• Unique header images for each page, category, etc.
• Fix tags list that run too far to the right
• Dropdown menus to show child pages in the header navigation – Hot!

Head over to the Forums for more!

• Adjusting columns/header widths
• Random rotating banner with AdSense occasionally
• Customizing link lists and link categories on the sidebar
• Insert logo in sidebar

Want more? Head on over to the forums and make some new friends!

Most of the time, the problem here lies with a blog’s permalink structure. Cutline was designed for use with blogs that use search-friendly URLs or permalinks. If your site uses a URL structure that looks like this:

http://siteurl.com/?p=xx

Then in all likelihood your site still uses the default WordPress permalink structure. There are drawbacks to this, and it’s mostly with searchability and user familiarity. It’s easier to recall http://www.blogherald.com/about than http://www.blogherald.com/?p=1656. The added benefit is that it makes it easier for search engines to pick up your site using keywords found in the URL.

It’s easier to recall friendly permalinks than ID or number-based ones. The added benefit is that it makes it easier for search engines to pick up your site using keywords found in the URL.

And so it makes sense to use a permalink structure that uses the post slug rather than just the post or page ID number.

And as for Cutline, the default header links (aside from the Home link) look like this:

• http://siteurl.com/about
• http://siteurl.com/archives

The part that comes after the URL is what you call the slug, and this is usually derived from the name of a post or page, unless you specifically edit it.

Activating friendly permalinks

To activate friendly permalinks, you go to your WordPress dashboard, and then to Settings — Permalinks. You are then given a few choices, which can reflect the date, category, name or other details specific to a post or page.

At Cutline, we use /%postname%/ which means the post or page slug comes right after the site’s URL. So a title named “Test Post” will usually have a slug test-post and a URL http://cutline.tubetorial.com/test-post, unless I edit the slug.

I usually recommend using the post category in the URL structure, as this helps by adding more keywords to the URL.

/%category%/%postname%/

If you prefer a shorter URL structure, then you can perhaps just use the /%postname%/. Some others would prefer adding the post year, month or day in the post field, but this can get messy, since in the event that you change post dates, links to the original URL will be broken. Static WordPress pages are unaffected by this, though, and their URL structures are usually the page slug appended right after the site’s URL.

Now if you’re editing the permalink structure through the WordPress admin panel, WordPress assumes your site’s .htaccess file is editable by the server. Otherwise, when you save the new URL structure, you would have to edit .htaccess yourself.

If that still doesn’t work, perhaps your server doesn’t support mod_rewrite. Check with your hosting provider if this can be activated.

You can check out this section of the WordPress codex for more information.

Editing the Slug

On latter versions of WordPress (2.6 up), the slug editing field can be found right below a post or page title, and this is highlighted in yellow, with an Edit link right after.

On older versions, the slug field can be found at the right sidebar of the post editor. The post and page slug usually follows the title of the post. So be careful when writing long titles–this also means your post slug will be lengthy. In those cases, it would help to manually edit the post slug for brevity.

Simply put, Cutline’s navigation bar links to the Archives and About pages will work if you have static pages published with the page slug as /archives and /about, respectively.

This means that under the WordPress admin panel, you navigate down to Write — Page and then input the following:

For the archives page

1. Title: Archives (or whatever title you want the page to have)
2. Page slug: archives

And then click publish. The archives page should take care of itself. Cutline will automatically publish a page with your archives organized according to month and category (or tag, if your WP version supports it), as long as there is a page called “archives” and your permalink structure is set correctly.

For the about page

1. Title: About (or whatever title you want the page to have)
2. Page slug: about
3. Input your desired about text in the text field

And then hit publish. For the about page, you actually need to have something in the text field or else the about page will be blank (just the title).

If you have done these and still the About and Archive pages do not appear properly, then maybe you have a different permalink structure or setup. You can resolve this by either of the following means:

First, under Options — Permalinks you have to set your permalink structure to have the following parameter defined:

/%postname%/

So it could either be

/%category%/%postname%/

or even

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

or anything else, as long as the %postname% parameter is included. This ensures that WordPress calls the pages with slug “about” or “archives” when these are accessed via the header navigation links.

If you’re running WordPress using the default permalink structure, you can edit the header.php file such that you change the links to /about and /archives. Simply look for these lines:

<li><a <?php if (is_page('about')) echo('class="current" '); ?>href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/about/">about</a></li>

and replace the part that says is_page('about') with is_page(##), where ## is the page ID of your About page.

And also replace the part that says <?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/about/">about</a> with <?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/?p=##">about</a> where ## is the page ID of your About page.

Note that page IDs can be found under Manage — Pages.

Same with the Archives page. Simply look for the line that says

<li><a <?php if (is_archive() || is_page('archives')) echo('class="current" '); ?>href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/archives/">archives</a></li>

and replace is_page('archives') with is_page(##), and also href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/archives/">archives with href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/?p=##">archives

where ## is the page ID for your Archives page.

If these still don’t work, then perhaps the problem lies elsewhere. Drop us a line and let us help you out.

Creating extra page templates, learning how to use Widgets, adding additional pages, image uploading, pages not showing because you haven’t set up permalinks, all of these can be handled quickly, and painlessly by the thousands of people in the WordPress support forums.

Noticing a Safari bug in the Cutline 1.1 theme or having issues trying to find where to change the colours of the theme, that stuff comes to me.

I am in the process of recording a few screen cast tutorials on how to make the most of Cutline, and they will be coming out shortly. They will cover the most popular Cutline related questions, and hopefully solve the major issues that people are having.

