The other day I had a client come back to me after the WordPress 2.8.5 upgrade came out. I had designed the WordPress theme for his website and after the upgrade had been installed the theme disappeared from his Appearance–>Themes section in his administration panel. At the very bottom of the theme selection page it read, “Template is missing.” next to the name of the theme. After searching around on the web I found a simple solution the error. Its just small problem within the style sheet.

Here is the solution to the “Template is missing.” theme problem:

Simply open the style sheet in an editor such as Dreamweaver or you can do the editing right within the admin panel by going to Appearance–>Editor and selecting the Style.css file.

Look for Template: at the very top of the code. It should look something like this at first:

/*
Theme Name: BrewBlog.ca
Theme URI: http://www.blakemccreary.com
Description: Theme with two columns, right-sidebar, fixed-width and widget-ready. Compatible with WordPress 2.8, valid XHTML & CSS. What’s new? No sprites, header image, version check and much more.
Author: Blake McCreary
Author URI: http://www.blakemccreary.com
Template: BrewBlog.ca <——-DELETE THIS LINE OF CODE
Version: 2.0
*/

Once you delete the Template code just save and/or upload the new style sheet. And there you go. WordPress theme “Template is missing.” problem solved!

The answer to your lightbox gallery problems is here.

Last night, I was pressed for time developing a WordPress site for my friend who happens to be an upcoming hip hop artist out of Atlanta, Georgia. Before we get started you can check out the new gallery to see how it functions. (Mr. Floyd County Photo Gallery) The launch is on October 23rd and everything was ready to drop on iTunes. The website had been neglected all summer with both of us being busy and we had to throw everything together quickly. After all, what artist doesn’t have a website up and running at all times if you are anywhere near the mainstream? (hrrm…http://www.kidcudi.com…seriously. I’m getting big timed hardcore on Twitter.) Anyway, I ran into some major issues when implementing a lightbox gallery in the WordPress.

If you haven’t noticed yet I use the Flexible Lightbox plugin on my Portfolio page to showcase my designs to potential clients. That plugin has always been quite a pain in the ass to me. It never works when I try to simply import a gallery all at once instead of doing all of the images individually. The CSS code has to be tweaked every single time I go in to edit. I will be taking my own advice soon and upgrading to the Lightbox Plus WordPress plugin by 23Systems.net.

I tried just about every single lightbox plugin possible including Lightbox 2, Shadowbox, and Flexible Lightbox. They just would not work with my new theme design. The images in the gallery just kept popping the images into a new window tab which is extremely boring. After getting frustrated I performed a search in google and hit this page.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/lightbox-plus/faq/

After reading through the frequently asked questions and troubleshooting page for the Lightbox Plus plugin I was immediately convinced that there was some good development behind the plugin so I installed it. After installing the plugin I was immediately impress by the array of options available within the admin panel. The screenshot below does not do justice.

One of the most impressive options within Lightbox Plus is the style setting. Many bloggers are not very knowledgeable  in CSS customization and the plugin clearly takes care of it with so many choices already available. A few of other settings available Resize Speed, Transition Type, Overlay Opacity, Slideshow, Previous/Next Labels, and much more. You can check the plugin out at the 23Systems.net home page or I’ve provided a direct link to the WordPress.org plugin below for quick download. Enjoy creating your lightbox gallery with efficiency and ease!

Hand Tool stuck in Adobe Photoshop

Recently I was working in Adobe Photoshop CS3 (this also happens sometimes when I swap back into Photoshop 7.0 to work with imageready) for a client’s animated gif advertising campaign, all of a sudden my Photoshop wouldn’t display anything but the “hand” icon. No matter what tool I selected, I would always have the hand tool icon. Not a single tool would work other than the locked hand tool. This happens occasionally to me so I figure a short article is due. I can’t be the only one, right?

Here are a few solutions to the infamous adobe photoshop hand tool stuck or froze problem…(please make a comment as to whether these were helpful)

1. Simply press the Space Bar. (it took me a while to find this one but it seems to resolve the issue frequently)
2. Try restarting Photoshop. Many other sources claim it is a memory problem.
3. If that doesn’t work, try clearing the menus and settings in your windows menu (this is Photoshop CS3 i’m working in).
4. If that fails go for a full system reboot.

Perhaps a corrupted preferences file is the problem – especially if rebooting photoshop and your computer isn’t helping.

In my case I tend to work with several programs running simultaneously since I like to multi-task along with listening to my itunes. Memory is most likely the issue and from what I’ve researched this is commonly solved restarting. If you want to go the extra step you could increase your memory allowance in the Adobe Photoshop preferences. (Edit/Preferences/Memory and Image Cache. Mine is cache level 4 and maximum memory usage 75%. My computer has a modest 2048 MB of system memory which seems to be enough at most times.) Hopefully many people can resolve the hand tool issue by pressing the space bar. It has not failed for me yet.