Best Practice for Server Processing

I recommend you take a look at the AJAX in Plugins page which should solve your woes with redirects. http://codex.wordpress.org/AJAX_in_Plugins You can send whatever you want to be processed asynchronously. This is a pretty standard way of processing forms in WordPress both on the front-end and back-end. If you need to include user data, add … Read more

Non-standard (new) theme file

Add a PHP comment to the top of your file, making it a Template: <?php /* Template Name: Whatever */ //your code here ?> Then create a new page with your new template as page template. Publish, then you will be able to access the file through the pages permalink. Kind of quick and dirty, … Read more

Setting thumbnail featured image size not working properly

It’s default behaviour that the images aren’t scaled up. Easiest way would be to use simple CSS to scale it up. How to scale up featured post thumbnail? For the second part set the crop parameter of set_post_thumbnail_size to true. set_post_thumbnail_size( 200, 120, true ); http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/set_post_thumbnail_size