date.

Win membership for a month!

To celebrate the launch of Blog Themes Club we are giving away 10 membership accounts for free to readers. These accounts are valid for one month. During that time you will be able to download all of our themes and get daily support.

To enter the competition all you have to do is help us spread the word of our site via Twitter. All you need to do is:

• Follow us on Twitter @BlogThemesClub
• Tweet or ReTweet the folling message via Twitter :
  

  @BlogThemesClub have just launched their new wordpress themes club http://tinyurl.com/n7rhnh – 10 memberships up for grabs in a competition

• Leave a comment linking to the status link of your tweet on our launch post

The deadline for this competition is Sunday 21st June 2009. Therefore, no tweets after midnight Eastern Time (New York Timezone) on Sunday (about 5am GMT) will be counted. We will select the winners randomly and do our best to announce the winners the following day.

» Read our launch post – Blog Themes Club Opens

Maybe I need to elaborate on a couple of things. At most we have maybe 3 or 4 people on a project, or sometimes it's just the two of us, so standard project management software is too excessive for our needs. All I need to do is create a post, write a to do list, add the initials after each item for the person who's dealing with it, and that's it. Then we can just make comments on the post with questions and/or updates about the work. The comments are timestamped which obviously helps, and I'll get an email for every comment. You can also subscribe to the comment feed for each post, so all everyone else will need is a lightweight feedreader and they can just add the comment feed for current work posts to keep up with the discussion.

It's simple, but that's all we need. Somewhere for me to list the work needing to be done that we can all access, and somewhere to share the discussion, where the discussion is logged for future reference.

Today I decided to try out a plugin called Allow Categories which allows you to restrict any non Admin to only see posts from specific categories. This isn't to try and hide our work from the freelancers that we employ, but more to simply reduce what they need to wade through really. The restriction/hiding of posts works fine, however all categories were still being displayed in the category list in the sidebar, so after various attempts I've managed to use a function to override the wp_list_categories() output, and remove the specific categories that shouldn't be displayed.

I've added my first actual project post for a new site that needs to be sorted out over the next couple of weeks. It took me all of a couple of minutes to type up what needed doing plus leave a comment with an update of what we were still waiting for from the client and what could be started.

Besides adding the other projects that are currently on, I just need to work out how I want the front page to work and look. So far so good

So how am I using WordPress? Well this is the plan, once it's set up I'll let you know if it works! At present I've decided to create a category for each web site we maintain currently, then work on each site will go up as a post. The idea is then as we (2+ people working on each site) work through things we can leave comments, questions, requests for opinions etc. on the posts. As work is done the post can be closed and a new one started, and if there are different sections to the work ie. for a whole new site, then multiple posts can be made.

Then on the front page the latest posts for each site can be displayed, or I can easily just control which sites to display on the front page so that sites that are not being worked on can be kept out of the lime light. I've not worked out the front page yet as you can tell!

I personally find it much easier to just type out a to do list and then update that with the del and ins tags as and when things are done rather than creating a record for every single task.

So WordPress is installed and now is just the task of adding all the work to it. I'll let you know how it pans out Any suggestions on how to structure the front page are welcome!

This may also be my own problem which is why I've not seen anyone else mention it. I've got an issue (which I don't have on any other site) on my comments admin page, and the comment counts are wrong on that too. So it's something to look into further when I have the time.

The other gripe I've got is that when you use the automatic upgrade in the admin, it overwrites all the files and also the classic and default theme directories. My first thought when I realised this was that surely there are people out there who use one of these themes and just make a few alterations themselves? My second thought, well more a concern, was that a lot of sites we have to upgrade has their theme in the default directory. You may wonder why, and there is a good reason! If you go to a WP site, the first thing WP has to do is check which theme is in use and then check if it's there by looking for the stylesheet. If the stylesheet can't be found WP automatically reverts back to the default theme and updates the database to make the default theme the selected theme.

It's an understandable method however I've found that if I happen to be updating my stylesheet for this site, for a brief couple of seconds my stylesheet doesn't exist as FTP will delete the file and then upload the new version. At that point, if anyone visits the site, the theme is switched to default. It sounds like a rare thing but I've had it happen a few times on this site, so once I worked this out I started to use the default directory instead.

Okay, so I realise that I could leave sites as they are and just not use the built in upgrade function but with around 20+ sites to upgrade (not all mine!) when a new version is out, the function is very much welcomed, however in my mind, overwriting the theme directories is a flaw. Either, the option should be given to copy the theme directories over or not, or simply just not part of the upgrade.

