First, if your theme doesn't already have a functions.php file, go ahead and create one. Then add the following PHP code:

register_nav_menus( array(
'mainnav' => 'Main Nav'
) );

"mainnav" (which is the menu's "slug" and shown as "Main Nav" in the admin) is just what I came up with – but you can name it whatever you want, and you can have multiple nav menus if you want. Just register them all in that functions file. Here's an example with 3 nav menus:

register_nav_menus( array(
'mainnav' => 'Main Nav',
'navtwo' => 'Nav Bar Two',
'navthree' => 'Nav Bar Three',
) );

That's it – What that does is tell your theme you're going to have three different/unique menus. You can use them as many times as you want, wherever you want in your theme.

You'll create your menus in the WordPress admin – this is pretty self explanatory (and described pretty well here) – add pages, categories, custom links that point outside your blog, whatever you want. Give the menu a name and "apply" it to a location:

Now – to add it to your theme… You get a whole bunch of options so if you need the menu to display one way in one location, and a different way in another location – you can do that!

Here's a simple example where I've stripped out the nav "wrapper" and any automatic styling it would add – just drop this in your theme file where you want the menu to show up (like your header.php, or footer.php… wherever)

$args = array( 'menu' => 'mainnav', 'container' => false, 'menu_id' => false, 'menu_class' => false);
wp_nav_menu($args);

But you can insert an ID or a class. This is detailed pretty well here.

I've already started to use this and it's great. Clients have been really happy that they can now manage their own menus without requiring edits to a template.

Updated to add: As pointed out by Stephen in the comments – if you are creating themes for general public use and you're not sure what version of WordPress your userbase will be running – you will want to wrap these new functions in a "if (function_exists('new-fancy-function-name-here')) { … }". He has details on this on his site here. In there, he linked to another article that would have helped me out a lot had Google liked the page more so I could have found it when I was working on this recently – but there's some additional reading here on how to set all this up (it's a lot more in depth than I got into – I guess my version is the "Cliff Notes")

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I found this post on ArtLung: Migrating an old Blogger Blog To WordPress – which was a HUGE help. The gist of that was you need to download an export file from Blogger, then get this script you run from the terminal (on Mac) which will convert the Blogger xml into a xml that WordPress will understand. (Just to give you an idea what we're talking about – the Blogger XML file I downloaded was over 40MB.)

THEN the fun began. After the conversion to WordPress XML – the file was still about 30MB. This meant that I had to run the import over a dozen times before it could chew through the whole file. When the import times out and you run it again, it recognizes that some posts are already there, so it doesn't import them a second time – but for some reason, it seemed to have trouble with a bunch of comments. Some of the comments DID get imported more than once. As well – the comment counts for each post weren't getting updated. SO! Here's the fix I pieced together for those issues.

First, to remove the duplicate comments – in PHPMyAdmin – I ran the following SQL command: (*DISCLAIMER: make sure you backup your database before attempting any of this!!)

CREATE TABLE temp_table AS SELECT * FROM wp_comments WHERE 1 GROUP BY `comment_post_ID`,`comment_content`,`comment_date`;

What that does is create a duplicate of the wp_comments table – but it's only grabbing the unique entries. If a comment is posted to the same post, has the same content and the same date – we'll just be grabbing one of those and ignoring the rest.

UPDATED TO ADD: One important thing I need to add in here is that you need to set the primary keys and a few indexes for this new table – This is the structure of a normal wp_comments table:

CREATE TABLE `wp_comments` (
`comment_ID` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`comment_post_ID` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`comment_author` tinytext NOT NULL,
`comment_author_email` varchar(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
`comment_author_url` varchar(200) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
`comment_author_IP` varchar(100) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
`comment_date` datetime NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
`comment_date_gmt` datetime NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
`comment_content` text NOT NULL,
`comment_karma` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`comment_approved` varchar(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT '1',
`comment_agent` varchar(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
`comment_type` varchar(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
`comment_parent` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`user_id` bigint(20) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
PRIMARY KEY (`comment_ID`),
KEY `comment_approved` (`comment_approved`),
KEY `comment_post_ID` (`comment_post_ID`),
KEY `comment_approved_date_gmt` (`comment_approved`,`comment_date_gmt`),
KEY `comment_date_gmt` (`comment_date_gmt`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 AUTO_INCREMENT=2 ;

THEN, I ran this SQL command;

DROP TABLE wp_comments;
RENAME TABLE temp_table TO wp_comments;

What that does is delete the wp_comments table, then we rename our new and improved "temp_table" so that it is now the official wp_comments table.

