This beginner-level WordPress tutorial shows 1. How to make a “child” page or subpage of another page (a “parent” page) using the WordPress 2.7 editing interface. And 2. How to hide a link in the Pages sidebar widget, in other words, how to keep a link to a page from showing in the Pages sidebar widget by putting the page ID number into the “Exclude” box in the Pages sidebar widget dialog box. Making “child” pages (subpages) is useful because you may not want all your pages to show in the …

Today we have a grungy theme, originally designed by DemusDesign and ported to WordPress by myself. It is coded for WordPress 2.7 and above only. This theme has widgetized sidebar, a widgetized footer, a theme options page, as well as a few other features which will be gone over below.

Live Demo | Download

And now onto the other features…

Subtitles

This is something that was styled in the original design, and I wanted to integrate it into the WordPress version. Subtitles in the Bolshevik theme are displayed directly below the title in red italic text. This is what they look like.

To add subtitles to your posts, simply type in the desired text in the meta box when you’re drafting a post or page.

That’s all there is to it, no fiddling around with custom fields. Remember, these subtitles are completely optional, so if you don’t want them on a specific post, or at all, just don’t fill anything out.

About Text

Similar to previous themes such as FreshPick, Mountain Leaves, and Underwater, Bolshevik has a theme options page to edit the About text, which is visible in the lower left corner of the footer.

This should be pretty self explanatory, although here’s some more detailed descriptions of the three different options.

• Title: You could change this to something like “About Us” or “About This Blog,” whatever you think would be appropriate. The default is set to: “About Me”
• Image URL: If you have a small avatar-like image (around 42×42), simply put the full path to that image in this box. If you don’t have one, no problem. No image will be displayed in that case.
• Message: You can write a little about yourself and/or your blog in this box. Just a few sentences would be enough.

Widgetized Areas

This theme has two widgetized areas, a sidebar and footer. Here’s a diagram to illustrate where exactly these are located.

Lenin Image

Okay, I know of at least one of you following me on Twitter who would rather not have an image of Vladimir Lenin on their blog. If you’re wondering how to remove this, simply go in the stylesheet, scroll down to #foot_inner, and comment out the following line: background: url(’images/lenin.jpg’) no-repeat top right;

You could also either remove the line completely, or replace it with another image.

Conclusion

That’s about it. Let me know what you think of the theme in the comments. Remember, support requests go in the forums. A big thanks to Brad of DemusDesign for designing it.

This is PART TWO of the Intermediate level WordPress tutorial that shows how to use a text widget to customize a WordPress sidebar. To see the final product of the tutorial in the Business Blogging 101 website and the HTML code used in this example, go to mcbuzz.wordpress.com and search for “text widget”. Widgets are a very useful feature of most new WordPress themes. They allow you to add custom content to your sidebars with little or no knowledge of HTML or other code. The example I use in …

This Beginner-level WordPress Tutorial shows how to make text into a link in a WordPress Post or Page. Steps: Highlight the text, click the “Insert link” button in the WordPress text editing window toolbar, insert a URL and Title for the link, click the Insert button. – by Mark McLaren of McBuzz Communications.

Beginner-level WordPress tutorial by Mark McLaren of McBuzz Communications shows how to create a new static web page like Contact Us so that a link to the page appears in the site navigation. (Different than creating a new Post.)