FAQ
General
WordPress is a state-of-the-art and rapidly evolving web publishing platform. Hundreds of individuals around the globe maintain WordPress’ open source code and thousands of talented WordPress plugin developers contribute valuable enhancements to WordPress’ out of the box capabilities. Our goal at Graph Paper Press is for photographers, videographers, designers, and publishers to be able to take advantage of WordPress’ elegance while simultaneously avoiding the hassle of keeping their software up-to-date.
According to WordPress.org, themes are collections of files “that work together to produce a graphical interface with an underlying unifying design for a weblog.” In layman’s terms, a WordPress theme is what controls the functionality, the look, and the feel of a WordPress website. WordPress themes come in a variety of flavors, from basic, free themes to more complex, premium themes. The key takeaway about WordPress themes any beginner must know is that at any moment a WordPress website’s theme may be changed without adversely affecting the actual content of the website.
What is needed to use Graph Paper Press themes?
Before Graph Paper Press themes are used, a few things must already be in place: a GPP compatible web hosting provider, a domain name, and a WordPress installation. Graph Paper Press themes come with the following minimum web hosting provider requirements: WordPress 2.8.5/WordPress MU 2.8.5.2, PHP 5.2 or greater, PHP cURL enabled (libcurl/7.16.0 or greater), MySQL 4.0 or greater, Apache mod_rewrite module (for Pretty Permalinks)
What is the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org?
With WordPress.com the hosting and managing of the software is taken care of by the team at Automattic. With WordPress.org you need to install the software on your own server. We provide hosting, if you need it, and WordPress and our themes come pre-installed. You can sign up for our hosting right here.
Who do you recommend for web hosting?
For large, expensive projects that will get lots of traffic, we recommend RackSpace. For smaller, yet-highly scalable projects we provide an Elite hosting package, which includes installation and configuration of our themes and WordPress on the shared Rack Space Cloud server.
What is a domain name and how does it relate to web hosting?
Websites are usually accessed by either typing in an IP address associated with a web hosting account or typing in a URL, which contains the domain name of a website. For example, Graph Paper Press’s IP address is in numerical form (12.34.567.89) while its domain name is in alphabetical form (www.graphpaperpress.com). Think of a domain name as an easy-to-read name tag which people may use in order to visit and view a website. In other words, consider web hosting to be a home and a domain name to be its address. In order to use Graph Paper Press themes, a domain name and a web hosting account are required.
What domain registrar should I use?
GoDaddy.com, Namecheap.com, Gandi.net, and Moniker.com all come highly recommended. Do keep in mind, though, that a good domain name registrar is not always the best web hosting provider, and vice versa.
What is FTP and how is it used?
An FTP client is application software which allows for the transfer of files between a web server and a computer. Put simply, an FTP client is what most website owners use when they need to download, edit, and upload their website’s files. Most FTP connections require a hostname, a username, and a password in the following form:
FTP Host: ftp.example.com
FTP User: user@example.com or user
FTP Password: password
Host, username, and password values are most often supplied by web hosting providers. Graph Paper Press recommends FileZilla, open-source software distributed free of charge under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Read more information about FTP Clients in the WordPress Codex.
FTP Host: ftp.example.com
FTP User: user@example.com or user
FTP Password: password
Host, username, and password values are most often supplied by web hosting providers. Graph Paper Press recommends FileZilla, open-source software distributed free of charge under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Read more information about FTP Clients in the WordPress Codex.
Installation
`This is html`
I downloaded a theme from Graph Paper Press. What do I do next?
Every Graph Paper Press theme comes with either a) an instructions.html file or b) a readme.rtf file. These files contain most of the information that you will need in order to quickly setup and deploy your new Graph Paper Press theme.
Since the release of WordPress 2.8, we've received a number of comments about our themes being broken after installation. This almost always has to do with the fact that one of our themes has been uploaded using WordPress' built-in theme uploader.
In both the forum F.A.Q. and forum threads, we advise that our themes should only be installed via FTP. You should use an FTP program like FileZilla, WinSCP, or Fetch to upload your files. Do not use WordPress' Install a theme in .zip format option.
If you feel that your theme is still broken after installation, completely delete the theme folder from your server and re-upload the theme via FTP. If after performing the steps listed above you are still having problems, feel free to post in the forum. Otherwise, please do not upload our themes using WordPress' built-in theme installer and you'll avoid a lot of problems.
More information about this problem can be found here. You may also be suffering from permissions issues, which you can read about here. And finally, make sure that when you unzip your themes, that you do not change the automatically generated folder name. The theme names should be as follows:
` /modularity/ /on-assignment/ /work-a-holic-pro/ etc... `
Finally, make absolutely sure to deactivate all of your plugins one-by-one if you've followed the above instructions. There are some plugins that do not play well with our themes, and time after time, people think that their themes are broken, when they simply have a plugin compatibility issue.
In both the forum F.A.Q. and forum threads, we advise that our themes should only be installed via FTP. You should use an FTP program like FileZilla, WinSCP, or Fetch to upload your files. Do not use WordPress' Install a theme in .zip format option.
If you feel that your theme is still broken after installation, completely delete the theme folder from your server and re-upload the theme via FTP. If after performing the steps listed above you are still having problems, feel free to post in the forum. Otherwise, please do not upload our themes using WordPress' built-in theme installer and you'll avoid a lot of problems.
More information about this problem can be found here. You may also be suffering from permissions issues, which you can read about here. And finally, make sure that when you unzip your themes, that you do not change the automatically generated folder name. The theme names should be as follows:
` /modularity/ /on-assignment/ /work-a-holic-pro/ etc... `
Finally, make absolutely sure to deactivate all of your plugins one-by-one if you've followed the above instructions. There are some plugins that do not play well with our themes, and time after time, people think that their themes are broken, when they simply have a plugin compatibility issue.