Getting started with WordPress can prove a little daunting for a total newbie – particularly for those of us who are more design-minded and less code-geek. Graphic Rating has put together a handy WordPress cheat sheet that helps give an overview of the most important things you need to know about creating a custom WordPress theme from scratch.

Click here to read the full article on the Graphic Rating web site.

With all the WordPress plugins floating around out there, it can be a chore to sift through the less-than-stellar options from the truly useful and well-built ones. Lunartics has compiled a list of the 25 most popular Twitter plugins for WordPress. Plug in and enjoy!

Click here to view the full list on the Lunartics web site.

Not sure whether we believe this really works as easily and well as the article suggests, but it’s definitely an interesting concept. Divine is a Photoshop plug-in that helps you turn your layout into a real-live custom WordPress theme in only a few minutes. Too good to be true?  Not sure yet. We’ve not had time to test it out, but the concept sure is appealing in a lot of ways.

Have you tried it? Love it? Hate it? Leave a comment and let us know what your experience is and whether the plug-in lives up to the hype!

Click here to read the full article on the Smashing Apps web site.

If you ever thought that WordPress was only good for blog sites, this article will make you think again. Wordpress is a robust and flexible system that has evolved into more than blog software, but a full-featured content management system capable of handling web sites of many different types, sizes and styles.

Click here to read the full article on the Blogsessive web site.

After having our WordPress RSS feeds mysteriously stop working and spending hours on researching possible causes and solutions, we learned an interesting (and, possibly, obvious) lesson that we thought we’d share with our readers so they can avoid similar issues.

With all the social media sites out there, we were looking for a way to clean up all the extra URLs we’re using to direct people to our various profiles on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, etc.

Instead of having a bunch of different, messy-looking web addresses all over the place (ie: www.twitter.com/designgroupies or www.flickr.com/groups/designgroupies), we decided to set up several sub-domains under our web hosting account control panel and create redirects to the different sites. So, we set up a sub-domain for each social media site, such as: facebook.designgroupies.com or twitter.designgroupies.com

We also created a subdomain for our RSS feeds in the form of: feed.designgroupies.com  Unbeknownst to us, however, setting up a sub-domain named “feed” would create an actual folder on our FTP called “/feed”.  Since WordPress creates its links on the fly and uses the format www.yourdomain.com/feed as one of its default URLs for accessing a site’s RSS feed, having an actual folder called “/feed” on the FTP created a conflict.

When we tried to access our feed after the sub-domain was set up, WordPress was not able to use the folder /feed on the fly to create a valid feed URL. So, instead of seeing our actual feed, we saw the empty “/feed” directory on our FTP. We were baffled.

Our clue came when we were investigating the FTP and saw the folder called “feed” created by the sub-domain redirect. This raised some eyebrows and we decided to remove the feed.designgroupies.com sub-domain and – voila! – all was fixed.

Additionally, it should be noted that WordPress also uses /rss as one of its on-the-fly URLs for feeds, so setting up a sub-domain called rss.yourdomain.com would create a similar conflict and result in feeds not working as well.

Now, we’re going with the WordPress-safe sub-domain feeds.designgroupies.com and all is well!

We hope our adventures in troubleshooting help others avoid similar problems!

Check out this collection of 12 great tutorials on the ins and outs of building a Wordpress theme from scratch.

Click here to read the full article on the ReEncoded web site.

WordPress is a powerful tool that can be used not only to power your blog, but also as a highly-customizable content management system (CMS).  Pro Blog Design shows how to design and build a custom WordPress theme step by step.

Click here to view the full article on the Pro Blog Design web site.