The first thing is to find the path to the theme that you are using, for the default theme the path is:

⁄wordpress⁄wp-content⁄themes⁄default

For other themes the path will vary so make sure you have identified the correct one for the theme you have in use.

Then using your favourite text editor open up the following files:

• functions.php
• header.php

Note: Before you make any changes to these files make sure you have a backup

In functions.php add the following code in an appropriate place.

function list_pages($pages) {
$options = get_option( 'widget_pages' );
foreach ($options as $key=>$value) {
        if ( $pages == $options[$key]['title'])	{
			$sortby = $options[$key]['sortby'];
			$exclude = $options[$key]['exclude'];
        	if ( $sortby == 'menu_order' ) {
				$sortby = 'menu_order, post_title';
				}
			$out = wp_list_pages( apply_filters('widget_pages_args',
					array('title_li' => '',
					'echo' => 0,
					'sort_column' => $sortby,
					'exclude' => $exclude) ) );
        	if ( !empty( $out ) ) {
				?>
				<li><?php echo $out; ?></li>
				<?php
				}
        	}
		}
}

Then add the following line of code in the header.php file. The correct location will vary by theme but generally it will be within the header div.

<ul><?php list_pages('Header1'); ?></ul>

The effect of this will be to list the pages defined by the Pages widget that has a title of Header1, you can edit the the parameter above for list_pages to match the one you are already using. This should work with WordPress 2.8 onwards but probably will not work with previous versions to that.

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare pclziputilpathreduction()

After disabling the WordPress Automatic Update plugin and clicking on the Automatic Update link on the dashboard again the update worked correctly. So that is easily dealt with and not a major problem.

The second problem was more serious, the automatic updates had overwritten the contents of the default theme with the original Kubrick design. If like me you have updated the default or the classic themes but never bothered to create a new theme then WordPress will replace your changed files with the originals.

Luckily in my case there was a backup that I could restore my changes from as I use SVN to store changes to code.

There is a message on the dashboard telling you to backup your files and database before doing the automatic update but many people will ignore this, I know I did!

I guess the moral of this story is to always make sure you have backups of your work before making changes, however tempted you may be to skip this annoying step, and also to create your own theme in WordPress rather than relying on making changes to the default or classic themes as WordPress obviously considers these fair game for overwriting without warning (something the old automatic updates plugin did not do).

⁄wordpress⁄wp-content⁄themes⁄default

For other themes the path will vary so make sure you have identified the correct one for the theme you have in use.

Then using your favourite text editor open up the following files:

• sidebar.php
• header.php

Note: Before you make any changes to these files make sure you have a backup

Next look for the following code fragment in sidebar.php which is used by WordPress to generate the list of page links.

<ul><?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?></ul>

Copy the line of code above from the sidebar.php file and paste it in to the header.php file

This will copy the page links from the sidebar to the header. The end result may look strange because of the CSS styles in use. To get the result seen above in the header of this blog I changed the stylesheet to make the page links float right, where you place them is down to personal preferences.

⁄wordpress⁄wp-content⁄themes⁄default

Then using your favourite text editor open up the following files:

• sidebar.php
• header.php

Note: Before you make any changes to these files make sure you have a backup

Next look for the following code fragment in sidebar.php which is used by WordPress to generate the search box (What this code does is to insert the contents of the searchform.php file at this point in the page. The searchform.php file contains the code to produce the search box and the search button).

<?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/searchform.php'); ?>

Cut the line of code above from the sidebar.php file and paste it in an appropriate location in the header.php file.

This will move the search form from the sidebar to the header. The end result may look strange because of the CSS styles in use. To get the result seen above in the header of this blog I changed the stylesheet to make the title float left and the search form float right, where you place the search form is down to personal preferences.

Being new to WordPress I have been using the standard image upload facilities.  After upgrading to WordPress version 2.7 the Flash uploader stopped working so I resorted to using the browser based version. This was annoying but not annoying enough to make me do something about it. Then I noticed that images which were fine when captured looked fuzzy when viewing the published article, specially when using Internet Explorer.

So what was going on? Well, for one selecting anything other than full size meant the images were being re-sized by the uploader and that reduced the image quality, you notice the difference in quality compared to re-sizing the images yourself in Photoshop.

The other thing is that if you select to insert the image at full-size then it will be uploaded at whatever size it is; if that is too wide then the browser will helpfully scale the image to fit within the column. This creates a passable image in FireFox but a pretty blurred image in Internet Explorer.

As an example, the image below has been scaled to fit, in FireFox you can still more or less read the text in the image, in Internet Explorer the image is pretty much unreadable

Right-clicking on the image in FireFox and selecting properties opens the image properties dialog which will show in the Image Dimensions line (highlighted in the image below) that the image has been re-sized

The answer for me was to revert to sizing the images using Photoshop then uploading the images via FTP to the same location as the uploader. Then there is a choice of selecting the image from a URL using the WordPress uploader or just typing in the URL directly to the post. Personally my chosen route is now to do the all the HTML myself, gives me a feeling of being back in control.

The other issue is the number of different images the uploader creates in the WordPress /uploads directory, it seems to create three images at least for every image that is uploaded, hand-rolling the process means you have one image per image in the post and you have control over the process. If you're like me and you keep altering and uploading the image repeatedly then WordPress creates a whole lot of images which become difficult to control and take up loads of space.