As I posted earlier, I am trying to expand my wings in the CMS world. I am typically a Drupal guy, but I wanted to try out WordPress. My post about how it went was a little early. The day after I finished creating the site I was patting myself on the back when my wife IMed me:

Why are the ads pushing everything down?

My initial thought was to tell her she was wrong, but I've found she's pretty much always right. I loaded up Firefox and took a gander. It looked fine. I replied to her and she insisted it was wrong. Jumping from my office chair, I hustled downstairs to her office and sure enough it was wrong. She was using Internet Explorer. Silly me. I didn't think to test in Firefox and Opera since 99% of the issues you see are in Internet Explorer.

I finally found my perfect theme, but it kept giving me the following error when it ran:

Warning: array_key_exists() [function.array-key-exists]: The first argument should be either a string or an integer in /XXXXXX/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 176 

Looking through the WordPress support forums I found lots of people talking about it, but no one discussing the fix. I did find someone who explained the issue and described how to get around it. Notice I didn't say fix it .  

Not a big entry, but when I initially installed WordPress I chose to use the catgeory tag when naming my posts. This is done in the permalinks section, and is a huge mistake. 

The permalinks category tag in WordPress is broken when it comes to using LINK TO PAGE as an option when uploading images. If you do use it the photo uploads without an issue and displays in the post, but when you click on it you get a 404 error. 

To fix this you need to dump the category tag in permalinks. 

I found the solution in the WordPress support forums after searching for 30 minutes. My search didn't have attachment.php in it.

It took eight hours, but I was able to get WordPress installed and working the way I wanted it to. The famous five minute install worked as promised, but getting the features I wanted working took much longer.

I am a Drupal guy, but I had a new site I wanted to put up and decided to take the plunge into the world of WordPress. I had tried it when it first came out, but was unimpressed. I think most people liked it initially because it wasn't Movable Type.

Anyway, here are the areas I found particularly frustrating in getting WordPress into shape for me:

Themes out of order: I went to the WordPress theme site and searched for a two column, fluid width, widget enabled theme. I received a list of themes, but very few met the criteria. It seems that theme authors tag their themes with everything and then let others sort it out. I searched for pay themes, but many people like eye candy rather than useful themes. I decided on a simple theme, but with the latest upgrade to WordPress the theme would give an error. I was able to work around it.