In the end it is really quite simple!
First you need to enable featured images on the forum post type, then you need to put that image in the right place (I prefer to use a hook action for this when I can).

The code

Just place this code in your theme’s functions.php file.

add_post_type_support('forum', array('thumbnail'));

function ks_forum_icons() {
	if ( 'forum' == get_post_type() ) {
		global $post;
	    if ( has_post_thumbnail($post->ID) )
	    	echo get_the_post_thumbnail($post->ID,'thumbnail',array('class' => 'alignleft forum-icon'));
	 }
}
add_action('bbp_theme_before_forum_title','ks_forum_icons');

The code above does those two things: enables featured images on forums and then hooks the image before the forum title on the bbPress archive page (the one with all the forums listed at once).

Icons on single forum pages

If you want to show the image on single forum pages too the method might vary depending on your theme, since the main forum title on those pages is generated using the regular WordPress the_title() function.
If you’re using a theme with hooks, like Thesis or Genesis (and most ‘frameworks’, I think), you can use the relevant “before post title” hook to add the same function as above to the relevant hook. E.g., in Genesis you can use add_action('genesis_before_post_title','ks_forum_icons');

There you have it! Forum icons in bbPress.

I have decided to strip things back and build up from almost scratch, in real time. Yep! I’m going to make my changes and experiment right on my site for the world to see.

Why? Actually I’m not really sure. It has something to do with how much I love WordPress right now, and a desire to use it more and be be involved in the community a bit more.

How will this venture do that? Maybe it will give people a chance to comment on the progress of the site and make suggestions, which you are welcome to do. Perhaps it will give me time to take inspiration from different sources, read more blogs, and learn some new things. It might inspire me to post more, which is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while (forever?!). You might think that paring back the design might make me intent on designing rather than writing, but I think by allowing my blog to be a bit naked for a while I won’t feel that pressure to get the design finished and ready for the world. I can just spend a bit more time with WordPress in general; it can be a work in progress while I do other things like write and go to WordCamp!

Heck yes! I’m pretty excited. In part because WordPress is great and getting better, also partly because I’ve never been to Melbourne before.

In other (somewhat related) news, over the past few months I have been teaching WordPress courses for a training company in Sydney. There can be between 1 and 8 people in a one-day class and I really enjoy it! I love being part of people learning about how great WordPress is! And their questions give me an opportunity to explore WordPress further, which has been bril!

It’s quite likely that my most recent Thesis child theme will be available in my store this week, and any other previous skins, if I have time to pull them together.

What’s there to be depressed about?

I can’t decide if this is a fair question, or one that shows a complete ignorance of mental health issues that affect millions of people. On one hand it is a fair question and the answer is “not much”; I have a great home, a great husband, beautiful pet bunnies, a loving family, a fantastic coffee shop down the road, good food all around me, decent clothes… What is there to be depressed about? On the other hand the question is the wrong question because depression often has little to do with current circumstances.

Depression can be triggered by life circumstances — usually by long-term struggles such as unemployment, illness, long-term stress¹ — or it might have no identifiable cause at all! Depression can be genetic: it can be caused by biochemical imbalances in the brain and doesn’t always need an external trigger.

For me, the first major episode of depression in my adult life² had no trigger that I know of. In fact, I was actually the healthiest I had even been! I had lost 24kg (so I was a healthy 58kg at 5’2″), I was exercising, I felt great. Gradually though I became less active, less motivated, more stressed, sad, angry, irritable, tired, lethargic, isolated… I couldn’t motivate myself to cook so we ate a lot of take away, I couldn’t motivate myself to work and I tended to spend a lot of time watching TV or sleeping on the couch. My Mum, who has had depression too, recognised these signs and told me to see a doctor, which I did. With a combination of medication and psychological therapy to identify unhelpful thought patterns and behaviours and learn to manage them I got a lot better. I was able to go off my medication and live quite well.

About a year later I noticed myself slipping again, and as much as I tried to implement the strategies I’d learned I was anxious, angry and wanted to sleep and cry too much of the time. I went back to the doctor, back to the psychologist and things are going a lot better again. Still, some days are fantastic, some are not. It’s a continual balancing act and sometimes struggle to do the right thing for myself and for others.

Why am I telling you all of this?

Well, while some behaviours and feelings are a lot more severe and prolonged in people with depression, many of them are still just as much a part of the human condition. So I think some of these strategies, mantras and challenges could be just as useful for you as for me.

• If it takes less that a minute, do it now!
  This is something I got from The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. Lack of motivation, laziness and procrastination can be significant in the mentally ill and the healthy alike, sometimes it’s just a part of life. If you stop putting everything off and just do it now, it makes things a lot easier! Put that document away now, put that rubbish in the bin now, rinse that glass now… if it takes less than a minute, just do it now.
  
• Is it interfering with what you need to do?
  Sometimes I wonder if I am spending too much time on a particular task that isn’t necessarily important. E.g., finding a new watch when I had lost my old one, or finding the right task manager tool rather than just getting my tasks done, or finding project management tools instead of just managing my projects in the simplest way I can. Sometimes you do need to invest a bit of time in structures that will help you get on with what you need to do, but sometimes you just need to pick a method and start getting things done.
• I might not be able to control everything around me, but I can control [insert personal behaviour here]
  The thing that you need to control might vary from person to person. For me it is usually what I eat. I am trying to shed the weight from my previous depression episode, but when things are tough it is even more difficult not to succumb to laziness and just get take away, or just eat the high-carb option, or drink too much wine. On a bad day I might not be able to control everything around me, but I can damn well control what I put in my mouth.

