If you are a wordpress developer or just need to test out some themes on your blog before posting your own content then check out WPCandy’s Sample Post Collection

WooThemes have become one of the leaders in premium wordpress themes since they relaunched and they certainly deserve their place. Today they released their latest offering named Fresh Folio. It is based on two of their previous themes bringing the best of both. It is a portfolio/blog theme designed to mix the two. It is worth mentioning that it is now very common for designers to publish a blog alongside their site as it is a great way to build up readers and potential clients, Fresh Folio allows you to do this brilliantly.

It comes in a range of colours and styles including Grunge, Antique and Nightlife. Whichever style you choose it will look great and really show off your portfolio without spending ages coding, simply add a portfolio item through the Wordpress admin area.

A bit of a description from WooThemes themselves:

The homepage is designed to both showcase your featured portfolio work (albeit web design, graphic design or photography), along with posts from your blog. The dual nature of the theme - and especially the homepage - allows you to take an integrated approach of publishing both your portfolio & blog in one, clean environment. Beyond the combo homepage, the rest of the theme is perfect for publishing a thought-provoking blog, as the portfolio sections doesn’t interfere there.

The theme costs $70 for a single-use license and $150 for the developer license, full details on all of WooThemes templates can be found here.

This has got to be one of the best free wordpress themes I have come across for a long time. It is now common to see themes that make use of paper and stationary. There are a few problems with the theme such as the inability to add widgets to the sidebar but adding them I think would just ruin the look of the theme. The theme was released through Smashing Magazine and full details can be found here.

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New Design

As you can probably tell straight away, WordpressIsland has got a new design which should make the site easier to navigate. The homepage will now give you all the latest from the different parts of the site, including some of the new areas.

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Forum now open

There used to be a forum on WordpressIsland but I closed it because it was empty and was just being used for spam. The forums are now open so please go and use them and let me know what categories you would like on the forum and I’ll add them.

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Wordpress Site Gallery

Wordpress is now used a lot more and the site/theme gallery is where you can add websites and themes which you think look worthy enough, I’ve added a few so you can see the level they will need to be at.

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Community Links

There is now a big community around wordpress including forums, blogs, galleries etc. and community links is designed to provide you with the best articles, resources and tutorials related rto Wordpress. Anyone can add links and they are all checked before publishing.

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So, there you have it the new WordpressIsland, please take a look around and if you have any questions or suggestions or spot and problems/bugs please notify me by commenting below or posting in the forum.

Thank you and I hope you enjoy your stay on the isle of wordpress.

THIS IS NOT FOR THEMES AND PLUGINS.

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Step 1 Create the CSS

The first thing to do is to create the CSS for the footer area. Open the style.css file of the Kubrick theme in your code editor and add the following code, we are going to call it the subfooter:

#subfooter {
width:730px;
margin-left:15px;
margin-right:15px;
height:300px;
background-color:#d5d6d7;
clear:both;
}

#subfooter .widget {
width:240px;
height:300px;
float:left;
}

#subfooter .widget .inner {
padding:10px;

}

The above code creates an area called subfooter where and a widget class, in the HTML code, I will add three instances of the widget class and with the float:left; option these will be aligned next to each other.

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Step 2 The HTML

Open the footer.php file and add the following code before the <div id=”footer”> code:

<div id="subfooter">

<div class="widget"><div class="inner">
Widget 1
</div></div>

<div class="widget"><div class="inner">
Widget 2
</div></div>

<div class="widget"><div class="inner">
Widget 3
</div></div>

</div>

Now if you view your blog you should see at the bottom of the page something that resembles this:

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Step 3 Making it widget ready

Currently this isn’t widget ready which means that you would have to manually add the code into each widget through the footer.php file. In this step I am going to show you how you can make this widget ready so that you can add/edit widgets from the Widgets page in your admin area. To do this we use the functions.php file, so open it into your code editor.

You will notice at the top of the functions.php file the following:

<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</li>',
'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));

Change this to the following:

<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
register_sidebar(array(
'before_widget' => '<li id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">',
'after_widget' => '</li>',
'before_title' => '<h2 class="widgettitle">',
'after_title' => '</h2>',
));
register_sidebar(array('name'=>'subfooterleft'));
register_sidebar(array('name'=>'subfootercenter'));
register_sidebar(array('name'=>'subfooterright'));

What this does is registers 3 sidebars called subfooterleft, subfootercenter and subfooterright which will correspond to the left, center and right widgets in the subfooter.

