Here are some tips for editing the default theme for WordPress 1.5:

• Instructions for removing the blog name and description from the default theme’s header are on the Kubrick theme site but they’re outdated. The changes should be made to the style.css file in your wordpress>wp-content>themes>default subdirectory.
• Similarly, instructions on the Kubrick theme site for making the default theme’s header image linkable are outdated. The actual instructions can be found in the Support forums.

I updated the WordPress installation on this site from 1.22 to 1.5 earlier so you might have seen some strange sights and experienced slight nausea if you were browsing fuyoh.net during that period.

(This is slightly different from the strange sights you see and the nausea you experience when you usually browse this site.)

The upgrade process was a little more complicated than I was led to believe and it took much more work than I expected. Admittedly, this was down to my personal preferences about the look and feel of this blog.

For instance, I ran a slight problem because my blog isn’t located in my WordPress directory. There are instructions for this scenario but these aren’t linked in the 1.5 upgrade instructions.

Dash it all

The Dashboard is a nice idea. I like having a single page with links to the most recent posts and comments as well as simple stats. I also appreciate being notified of important WordPress updates and I could see how the Dashboard could be important when disseminating WordPress-related security advisories.

However, I’m less keen on the “Other WordPress News” section. These are updates on the Planet WordPress site and while there certainly are relevant WordPress-related entries on that site, there are some unnecessary updates as well. Does every WordPress 1.5 user really need to know the founding developer misses Texas food? I would prefer it if the Planet WordPress updates on the Dashboard are made optional.

The “Get Firefox” promotion in the WordPress admin section is odd. Who is the target exactly? Are there really any users who are savvy enough to use WordPress but haven’t heard of Firefox? My feeling is that if there are WordPress users out there who aren’t using Firefox it’s because they prefer their non-Firefox browsers. (“Non-Firefox” doesn’t necessarily have to mean IE as there are other robust Open Source browsers.) I’m a fan of Firefox and have been using it since the Phoenix 0.5 days so seeing that “Get Firefox” exhortation in my Firefox browser is redundant.

Kubrick

The default theme bundled with WordPress is a slick piece of work and a vast improvement over the previous default WordPress theme.

There are some quirks, though. For instance, by default, Kubrick’s archives display excerpts which strip the HTML from entries. There are instructions to remedy this but the instructions contain a typo. You should be editing archive.php instead of index.php. You might also want to perform the same edit in search.php because Kubrick search results are HTML-stripped as well.

More on WordPress 1.5 later and hopefully, I’ll be able to run through all the things that make WordPress 1.5 super-cool after complaining about its minor quirks in this entry.