In the past I’ve talked about some great WordPress plugins for backing up your database.   This is a great way to backup your WordPress blog for people that don’t know how to do it manually.   You can also set it up to do your backup automatically, which I find extremely useful because I run several websites that need backed up.

Throughout the past few years I been fortunate to meet a lot of bloggers, and I’ve found that many prefer to avoid plugins as much as possible, or sometimes they are just the kind of people that like to be hands on and learn how to do things themselves.   For these people, Performancing recently posted a Bloggers Guide To Safely Backing Up Your WordPress Site, where they detail the steps you need to take to manually backup your WordPress blog.

As a quick note, if you decide you want to manually backup your WordPress blog, you’ll first need to make sure you have FTP access for your website and the ability to access your Control Panel (CPanel).   From there you will want to follow the steps in Performancing’s guide to create a backup of your posts and a backup of your database.

I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t sad to see a post pop up in my feed reader today that WPDesigner.com is for sale. Small Potato has been a major part of the WordPress community and has developed quite the following. Not only has he been quite successful, but according to the WordPress Top 40, it looks like he has the #1 ranked WordPress blog, including a PageRank of 7.  On a personal level, he has touched a number of lives.

According to Small Potato, regarding the decision to sell WPDesigner:

If you’ve been reading this blog and my personal blog, you know the first and main reason is I’ll be traveling abroad for the rest of this year. Initially, I was hoping I could juggle traveling, maintaining this blog, and continue creating WordPress themes, but that’s more than likely not the case. Because of that, I’d rather hand Wpdesigner.com to a solid team of developers with enough man hours and better management skills to do this site justice.

Second reason is I’m at a crossroad in life. In the last two months, I changed my love and family lives. Now, it’s time to make career choices; I don’t have to, but I want to make a change. Although I still have the desire to compete with fellow WordPress theme authors, I would love to have the time and opportunities to explore and actually get away from the computer (my lower back acts like it’s 90 years old, but it’s actually 21). Letting go of Wpdesigner, sadly, will leave room for me to do that. (I’ll probably become a fisherman at one of the Thailand islands. I kid. I kid.)

Third reason is I don’t like giving theme support. Hahaha.

The website developer in me says “Wow, what an incredible domain name and great price for an established site,” but truthfully I am saddened by this news. When I think about people that have contributed the most to the advancement of WordPress, Small Potato is towards the top of that list with Matt, Lorelle, and some other great company. He’s always been very helpful and always tended to take a creative approach to things, whether it was his blog, theme club, or whatever else.

Small Potato, best of luck to you in your travels. The next owner has a lot to live up to!

In what is probably the most anticipated premium WordPress theme to date, it looks like the Mimbo Pro Theme has finally been released!

Darren created the free Mimbo Theme quite awhile ago and the demand was so high that he decided to follow it up with this work of art. Here are the features Darren lists for Mimbo Pro:

• Control panel options for Google Analytics and Feedburner, logo and header image management, homepage categories, optional color schemes, and advertisement management
• Custom templates for categories, archives, authors, sitemap, search results
• Auto-resizing for images
• Built-in contact form
• HTML controls for comments (bold, italics, blockquote, link)
• Print-friendly options on single-post pages
• Two widgetized sidebars with optional advertising
• Tabbed and separated comments/trackbacks
• Built-in gravatars and author highlighting
• Cookie crumbs on single-post pages
• Print.css stylesheet
• Optional microformats in the footer

Sound good? The screenshots are even better! Here is the demo of the homepage:

And here is a sample of a single page:

So what about the price? This theme is very competitive, with the single-use license available at $89.95 and the multiple-use license is only $199.95.

If you’ve been following the recent trends with premium WordPress themes, you’ve probably noticed that the two-tiered navigation menu has become extremely popular. An example of this is the popular Revolution WordPress themes. This style of menu can be used in a variety of ways, but the most common seems to be to display your children pages in a menu below your blog’s parent pages.

If you’ve wondered how to hack your existing WordPress theme to accomplish something along these lines, Darren Hoyt has taken the time to explain this in his post Creating Two-Tiered Conditional Navigation in WordPress. Here is the PHP you’ll need:

<ul id="nav">
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&depth=1'); ?>
</ul>
<?php if($post->post_parent)
$children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->post_parent."&echo=0"); else
$children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->ID."&echo=0");
if ($children) { ?>
<ul id="subnav">
<?php echo $children; ?>
</ul>
<?php } else { ?>
<?php } ?>

Once you’ve got the code in place, you’ll want to style it to look the way you want it to. Click over to Darren’s post to get the styling information!