NEXT – we want to update the comment counts. To save having to recount the comments each time – there is a field in the wp_posts table that stores the total number of comments. However, with the way this import worked, those numbers did not get updated so most were saying there were 0 comments on posts that did have comments. To fix that issue I ran the following SQL command: (which I found here on Planet MySQL)

UPDATE wp_posts wpp
LEFT JOIN
(SELECT comment_post_id AS c_post_id, count(*) AS cnt FROM wp_comments
WHERE comment_approved = 1 GROUP BY comment_post_id) wpc
ON wpp.id=wpc.c_post_id
SET wpp.comment_count=wpc.cnt
WHERE wpp.post_type IN ('post', 'page')
AND (wpp.comment_count!=wpc.cnt OR (wpp.comment_count != 0 AND wpc.cnt IS NULL));

Which as far as I can tell gets the comment counts for each post in wp_posts. (I can't tell you more than that because once you start getting into the "LEFT JOIN" stuff in sql, my brain shuts off)

The other piece advice I'll give is if you have a ginormous blog that you have to move like the one I was working with – set the blog up locally using MAMP, do the imports, all the database correcting stuff – then just export the database and import it onto your server. The database file ended up only being 14MB uncompressed – way better than trying to chew through a 30MB import file. Once the database is up on your server, a few more SQL commands (just like if you're moving your blog to a new domain) to change the local version (probably http://localhost:8888 ) to your actual domain name, and you're done!

Another tidbit to add: if you need to redirect blogger formatted url (that may include ".html" in the end) – add this to your htaccess file and it should redirect to the new (non extension ending) URL:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule (.*)\.html $1 [R=301,L]

(I tooke off the first line and put the second line under the "RewriteEngine On" that WordPress has in it's htaccess block and it worked great)

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Well, one problem here is that WordPress pages (at least as of this writing – with WordPress in version 2.8.5) do not have excerpts for pages. Only for posts. The way around this is to use the <!-- more --> tag where you want your break. So that works fine – but what about stripping out the images? I'm still working on my reg-ex knowledge, but I found this one from here and it worked for me. So this is what I'm doing when I'm pulling in my page excerpt:

<?php
$posts = query_posts('page_id=1234');
if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();
//this makes the more work...
global $more; $more = 0;
?>
<h1><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
<?php
$content = get_the_content('');
$content = preg_replace('/<img[^>]+>/is', '', $content);
echo $content;
?>
<p><a href="<?php the_permalink(1234); ?>"><img src="/images/more.gif" /></a></p>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

*we're assuming "1234" is the ID of my page in the example above…

You'll also notice I manually added my "more" button image…

To read more about the more tag (and see where I got that global $more; $more = 0; from, you can see the WordPress codex here on the subject. (Scroll to the very bottom of the page – to the section title "How to use Read More in Pages")

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Previously, my way around this had included the use of various plugins that had you wrap certain areas in your post with specific comments that would tell WordPress to leave that block alone and not insert those paragraph tags. There was still some issues doing it this way – as it required you to view these posts in the HTML view. Viewing them in the visual editor would mess everything up.

So, keeping in line with what seems to be a current trend at the moment of solving all my problems with shortcodes, that's how I've decided to solve this problem as of late.

First – (you'll only need to do this once) – add the PHP code so that you can do the shortcode. If you don't already have a functions.php file in your theme directory, create one and add the following code:

function scriptysAddHTML_func($atts) {
global $post;
$id = $atts['id'];
if (empty($id)) return;
return get_post_meta($post->ID, $id, true);
}
add_shortcode('html', 'scriptysAddHTML_func');

Then, in your post when you want to add some custom HTML, paste your block of HTML into the value of a new custom field. For the name of this custom field, give it a unique name with no spaces. (For example: My_HTML_Block)

In your WordPress post, where you want this block to appear, add the shortcode like this:

[html id=My_HTML_Block]

You would add it exactly like the above, except instead of My_HTML_Block, you would change that to be the name you gave your custom field.

