rustindy

The graphic of the fairy was unfortunately *not* a GPL picture – it was from an online stock photo library (I forget which one, but it’s linked in the comments on Alex King’s blog somewhere) and is not allowed to be distributed in the way that it was. But if you want to see it in action, check http://lisa.innereyes.com 😉

As I understood the license for the picture, it is not allowed to be distributed, but it is allowed to be used for a blog. If anyone finds the link to the library it came from and reads legal better than I do, feel free to double-check that.

oh yea, borders too (sorry, forgot about that) 🙁

Well, normally you shouldn’t have to change *any* of the core WP files, so most people wouldn’t have that complaint. And the few that do need to change core files probably know what they’re doing and won’t have that complaint. WP is pretty well organized, internally. There are only 4 folders with required files in them (besides “/“). Seems straightforward enough, given their names.

As for the CSS file, blame the theme/template/style author, not WP. The stylesheets can be as simple or complex as the person creating them desires.

To change the colours of the links in the sidebar, start by finding the #sidebar ID in the stylesheet. Then look for #sidebar A in there. If that doesn’t exist, create it and assign a colour to it. You might need to mess with the anchor pseudo-classes to make it work though:

#sidebar A:active, #sidebar A:visited, #sidebar A:link
{
color: #003366;
}
#sidebar A:hover
{
color: #0033da;
}

Your ISP is dumb. Nothing you do in WordPress will affect your FTP access to the folders. Simply put, it *can’t* happen. It sounds like they messed something up on their end.

Anyone who knows what OSS is should also know the differences between OSS and free, so (c) isn’t too much of a concern – generally speaking, for the most part, etc.

(b) is definitely something to consider, but there are always situations where someone simply does not have the time and/or ability to do their own theme. Case in point – I can’t draw to save my life, but I have good eye for layout and colour, so I’m creating a theme. It’s taking forever because I can’t draw, but I know exactly what I want to see – just takes me a while to get there. If I had $50 or $100 to pay someone to develop the layout I want so it looks like it’s meant to look the way it looks, I’d be happy 🙂

(a) yes and no. There is currently no in-depth FAQ to my knowledge, and I do see *many* of the same questions being asked over and over again. If someone with a couple hours a day to spend on it for a week or so would start one in the Codex, I suspect it would quickly be linked to from the Support page here as a “first-stop” resource for people with problems or questions. At the same time, with regards to Themes, there is *plenty* of documentation on how to build them and tons of examples of what you can do with them. Education is always the first choice of the intelligentia.

From the MySQL 4.1 documentation:

Tell the server to use the older password hashing algorithm:
1. Start mysqld with the --old-passwords option (this can also be set in the MySQL INI file)
2. Assign an old-format password to each account that has had its password updated to the longer 4.1 format. You can identify these accounts with the following query:
mysql> SELECT Host, User, Password FROM mysql.user WHERE LENGTH(Password) > 16;
For each account record displayed by the query, use the Host and User values and assign a password using the OLD_PASSWORD() function and either SET PASSWORD or UPDATE, as described here:
mysql> UPDATE mysql.user SET Password = OLD_PASSWORD('newpwd') WHERE User = 'some_user';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

So basically, add the -old-passwords option to the MySQL ini file, then use the bottom two queries to change your existing WordPress database login from the new password encryption to the old password encryption. Then run the WP installation again so it can create the proper tables with the proper rights.

The link to the above information is at: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql/en/old-client.html

As I’ve noted on several occasions in the past (including a response earlier today to you), PHP4.3 and MySQL4.1 dislike each other because of the new authentication scheme in MySQL 4.1. The only workaround is to set MySQL4.1 into the lower security mode so it’s compatible with clients (like PHP4.x) that use the older authentication library.

Or upgrade to PHP5 – WordPress works fine with it, and it works fine with MySQL4.1.

No problem, glad it’s working for you 🙂 Gonna post a link?