The reason we have set it up so that category archives show excerpts rather than full posts is for search engine optimization benefits. Basically, we have worked it into the theme that you have less duplicate content and so Google will like your blog more because of the truncated posts.

If you want to change this, open up archive.php and look for <?php the_excerpt(); ?> (around line 24) and replace the_excerpt(); with the_content();. Save and re-upload and you should see full posts on category pages rather than excerpts.

Also, Cutline 1.2 should be coming out soon. I am putting the finishing touches on it, and I hope you will all be pleased. Of course I couldn’t implement every change that people wanted as I can’t please everyone, but I hope you will like the tweaks and update.

The only thing needed to do so is a conditional tag, and of course Wordpress has the appropriate template tag for this:

(in_category())

Using this condition and a classic if, elseif php call we can change everything we want for the categories we want. Just the post CSS or even the complete design. If you want to feature a complety different design based on pages, use combined conditional tags to define if your new design.

The background images (colored closing tags) and background color for several categories I used on my former blog are easy to achieve.

Open in your theme folder the file index.php or if your theme uses a separate file for the loop, theloop.php and look for following line

This is the regular entry template and here we will have to change the code a little and insert the conditional tags for the categories we want to alter.

As you could see in the link above, I used a different background for several categories, but there are no limits for this principle.

You can easily use a total new template page for every category, in which case you have to make new template files and call them as in the following screenshot.

And obviously you can even call a totally different CSS for every category, or for specific pages. All based on the conditional WP tags.

Now you only need to make the changes to your CSS anymore. In the next screenshot you see a small example of how to achieve this, just like I did at my former blog

My Archives Don’t Work

This problem has been addressed by Chris in 2 different entries.

1. Creating About And Archives Pages.
To make sure your archives work, you’ll first have to make sure you have an archives page. Creating this page is simple. Follow these steps (Copy&Paste from Chris’s entry)

1. Log into your WP Administration panel and click on the Presentation link.
2. Assuming you have the Cutline theme activated, you’ll notice a link in the sub-navigation menu called Cutline Options.
3. On the Cutline Options page, simply check the box next to “Enable the Cutline Archives Page.”
4. Click the Update Options button to create the Archives page.
5. In order to ensure that your new Archives page gets published properly, you’ll need to click on the Manage link in the main navigation menu.
6. Once there, click on Pages in the sub-navigation menu.
7. One of your pages will contain the text “Archives” in the Title field – find that page, and then click on the Edit button for that page.
8. Locate the Save » button (which resides just beneath the main text entry box), and click it. You’re done!

If you don’t see a page titled Archives in your page manager, write a new page, called Archives, chose the Archives template for this page and use archives as post slug Template and Post Slug can be found in the sidebar of your admin panel).

2. Why My About And Archives Link Don’t Work
If you click both the About and Archives link, and none of them works, although you have created both pages, make sure that you use the permalinks structure for your WP blog. Chris explains everything in this entry.

The Sitemap Doesn’t Work

If you click in the footer the link to the sitemap and this leads you to a 404 page, you might not have created a Sitemap for your site yet. Again create/write a new page. Call this page Sitemap and use as template Sitemap. The post slug should be sitemap too, exactly as we did with the archives page.

Change The Header Navigation Links To Display Your Pages

If you want to change the standard Cutline header navigation links (Front Page, Archives, About) in to a horizontal list of your pages, replace the line 35 – 36 in header.php

<li><a <?php if (is_archive() || is_page('archives')) echo('class="current" '); ?>href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/archives/">archives</a></li>

<li><a <?php if (is_page('about')) echo('class="current" '); ?>href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>/about/">about</a></li>

with

<?php wp_list_pages('sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li='); ?>¹

So far Cutline Problems, Question & Answers Round 1, more to come over the next days.
And yes, I’ll install forums for the community too.

¹This will display links to all first level pages, not to subpages.

Recently, I addressed both XML and XHTML sitemaps. In the case of the XHTML sitemap, I even released a special WordPress theme Page that can be incorporated into any existing site without additional modification.

The only bummer, though, is the fact that the resulting sitemap page won’t assume the styling of your current WordPress theme. This is something that really has to be addressed on a per-theme basis, so there is simply nothing I can do to accommodate everyone (at least not beyond what I’ve already done).

But you know what? I’m not worried about everyone.

I’m worried about you, my savvy and excellent community of Cutline users.

So in order to show my appreciation, I’ve formatted my XHTML Sitemap specifically for you guys.

Download it now and follow my activation instructions to get it working!

If you do everything right, it’ll end up looking like this.

Note — all future downloads of the theme will come equipped with the sitemap.php file. So, if you download the entire theme now, you won’t have to deal with my special add-on here, ’cause you’ll already have the goods!

Update — The sitemap file linked above is only suitable for Cutline 1.03 or older, and it is not intended for use with Cutline 1.1 or WordPress 2.1. If you have Cutline 1.1 or higher, you already have the correct sitemap file, so no worries!

Default WordPress Pages in Cutline have been constructed so as to allow for comments. In many cases, however, comments may not be appropriate, and by turning them off for a particular page, you can clean up the styling and save yourself some potential spam troubles down the road.

How to turn comments on or off on your Pages

In the Write Page area of your WordPress Administration Panel, you have the option to choose whether comments are on or off for the Page that you’re creating. Please note that the default setting is to have comments turned on, so if you create a page without addressing this issue, then you may end up with a discussion area that you don’t necessarily want.

Many themes do not come with this capability, but Cutline gives you total flexibility with regard to Page handling.