Extra Tip If for some reason, you're using more than one shortcode in your post and it doesn't seem like they're working… if you're using them one right after the other, make sure there is a space between them. ie. If you're using my linebreak shortcode, and you were adding more than one linebreak… it might not work if you do this:

[br][br][br]

You my have to do this:

[br] [br] [br]

Little minor thing, but something you might not have thought of… figured I'd mention it.

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A few problems:
I needed to use TinyMCE for one of the textareas, (There's some good information here on how to do that) because the client doesn't know and doesn't want to know HTML. Trying to apply TinyMCE to the textarea in a widget presented all kind of problems.

Also – just simply dragging and dropping the widgets onto the correct sidebar was excruciating slow.

The solution to both of these problems was solved in the 2.8 FAQ – specifically – turning on "Accessibility Mode" in the screen options for the widgets page. It's not as snazzy as it was before – but being excruciatingly slow and TinyMCE not working isn't snazzy either. So I'll take "functional" over "Snazzy but not functional".

Anyway – just putting this out there for anyone else running into similar problems.

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I know there can be more than one thing that causes that "open_basedir restriction in effect" error – but in my case it was because:

1) I was moving a wordpress site to another location (usually a subdomain of a live site so I could set it up as a "test area")
2) In the settings page, I had specified a different path for uploads (this is done on the "miscellaneous" settings page). This directory was actually OUTSIDE of the wordpress directory, which means I had to use the full server path to point to my custom uploads directory…

So I copied over the files to the test area, copied the database to the test database, changed the domain to the test domain using this method. But if you've specified a path for uploads on that miscellaneous page – you'll need to log in once everything is all set up and change the path there too to the new one pointed at the new location.

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I know this may or may not apply to many people – but having just lost a bunch of changes on a site I was working on (had been tweaking the default theme to test out some stuff) I didn't realize that 1-click upgrade feature would do that.

Other than that – the new upgrade thing is awesome. Easily upgraded a bunch of other sites (that thankfully used custom named themes!) without issue and because it just a one-click upgrade – I did it much sooner than I would have if I had to download and manually upload everything.

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<?php
$i=0; // Initialize to Zero;
if (have_posts()) :
while (have_posts()) : the_post();
if ($i==0) {$recentpostid = $post->ID; $i=$i+1;}
endwhile;
endif;
//get only the latest post
$posts = query_posts( 'p='.$recentpostid."'");
?>

and then you start your loop like you normally would…

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

Worked for me!

Update As Danny pointed out in the comments – there's a simpler way to do this. Put the following code on the page (I put it before the loop and it worked)
<?php $wp_query->is_single = true; ?>
Much simpler

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1) When I ran the upgrade, it sort of died before finishing… I refreshed and it told me it was all set. Checked on the main page, and everything seemed to be okay – but when I logged in to start tinkering around with the settings, I couldn't log in completely. I got the dashboard with no navigation and then I clicked on something and all it wanted to do was send me to the profile page – but with nothing showing except "You do not have sufficient permissions to access this page". Googled for a solution and found one on Mark's site. Ran his script, and all was well again.

2) Then I discovered that clicking on the the "previous entries" link at the bottom sent me to a "page can not be found" error page. Google to the rescue – and found one on the WordPress Codex… (scroll ALLLL the way down to "Paged Navigation doesn't work" – There it will tell you that the error I was getting was due to the .htaccess file that WordPress generates. Delete the contents (or at least the wordpress stuff in there) and manually add the code back in from the Options -> Permalinks page. Again, all was well again.

3) This one was really weird. I had a post that was showing up in Firefox but not IE. It was like it didn't exist at all on IE. Wasn't in the source. Try to pull up the post page, and it gives you a 404 error not found. Turns out – and maybe this was because of the glitch during the upgrade – the post didn't have any status indicated. It wasn't marked as "Published", "Draft", or "Private". (The weird thing is that, then WHY did Firefox show it at all?!?) Anyway, clicking the "Published" box and re-saving the post seemed to fix the problem.

If you find any other broken links or errors, etc. – please let me know!

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