That being said, the Privateer Theme update is being delayed a bit as is a new framework that I’ve put together that I call the Gypsy System.

The next Privateer update will be covering some of the following:

• Admin panel revisions to make things easier for those new to the theme
• Some minor features to provide better support for different looks
• Some fixes for minor bugs that I’ve run across recently when setting up different types of sites.

While getting that together, I’m going to also see about writing proper guides for the following:

• Using WordPress – a comprehensive user manual to cover the various functionality available
• Using HTML – Comprehensive coverage of the basic tags and css needed to build nice web pages
• The Privateer Manual – a much more comprehensive manual showing how to do all kinds of things with the theme that aren’t obvious enough.

I’ll also be getting the Gypsy System cleaned up and documented. Briefly, it is a site building system designed to allow one to quickly put up sites with various page types, specifically store type sites or other sites where information falls into logically related groups. It is not meant to be a WordPress replacement, but rather a system to build out the things that WordPress was not designed to do. To see a site using the basic Gypsy System, check out The Accessory King – Cell Phone Accessories. Unlike that site, which is a straight e-commerce site, the Gypsy System also supports off site sales, affiliate sales, and temporary sale redirects ( say you put something on e-Bay…you can have the product page redirect there until the auction is over ).

Anywise, these things won’t be starting for a week or two ( probably two knowing me ), but they are coming.

This is just a quick note to say that I have been swamped with client work this past month, but am just about out of the woods.

As soon as I wrap up my current two projects, I will be getting version 1.9 of the Privateer Them put together.

It is not going to be a huge update, but it will focus on cleaning up page loads, optimizing apparent page load times, and fixing a couple of features that I noticed were not working properly.

From there, I’ll send out notice to all who have the theme that the new version is available and start trying to better split my time between improving the theme, adding documentation for the theme, client work, my own pet web projects, and life…

• Silver Art Glass Jewelry

This is the first e-commerce site that I have designed with the theme and I think that it has come together nicely. I especially like the navigation functionality for store categories that was achieved with my Ad Manager plugin and lightbox functionality.

I’ll be tweaking a few more things for the site soon…but if you are looking to build your own e-commerce site to sell hand crafted items, stay tuned for my e-commerce site how to series…which should be up here within a month or so ( yes…I have too much on my plate right now…idle hands and all that ).

Such being the case, I’m going to make a good effort over these coming weeks to add a good amount of solid information for those who use my products.

I’m also going to be adding a couple of new plugins, wrapping up a few of my beta plugins, and getting version 1.9 of the Privateer wrapped up.

Documentation

Within the next couple of weeks, I’m going to be adding very detailed documentation on not only using the Privateer theme and the plugins that I have written, but also on how to do things with them that will likely surprise a few theme users such as:

• Placing opaque background images on specific pages, posts, or templates
• Placing mixed ads pretty much anywhere one wants
• Building selling sites using a couple of good shopping cart solutions
• Different methods of putting a newsletter in place
• Creating very nice menus

Upcoming Plugins

I recently had reason to implement a good image gallery solution, but couldn’t find anything that quite suited my needs. Such being the case, I took the zenphotopress plugin and made quite a few modifications to it. Once I have the changes polished, I’ll make the resulting plugin ( along with full documentation on setting it up and using it ) available here.

My various beta functionality plugins will also be getting finished up in the near future and I’ll be making them available as well. In particular, I’m going to see if I can wrap up my various privateer specific menu plugins ( page menu, category menu, category posts menu, etc. ) and my PHParse and FeedWidget plugins.

Privateer 1.9

This will be the last major release of the Privateer until I get the complete rewrite (2.0) completed. New functionality will include:

• Static options for CSS and JS files ( much faster )
• Tweaks to make the theme play nicely with cache plugins
• Some minor tweaks to the search bar
• A few more items that I will detail once I have 1.9 wrapped up and fully tested.

At their core, skins are nothing more than a set of database commands used to update privateer theme options with new settings to provide wanted looks.

Because they are text files, you can open them in text editors, change different things within them to be what you want or need, save the changes, and use the end result.

With the above, you should be able to use the existing skins to create versions with completely different color sets.