I haven’t got these things down pat, but I am trying to remember them in my day to day. I need to keep going. Keep doing. Keep being.

Do you have any tips or mantras that help you when things get tough or everything seems overwhelming?

For more information about depression and anxiety please visit Beyond Blue and Black Dog Institute.

1. See What Causes Depression on the Beyond Blue website
2. I had been depressed as a teen, but with all the crazy hormones of growing up it was easier for me to grow out of it when those hormones evened out.

It’s not really a new message, it’s just that it probably hasn’t been as dangerous to have a username of “admin” as it is now. Many hosts and news outlets are reporting widespread botnet attacks to gain access to the username “admin” in WordPress installs.

It used to be that WordPress would automatically create an account with the username of admin, and usernames in WordPress can’t be changed without editing the database directly. Now-a-days WordPress gives you the option to enter any username you like when you install WordPress, but that doesn’t help all the people with older sites.

Thankfully, if you aren’t comfortable editing the mySQL database, there are some plugins that can change the admin username for you. My favourite is Better WP Security, which can change the admin username and ID as well as a range of other things.

When using these plugins please backup the database first (Better WP Security has this ability built in) and if you use any of the more advanced features, like changing the database table prefix, make sure you have access to your site’s config file and database… I used this feature on a site today and it changed the tables, but not the config file, which I had to change to get the WP files connected to the database again.

Organ transplants can give not only the recipients of the donation a new lease on life, but also their carers, friends and other loved ones (maybe even their pets!).

The donation situation in Australia is pretty sad; donation rates are very low. You can opt to donate in your home state on your licence, but relatives have complete power of veto if the moment ever comes. Also many people don’t know that you need to register your wish to donate on the national register to donate country-wide, but again family can choose not to donate your organs when the time comes. So you really need to talk to your family and friends and ask them to respect your wishes regarding donation.

If you don’t have a deeply religious need to hold onto your organs after your death please register AND talk to your loved ones about it. They need to know your wishes so they are not burdened with the decision in a time of grief.

To hear a bit about living with chronic illness and waiting for a transplant please listen to this short interview with Jennifer Symonds.

The official Google Maps for iPhone came out today! I’m pretty excited.

Apple maps wasn’t so bad, if you live in California and possibly inner-city China. I thought the design of Apple Maps was pretty great, I liked the layout of the directions and how you could swipe across to see the next step of your journey. The only problem with it in Australia was that you couldn’t see major landmarks until you zoomed in pretty much as far as it goes… and you couldn’t search for business names or types and actually find anything useful… and it told you to do things that are illegal and therefore dangerous in New South Wales (like u-turns at lights)… and it sometimes told you to do impossible things like turn into a street from a cul-de-sac end… oh, and it got people so lost that they needed police assistance.

Yes, Google Maps had a couple of those problems (like the cul-de-sac one) in the early days, but why didn’t Apple learn from Google’s mistakes and do more testing before making such a drastic change?

I’m not sure what this release means for Apple Maps. Perhaps some good samaritans, or folks who don’t download a lot of apps, will still use it and report problems back to them. Perhaps I will be a good samaritan and compare directions and report problems to Apple occasionally. What do you think Apple will do? Will they ditch their maps app like they did their YouTube app? It seems a shame after all the work they put in, but all that work wasn’t quite enough.

I can actually see the train stations!

You can tap on red dots, or swipe across the bottom business name to select search results

• Nice layout
• Multiple account support!
• Easy image attachment
• “Scribbles” drawing attachments (this comes under the more than I want; although cute I can’t see myself really using it!)
• Search with auto-suggest

There’s room for improvement, but this is sooo much better!

EXIF block ID

In order to add the image ID to the EXIF container HTML use %s where you want the ID to appear. E.g., <ul class="exif" id="%s">

The output for that ID is wp-image-ID, since WordPress automatically adds the same as a class to the images it inserts into posts you can fairly easily associate the EXIF block with its image, which will be useful for javascript effects and that sort of thing.

If you happen to be using that ID as an ID for something else on the same page you could include it as a class instead: <ul class="exif %s">.

EXIF item classes

You can also add a unique class to each exif item to style them separately.

E.g., <li class="%s">

The class that is applied is the same as the keys used in the shortcode. So, in order to style the timestamp differently to all the other items, for example, you would use .created_timestamp {text-transform:uppercase; color:blue;}.

Hey, so you’ve just installed Thesis 2.0 and you’re trying to figure out what is going on and completely messed up the classic skin? You’re not alone!

This is my recommendation for resetting the classic skin to its default. DIYthemes might release an official method soon, but until then, this should work if your skin files are still in tact.

1. Switch to the Thesis Blank skin
   
2. find custom.php in wp-content/thesis/skins/thesis-blank/ (you will need FTP, or your host’s file editor for this) and insert the following code:

   delete_option( 'thesis_classic_css_custom' );
   delete_option( 'thesis_classic_css' );
   delete_option( 'thesis_classic_vars' );
   delete_option( 'thesis_classic_snippets' );
   delete_option( 'thesis_classic_packages' );
   delete_option( 'thesis_classic_templates' );
   delete_option( 'thesis_classic_boxes' );
   update_option( 'thesis_raw_css','' );

3. Reload your home page (it should be blank unless you’ve played with adding HTML to the blank skin)
4. Reactivate the Thesis Classic skin
5. Save and Compile CSS in the skin editor
6. Delete the code from step 2.

This deletes the classic skin related data from the database, so that when you reactivate the Classic Skin it loads its defaults back into the database.