We've been working on a select number of WordPress Themes over the course of the past few weeks to prepare for the new year and the new upcoming version of RockStar Communications. The PressMonkey WordPress Theme will be the first of many WordPress Themes released over the span of the year 2009.

We'll be uploading more screenshots of the PressMonkey WordPress Theme as the release date draws nearer. In the mean time, we've provided a base screenshot below as a teaser!

In addition, we will be introducing a whole new line of services ranging from upgraded shared hosting plans, to only the finest in VPS & Dedicated Hosting solutions.

We'll be following up with more information soon, so be sure to keep in touch, keep up to date and keep sending in your questions, comments and suggestions for us to read and review!

Why Are You Offering Free Managed WordPress Hosting?

RockStar Communications has provided a truly reliable, dependable service to our existing customer base over the course of the past year and as of this post, we've maintained a true 100% Server & Network Uptime.

Our server & network uptime average alone is nearly unheard of in the web hosting industry and we owe it all to our network providers.

The decision to offer Free Managed WordPress Hosting Solutions alongside our fee-based Managed WordPress Hosting solutions was brought on after seeing a growing need for a truly reliable web hosting solution specifically for WordPress bloggers.

What About WordPress.com's WordPress Hosting?

WordPress.com provides a truly wonderful service no doubt and we're thankful they exist to provide such an exceptional service, however, hosting your blog on a multi-blog platform greatly limits your growth and what you're able to accomplish.

If you're looking to grow and expand, install your own WordPress Plugins & Themes and really dive into your WordPress blog, you need a web hosting solution that caters specifically to those needs and that's exactly what we provide!

Our Free & Fee-Based Managed WordPress Hosting Solutions provide WordPress bloggers with CPanel + Fantastico Auto-Installer (which features one-click WordPress installation). We also provide Free WordPress Installation, Configuration and Optimization in addition to Free WordPress Plugin & Theme Installation.

Our Managed WordPress Hosting Solutions aren't called Solutions without reason, they truly provide WordPress Bloggers with an All-In-One solution to their WordPress Hosting needs.

What About Disk Space & Data Transfer?

Our Free Managed WordPress Hosting Solutions feature a generous 1GB of Disk Space and 10GB of Data Transfer. This is more than enough to get things started and further develop your blog for some time to come.

We'll even assist you in lowering your bandwidth usage in the event you are nearing your limits. We do this by further optimizing your blog, caching and other related tools.

Do You Have a Complete Feature Listing?

Of Course! You can find a complete listing of features by clicking here. As more features are added, we'll continue to update the list accordingly.

Do I Need My Own Domain Name?

Not at all! RockStar Communications is now providing the option of hosting your own domain (.com, .net, .org or any other extension) or choosing a username based sub-domain such as username.rockstarcomm.com.

How Do I Sign Up & Get Started?

You can find a complete listing of the available Free & Fee-Based Managed WordPress Hosting Plans at the URL below.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please feel free to Contact Us anytime and we will be more than happy to assist!

Managed WordPress Hosting: http://www.rockstarcomm.com/wordpress-hosting/

Our members and customers are free to run their own ads from services such as Google AdSense or others, however, RockStar Communications will not place ads, links or other advertising mediums on their websites.

This will be the biggest update we've made all year long and it'll be a great way for RockStar Communications and the entire RockStar Team to step into the upcoming new year!

Tell Me More - What's Coming?

We'll let you in on a little secret, it most certainly isn't a small software or feature update, it's something much more and something much bigger!

We already know we provide more features, more services and better support to WordPress bloggers than any other web hosting provider on the market, so we won't bore you there.

What we can say is that this announcement changes the way RockStar Communications serves the WordPress community entirely.

What About the Managed WordPress Hosting Solutions?

We're not dropping our core service. RockStar Communications is dedicated to providing Managed WordPress Hosting Solutions to WordPress bloggers and that won't be changing.

We'll still be offering Free WordPress Installation, Configuration and Optimization + WordPress Core and Security Updates. We'll also still be providing WordPress Theme and Plugin installation.

How to Stay In the Know

Subscribe to the RockStar RSS Feed and Stay In the Know! Choose your favorite RSS Reader and keep your eyes peeled because this announcement will be dropping soon!

In this short tutorial, we'll make use of functions.php to remove the version of WordPress currently installed, the Really Simple Discovery Link and the Windows Live Writer link from wp_head.

Creating the functions.php File

If you do not already have a functions.php file within your WordPress Theme's directory, go ahead and create a new PHP file with the following information.

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<?php
 
?>

Save this file as functions.php, upload it to your current WordPress Theme folder and make sure it is writable by WordPress (CHMOD 666).

Editing the functions.php WordPress File

To remove the WordPress Version Number, Really Simple Discovery Link and Windows Live Writer Link, simply drop the following bit of code into functions.php and save.

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// Cleaning Up wp_head
// with functions.php
 
// Remove the Really Simple Discovery Link
remove_action('wp_head', 'rsd_link');
 
// Remove the Windows Live Writer Link
remove_action('wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link');
 
// Remove the WordPress Version Number
remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');

It's that simple and you should end up with a functions.php file that looks something like the following.