With it, you can create as many sales pages as you want using only one wordpress install. Each page can look completely different both from the wordpress site itself, but from each other.

See combination example and tutorial: WordPress Sales Pages with the Privateer Theme.

New features include:

• The ability to make completely custom headers and/or combine custom content bars with the existing bars
• XML Sitemap Generation
• Support for Google AdSense for Search
• Extra content areas above and below the sidebars.

For full details, please check out the Privateer Theme Page and Privateer Theme Forums.

Step 1: Create a new eMail address

Log into your host gator cpanel account, locate the Mail section of the control panel, and select Email accounts

In the Add New Email Account section:

Adding a new email address with cPanel

• Enter the name for the email account
• Select the domain name that you want to use
• Enter the password you want to use twice
• Set a quota to note how much space it can take up
  I recommend something fairly small unless you want to save all of your mail online. 10 MB is plenty if you download all of your mail. 50 MB to 100 MB is probably plenty if you keep your mail online and delete old / unwanted mail.

When done, select Create and you should see a confirmation message with the new email address shown in the list under the Current Accounts setting.

Using your new email account

Once you have created the mail account, you need to be able to make use of it. There are two primary ways of doing so:

1. Checking and using email online
2. Setting up an email client to use the email account locally

Because there are a number of email clients available, I am just going to cover accessing your email via cPanel.

Accessing webmail from the cPanel email list

Select Access Webmail from the list of emails shown in the Email Accounts panel. Note that if you select the WebMail button from the main cpanel home, you will be logging into the main account for your domain, which is probably not what you want.

You should see the below login screen ( or something similar ). Go ahead and enter the password you set for the new email account and select login.

Once you do so, you should come to a screen that allows you to choose which webmail client you want to use and/or configure the account.

Clients and Mail Setting Options in cPanel

Choose a client to log in. I’ll use Horde for this example, but any will work. Try them each to see what you prefer. Here is what Horde looks like:

The Horde Mail Client

From there, you can see your email, write email, etc.

If you want to setup your email to be read from an email client such as Mozilla Thunderbird and are not sure how to go about doing so, feel free to leave a comment with the client in question and, when I get time, I will see about putting up a quick configuration walkthrough for you.

It includes 12 different custom displays, outlined as follows:

1. Page: Extra Column Boxlist
   • This display adds an extra list of content boxes to either side of the content area for page pages.
2. Page: Extra Column Postlist
   • This display adds an extra list of posts to either side of the content area for page pages.
   • The posts to be displayed are set by choosing a category to pull them from for each page that uses this display.
3. Page: Extra Two Column With Boxlist
   • This display places content normally, but adds two columns below the content, one side containing content areas and the other containing a list of posts.
   • It can also be used to place only content areas or a post list below it if wanted.
4. Post: Extra Column Boxlist
   • This display adds an extra column of content boxes to either side of the normal post content.
5. Post: Extra Column Postlist
   • This display adds an extra column of posts pulled from a specified category to the side of the normal content.
6. Home: Two Column Boxlist Postlist
   • This display adds an extra column of content boxes next to the normally displayed posts on your home page.
   • Check out my home page for an example of this display in use.
7. Archive Pages: Two Column Boxlist Postlist
   • Each of the archive pages ( tag archives, date archives, author archives, and category archives ) includes a custom display that will add a box list to the side of the normally displayed posts, just as the home page display for this set does.
8. 404 Pages: 2 Column With List
   • The 404 page for this set can be configured to display one or two content columns of content areas as well as a list of posts at the top on either side.
   • This is a good way to showcase various features of your site and give people the latest information from you if they happen to hit a page that simply does not exist.

$27.00

A partial change list:

1. More (and more flexible) custom displays
2. A custom display installer, so you don’t have to upload them via ftp.
3. Quick sets. These are saved option groups that you can create and/or apply to instantly change the entire look of your site. Perfect for trying out different looks quickly as well as designing locally and applying your finished look to your production site.
4. Better interoperability with Google AdSense and Analytics
5. A more robust lockout system so you can choose to refer those who are not logged in to your login page, show them a static page, or show them a brief maintenance type blurb.