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Step 4 Adding the Widgets

To add the widgets go to your admin area and click the Design > Widgets tabs. You will see a drop down menu which will say “Sidebar”, click this and you will notice 3 more options:

Choosing one of the subfooter options and clicking Show will allow you to add widgets from the left column on the page, I only advise adding one widget to each subfooter widget area. To save your setup click Save Changes.

Now if you go back to your blog you should have something like this:

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Step 5 Making it neater

So we have it all setup and working now but it doesn’t look that great.

Add the following code to the style.css file.

#subfooter li {
list-style-type: none;
list-style-image: none;
}

#subfooter li ul {
padding-left:0px;
font-size:12px;
}

#subfooter a {
padding:5px;
width:90%;
text-decoration:none;
clear:both;
display:block;
}

#subfooter a:hover {
background-color:#1a6198;
color:#FFFFFF;
}

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Result

And there you have it, a widget ready subfooter for Wordpress.

You can download all the files here in .zip format.

Wordpress used to have a themes directory but it was pretty bad and now they are saying that they need a centralised area for people to download Wordpress themes because there is not quote “a good centralized place for people to browse, search, comment on, and rate themes”. Personally I think that there are plenty of places for this, Wordpress are just entering this area a bit late and showing that they haven’t done any research into this.

The new directory is based upon the same system used for the plugins directory so it is easy to navigate and download themes as well as get information and help. It is overall very nice but I doubt that I and many other designers will use it because there are some very strict guidelines:

In order to be added to the directory each theme must meet the following requirements:

1. A single zip file, with all of the files themes file included.
2. There must be a style.css file containing:
   1. Name (which must be unique to the directory)
   2. Tags
   3. Version (in the format of x.x or x.x.x and must be unique to the theme)
   4. Image align classes: img.centered, img.alignright, img.alignleft, .alignright, .alignleft
3. The screenshot file name must be screenshot.png, and be a real screenshot of the theme, not a splash screen.
4. Licensing must be GPL compatible.
5. No hidden, paid or sponsored links in the theme. Links back to the author’s site are fine.
6. The theme must be your own original work.

All themes are subject to review.

(Source)

Not something I approve of because I think sponsored links are important in order for designers to produce good quality wordpress themes.

You can go to the new directory here: http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/

What are your opinons on it? Leave your comments below.

Features include post revisions which enable you to see past versions of posts and even restore back to these if you wish, this is starting to become a common occurance in many areas of software so it is nice to see it implemented into Wordpress.

Also the Press This feature has been improved, simply add the link to your bookmarks and when you find a webpage you would like to blog about simple choose the bookmark and a window appears enabling you to grab text, images, quotes and videos and post them to your blog.

A simple but effective feature is the option to add Image Captions, this may not seem a big deal but it really is, it enables you to well, caption your images so it is great if you need to leave credit to the owner of the image.

Theme Previewing has been added to 2.6 enabling you to see how a theme will look before commiting it to your blog, this will mean that you can check whether everything works correctly without affecting your users who are currently viewing the blog.

You can also now speed up blogging by using Gears which will add scripts, images and other content to your hard drive so your personal blogging is speeded up.

There are also plenty of other little features including, Word Count when you are posting, Gallery Sorting so that when you use the gallery option you can arrange the image order, Avatar enhanced support and the option to select multiple items from lists using Shift and Click.

Overall, I am pleased with the developments of Wordpress 2.6 and will be upgrading my sites to it in the near future. Wordpress amazes me everytime a new release is unleashed on the world and really does prove its right to stand as the leader in blogging software. Below is the official video from Wordpress about the new release so check it out to see the features I mentioned in action.

Looking for a magazine style template but don’t want to pay out huge amounts of money? Well Mimbo Magazine is for you, this premium (but free) wordpress template is packed full of features including an area for the featured post, thumbnail support and a drop down page menu.

Live Demo | Full Details and Download