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<?php
 
// Cleaning Up wp_head
// with functions.php
 
// Remove the Really Simple Discovery Link
remove_action('wp_head', 'rsd_link');
 
// Remove the Windows Live Writer Link
remove_action('wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link');
 
// Remove the WordPress Version Number
remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');
 
?>

If you already have a functions.php file, simply add the code the the top of the file.

Vanilla WordPress Installations

On a vanilla (stock, unmodified) WordPress installation, the header.php file makes multiple calls to the database to generate the URL's used to pull your CSS, RSS and Content-Type.

We really don't need to have WordPress generate these URL's or make a call to the database to obtain the information, so we can easily replace these areas with static URL's.

Inside The header.php WordPress Template

If you open header.php, you will find the following lines that are used to set your CSS, RSS and Content-Type.

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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" <?php language_attributes(); ?>>
 
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="<?php bloginfo('html_type'); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo('charset'); ?>" />

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<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php bloginfo('stylesheet_url'); ?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />
 
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
 
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> Atom Feed" href="<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>" />
 
<link rel="pingback" href="<?php bloginfo('pingback_url'); ?>" />

As you can see, the language_attributes(); function is set to tell the browser whether your reading style will be LTR or RTL (left to right / right to left).

The bloginfo(); function is set to make a call to the database to retrieve the information needed for WordPress to generate this content.

Editing the header.php WordPress Template

We can easily replace the function calls made by language_attributes(); & bloginfo(); with static content, thus removing the need for the calls to be made in the first place.

To do this, we simply replace the function calls with the information we already know about our blog. As an example, we'll use our blog here at RockStar Communications.

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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr">
 
<head profile="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />

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<link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.rockstarcomm.com/wp-content/themes/rockstar/style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
 
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RockStar Communications RSS Feed" href="http://www.rockstarcomm.com/feed/" />
 
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="RockStar Communications Atom Feed" href="http://www.rockstarcomm.com/feed/atom/" />
 
<link rel="pingback" href="http://www.rockstarcomm.com/xmlrpc.php" />

Dynamic to Static Replacement Breakdown

Reading Style - We've replaced language_attributes(); with dir="ltr".

Content & Charset - We've replaced the content type with "text/html" as default. The Charset has been replaced with UTF-8.

StyleSheet - We've replaced the function call with a static and direct URL to the CSS file that is used for the WordPress Theme that we currently have activated.

RSS/Atom Feeds - The RSS/Atom Feeds have been replaced with direct URL's to each and the names have been modified to suit our blog.

PingBack - The PingBack has been set to always ping the XML-RPC PHP file upon a successful entry.

We've Replaced 9 Total Function Calls

By replacing the above variables with static content, we've dropped a total of 9 function calls from our WordPress theme without disabling any functionality at all.

In dropping these calls, we've also reduced the number of queries that need to be ran each time a page is loaded by a member or visitor.

Fewer Queries = Lower Server Load

For those of you running a popular, successful WordPress powered blog, server load is generally one of the biggest issues. Reducing your MySQL Queries can easily aid in lowering the load placed on your server.

It's all about replacing dynamic content with static content when able. If you don't need WordPress to dynamically generate the content and you can get by using static without losing functionality, do it.

To setup WebDAV, simply login to CPanel and scroll down to the "Files" category and click on the icon labeled "Web Disk" (the CPanel equivalent to WebDav).

You should see that your primary login (CPanel Username) has already been setup to access Web Disk (WebDAV) and may be used without the need to setup another user.

Setting Up the Network Place

Once you've verified the existing account or created a new account, you will need to navigation to your My Networks folder on your PC and then click on "Add Network Place."

Creating the Network Place

You will be asked "Where do you want to create this Network Place?" - You need to "Choose another network location."

Network Place Location URL

You will need to use https://yourdomain.com:2078/ as the URL to access WebDisk (WebDAV) on our servers. Replace, yourdomain.com with the domain or sub-domain that you host with RockStar Communications.

Security Notices

When accessing your WebDisk (WebDAV) for the first time, you may receive a security alert stating “This page requires a secure connection which includes server authentication. The certificate issuer for this site is untrusted or unknown. Do you wish to proceed?” simply click "Yes."

Basically this means that while the connection is encrypted, your computer cannot automatically detect that the server you are connecting to is who it is claiming to be for the encryption.

You may then receive another pop up security alert saying “A secure connection with this site cannot be verified. Would you still like to proceed? The certificate you are viewing does not match the name of the site you are trying to view." Simply click "Yes" again.

Logging In & Creating a Network Name

Once you setup the network and pass over the above mentioned security notices, simply login with your CPanel login information and setup a name for your new WebDisk (WebDAV) connection.

The official WordPress 2.7 Release Announcement can be found at the URL below.

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/12/coltrane/

We will be contacting customers shortly with further news and assisting with upgrades as needed!

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/12/27-release-candidate-two/