However, despite my problem and annoyance, those are the only issues that I can really find wrong with the new version. I just now need to update all the sites to not use the default directory!

We run quite a few client sites on WordPress, and let's face it, sometimes you don't want to upgrade immediately, perhaps other work needs doing to the site theme before you want to upgrade everything, or you have another reason (client's paying up is usually a major one!). If you're like me then you'd rather your client's didn't see this notice about upgrading. Some can start contacting you asking why it needs upgrading and if the site is safe to use, others request the update there and then.

Why the notice is shown to non Admins I'm not sure. However, after a quick check and a few lines of code, I've now released a plugin to just hide this message from anyone who isn't a level 10 (i.e. Administrators). Once I've got time I'll probably add an options page to allow people to hide it altogether, or to perhaps allow Editors and Admins to see the message, but not Subscribers through to Authors.

You can view the official plugin page or just download it from WordPress.

A quick wrap up of what's been happening:

WordPress 2.7 was finally released this week, and not a moment too soon. WP 2.7 is the best version yet, the admin is beautiful and the features are great.

We finally took a day off work (on an exceptionally cold but sunny day) and got to the zoo, something we'd been planning to do since October. It was all worth it when I got to see what I went for – the new lion cub. I could have just stood and watched him for hours!

Work has continued to be busy, which is obviously good from a credit crunch / recession point of view. I'm just a tad bit tired and need a break! However, come Friday I'll be stopping work (well client work) for Christmas, and certainly can't wait! Although I seem to be arranging to sort out so much stuff over Christmas that I'll probably be busier than ever!

I won a competition the other week and got a premium WordPress template for free, so I need to get around to injecting my own personality into that, plus the 2.7 code (yes another job for Christmas). So I'll be updating the design of this site soon.

Both Dave and I won a bit of cash off the BloggingTips.com forum competition, so we put our winnings together and put it towards a new Sigma 10-20mm camera lens. I've not had a chance to get any shots with it yet, however I hope to have a play next week and see what I can capture.

I've been eying up Sam's iPhone with a major amount of jealousy! Frustratingly, I've got over a year left on my current contract (yes the one that had no improvement on it whatsoever!). I'm quite tempted to take on a second contract just to get the iPhone, and use that for business, then keep my other for personal for the time being until the contract runs out. But I do keep trying to tell myself to just wait!

And I've finally got Family Ski (We Ski) for the Wii, a bit of an early christmas present off Dave. It's not as good as the real thing, but it's good fun anyway. I've only spent about half an hour on it due to lack of time, but it's quite surreal shussing down, round the trails and paths, avoiding the silly people standing having a chat on the slopes (it's just like real life!).

However, hopefully I can take a long weekend here and there next year and get up to Scotland to do the real thing

Most of it has gone pretty smoothly. I've not only updated to use the new comment pagination (after 25 comments, which is a rarity on my posts!), but I've also still kept my own comment styling and markup, using the comment callback function.

I have spotted a couple of issues or concerns however, but I'm not sure if this is down to the code I've used, so I'll be checking on these more in depth first.

The first is the comment count using the comments_number() tag. I noticed when I first added my updated theme files that one the post I happened to check, there was one comment displaying however the count said 2. On further investigation I did have a second comment on the post but it was unmoderated. Obviously not the outcome I'd prefer, as sometimes I just don't have a chance, or forget to moderate comments, so it would be confusing to some to see perhaps a heading of '4 Responses' yet only one displayed!

The second issue, or not really an issue but a strange finding, is that in the callback function you effectively rewrite your comment markup. You start with a list item so essentially you should finish with a list item. On the codex page for the wp_list_comments() tag, the callback function example has the closing list item tag, however, when you use this code in your theme, you actually get two closing list items. It looks like the template tag automatically adds the closing list item regardless of what you use. Obviously this is strange behaviour as it's assuming that you're using a list for your comments (which you should, but plenty of themes out there don't), and it leaves you with incomplete code in your function, which is not usually the case.

Hopefully the first issue mentioned will be fixed before the final release, and the second is more a case of whether it's considered normal behaviour or not. To me it isn't, and who ever wrote the codex page thought it wasn't either, but perhaps to the WordPress developers it's how it should be!

However, they're only minor issues, and the advantages and beauty of WordPress 2.7 far outweights those that's for sure.

All I'm now waiting for is the release of WordPress MU 2.7 for a couple of sites!