Check out the screenshots of the new BuddyPress theme. What is BuddyPress, you ask? BuddyPress is a set of WordPress MU specific plugins, that will enable you to create your own social networking site.

Click the image to see more

This blog is running a modified version of the Blue-Pix theme. I have made a lot of minor changes to the Blue-Pix theme since starting this blog less than a year ago. Some changes were just minor visual tweaks like simplifying the search field in the header, while others, were a bit more involved, like making the theme widget compatible. My most recent modification was to change the load order of the page.

I have been reading up on some SEO, and one thing I came across (which may or may not be true but sounds plausible) was that search engines prefer your content to be at the top of the page. That may sound silly to you, because where else would you put your content? I thought about this for a minute, and then looked closer at the source for my index page. My content was not at the top of the page. It turns out that the Blue-Pix theme loaded the sidebar first with the property float:right, then the content. So, in an attempt to make things easier on spiders, I reversed this behavior. The content loads first with a float:left followed by the sidebar coming in and filling the space to the right of the content.

The solution for me was to edit the .htaccess file in the root directory of my webserver (the directory where Wordpress is installed). Add the following to the the .htaccess file after the “END WordPress”:

<IfModule mod_security.c>
<Files async-upload.php>
SecFilterEngine Off
SecFilterScanPOST Off
</Files>
</IfModule>

If you are having the problem of your .htaccess file losing its changes, you have most likely put something inside the Wordpress block of the .htaccess file. Keep any custom changes outside of that block or they will be overwritten.