Latest Wordpress News
WPCandy have released a sample post collection that you can import to your wordpress installation, it’s something I have personally been looking for for a while. As a wordpress developer I need to ensure that all the styling works, comments, links, heading tags, image alignment, everything. This collection addresses that issue and enables you to check that every part is correct.
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 released another theme called Fresh Folio which brings a blog together with a portfolio seamlessly enabling you to easily manage both from one site. Check out our review here.
Hello readers and welcome back to WordpressIsland and if it is your first time visiting then welcome and make yourself at home. There have been a few changes on Wordpress Island which I would like to make you aware of.
Wordpress have released a theme directory based on their popular plugins directory. You can read the official post here.
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.
Wordpress 2.6 “Tyner” was released yesterday and has some nice improvements over 2.5 and 2.5.1 making the new interface much easier to use and adding some great features to make blogging much easier. Today, I installed 2.6 on my localhost to check it out and I was pleased with the new features. 2.5 had quite a few bugs that were pretty annoying but most of these were ironed out in 2.5.1, 2.6 however just seems much more stable like a chair built with wood and nails as opposed to wood and tape. Oh, and if you are wondering why it is called Tyner, it was named after jazz pianist McCoy Tyner.
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Wordpress Themes
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.
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
TextureBlog is a selection of 6 templates from Simnor Web Templates and comes in Wood, Stripes, Leather, Marble, Cork and Leaf textures. It has a great design and is highly customisable. One of the best features is the two line menu which is now a common occurance on many websites.
It comes with all the usual features like widget ready sidebar and footer, thumbnail and gravatar support, advert areas and integrated social bookmarking.
For just $40 you get all 6 textures.
Live Demo | More Details and Purchase ($40)
This great looking Wordpress Template from Blogalized can make your blog look that little bit better. It has a rather nice menu under the header with links to RSS feeds so you can get returning visitors without much effort. The blue design makes the site look very friendly so perfect for a personal blog.
Live Demo | More Details and Purchase ($14.99)
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Latest Wordpress Plugins
Vladimir Prelovac has released a great wordpress plugin that allows you - as administrator - to test drive new wordpress templates without having your visitors having to use it as well. This means that your visitors wont be greeted with an unexpected template when they are visiting your blog whilst you test whether the new template is right for your blog.
From the site: Theme Test Drive Wordpress plugin allows you to safely test drive any theme on your blog as administrator, while visitors still use the default one. It happens completely transparently and they will not even notice you run a different theme for yourself. Best part is you can even set the testing theme options (if it has them) in the Admin panel while you are testing the theme. (source)
You can view full details and download the plugin by going here.
From Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan comes a simple and easy post visitor counter which you can add to the bottom of your posts to keep track of how many visitors you get to particular blog posts.
The plugin is simple to add to your blog, simply add this code:
<?php if(function_exists(’the_views’)) { the_views(); } ?>
to the post loop in the single.php page of your template and you can see how many people view your posts without having to use complex statistics programs.
More Information and Download
Adding a contact form to your blog is a great way to get feedback on your content and the blog itself without having your email address out there for the spammers to see.
To add a contact form the best one to go for is the Contact Form plugin from Chip Cuccio. The plugin allows you to add it to any page by adding a simple HTML tag in the pages html code.
For full information and download click here [Link seems to be dead]
Other great contact form plugins to check out
Contact Form 7
cForms II
wpForum is a handy little plugin that adds a forum to your blog without having to integrate it manually which is either costly (if you don’t know advanced php) or takes a lot of time and training.
wpForum allows you to add a simple forum with basic features allowing your users of the blog to post in a forum. In order for a visitor to post in the forum they need to sign up with the wordpress membership included in your wordpress installation meaning that they become a member of both the blog and the forum.
You can choose from 4 designs and add as many forums as you like. To link to it you simply add <!–WPFORUM–> to a new page and it will add it for you.
More details on this plugin including download and installation information can be found by clicking here
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Latest Wordpress Tutorials
It is a common site now to see a widget ready footer on a wordpress powered site, it adds some extra areas to add widgets that would maybe look out of place in the sidebar. It is good to have widgets at the bottom of the blog for links to other posts and maybe some details about yourself. In this tutorial I am going to show you how to create 3 footer widget areas which can be edited from the admin area of your wordpress installation. I am going to use the default Kubrick theme for this tutorial.
A couple of days ago I released version 2.0 of my premium news wordpress template - Simify, one of the templates main features is the tabbed area for the featured posts. In this tutorial I am going to show you how to produce a tabbed area for your featured posts on your blog complete with [...]
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Community Links
Although tentatively scheduled for November, WordPress 2.7 looks to be as big of a release since WordPress 2.5, perhaps even bigger. Before reading the rest of this post, please keep in mind that what you see in the following screenshots is by no means a representation of the final product. Also keep in mind that WordPress 2.7 should not be used on a live blog as 2.7 is no where near stable. What you see here is not necessarily what you’ll get. This post will highlight WordPress 2.7 at its current stage of development.
Free professional WordPress themes always come in handy. Whether you are looking for some design inspiration or professional coding solutions — in both cases you can learn a lot, you can apply them and you can build customized designs upon them without reinventing the wheel all the time.
In this article we present over 30 fresh free high-quality WordPress themes. All themes can be downloaded, customized and used for free — in personal or/and commercial projects. Please read license disclaimers carefully before using the theme in commercial projects — they can change from time to time.
This is the first article in our new three-part WordPress series. I want to share with you some hacks that i found to be very useful when i was working on the redesign of Noupe and during the design of my other site Devsnippets. Throughout this article, we’ll be focus on many WordPress Theme hacks, ideas, tips and useful tutorials you need to have ready in hand when developing WordPress websites.
I love WordPress… ok scratch that… I ADORE WordPress! I have used it for several of my own personal blogs, as well as to develop blogs and web sites for clients. However the more I use it - especially for my own projects where I have full creative reign - I am constantly amazed by just how much it is capable of.
When designing a custom theme or deciding on an already-existing theme, bloggers have a lot of factors to consider and there is no shortage of options, particularly for WordPress users. A growing number of blogs are moving away from traditional blog layouts in favor of magazine-style themes; however, the layout and presentation of content has a major impact on visitors and there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
A collection of 13 of the best Firefox Addons designed to making blogging with Wordpress even easier right from the browser.
With the push towards a successful blog being defined by its comments, a new WordPress Plugin has appeared that may push the comment frenzy even more. PlanetOzh has created the Liz Strauss Comment Counter by Ozh WordPress Plugin which honors the popular blog conversation expert, Liz Strauss.
I will be talking about how WordPress is changing lives, not just from the blogging experience but truly changing your life from stem to stern.
In Part 1 of this Wordpress As CMS tutorial, I will show you some quick settings that will transform your Wordpress installation into a simple website. I already did a clean Wordpress install on my local web server and I will use Corporate Sandbox, my simple two column Wordpress theme, as a starting point. It’s a light theme, with just a few images, ideal for the kind of website we’re trying to build.
A collection of some of the very best free premium wordpress themes. All templates comes in a magazine or grid layout which are becoming very popular on many blogs. From the site: “Today I posted the biggest collection until now on the blog. This collection is constituted only of Free Premium WordPress Themes, most of them have magazine or grid layouts.”
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