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I’ve recently starting using the FS Contract Form plugin for WordPress, and I think it’s the start of a great new relationship. It did, however, take me a while to figure out how to create a drop-down menu. Here are the steps:

1) Scroll down to the “extra fields” field on the plugin’s options screen.

2) Paste the following into the “Label” field (be sure you’re not pasting it into the “Default Text” field):

Options: , Red; Green; Blue

That will create a drop-down that looks like this:

3) Under the “fieldtype” dropdown, select the “Select” option.

4) Click “update options.” Your drop-down menu should now be active once you insert your form into a post.

Here’s what a completed drop-down menu screen should look like:

If you’re using WordPress, you’re probably savvy enough to start your own online business. Check out my post: The Top 51 Best Ways to Make Money Online and Work From Home.

As a beginning web developer, the first time you try to paste some HTML code snippets into your WordPress blog can be annoying. You want to show off the actual code, and your browser converts that code into commands! Don’t worry, though. You have a few options:

1) The built-in code tool. If your wordpress theme supports the “code” command, you can simply paste your code into your post, highlight it, then click the “code” button above the text-editing window in your WordPress admin.

2) Convert all your HTML symbols into entities. This is a favorite trick of mine. Character entities are converted from a string into the underlying symbol they represent. That way, the browser doesn’t interpret them as HTML. One of the more common character entities you may have run across is the copyright symbol (©). Since the symbol doesn’t appear on most keyboards, you’ve got to use a character entity to get it to appear on a web page (and that character entity is ©).

Similarly, you can use character entities to get your browser to ignore brackets and quote marks in your text. Just paste your code snippet in Notepad (or Dreamweaver or whatever), and do a find and replace on the brackets and quotemarks. Here are the character entities you’ll need:

< = &lt;
> = &gt;
" = &quot;

Just do a find on this symbol: “<” and replace it with this: “&lt;”. Repeat that step for the “>” and quote symbol (using the entities above) and then post the code chunk into your blog.

Want to turn off smartquotes for good? If you don’t want smartquotes to appear anywhere on your blog, you can try setting up a php plugin following these instructions from Lance Bledsoe. Note: I haven’t actually tried his suggestion, so proceed at your own risk. I’m assuming it works, though, since Lance’s post doesn’t contain any smartquotes!

If you’ve installed WordPress on a Linux server in the past, you’re probably amazed at how easy it is. Then, when you get a client who ask you to install WordPress on a Windows-based GoDaddy hosting account, you get the dreaded “Error establishing a database connection” message. I wrangled with this problem for about 20 minutes tonight. Here’s a possible fix if you happen to encounter the error: change the “localhost” setting in your WP-Config file to the actual location of your database. Not sure how to do that?

1) Login to your GoDaddy account.

2) Click “My Account” in the top right.

3) Scroll down to “My Products” and click “Web Hosting.”

4) Launch your “Hosting Control Panel.”

5) Click “Databases/MySQL” from the tabs at the top of the hosting control panel.

6) In the “Action” column, click the small pencil symbol.

7) You should now see a field titled “Host Name.” Copy the string, which will look something like this: “abc.db.9999999.hostedresource.com”

8) Open your WP-Config file.

9) Scroll down to “/** MySQL hostname */” and paste in your “host name” like so:
define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘abc.db.9999999.hostedresource.com’);

10) Upload the modified WP-Config file back to your server and visit “http://NameOfYourSite.com/wp-admin/install.php” Hopefully your wordpress blog will now be up and running!

After you’ve gotten your blog installed, you may want to verify that your GoDaddy file permissions are set up properly for your WordPress blog.