Daily Tip: Check Out WP-Snippets’ Brand New Resource Archive
April 4, 2011
WP-Snippets.com is one of my favorite WordPress websites. It’s a growing resource of short snippets to enhance your WordPress site. The snippets have been submitted by multiple authors and cover a wide range of customizations, such as admin dashboard hacks, custom fields, social networking integration, shortcodes and more.
The front page is still the same with a massive cloud of snippets, but now they’ve added a brand new archive for more structured browsing. Head on over to wp-snippets and bookmark this handy resource.
Ladies – Get Over to the Allure Themes Preview Launch Webinar
April 4, 2011
Lisa Sabin-Wilson, author of the popular WordPress for Dummies, MassivePresser, owner/designer at E-Webscapes and all round entrepeneur, is holding a preview launch webinar for her latest venture – Allure Themes.
Allure Themes, which is due to launch on April 12th, is a theme shop that will be offering themes designed JUST for women. Lisa has been drip feeding us teasers over the past few months, since she announced Allure. Here’s the latest:
This Thursday, Lisa is holding a live webinar where attendees can get a preview of the Allure Themes.com launch. She’ll be previewing theme designs for the new release and talking about WordPress theme design.
I will be there! It’ll be interesting to find out just what makes a woman-only theme.
5 Simple Ways to Improve a Boring WordPress Theme
April 4, 2011
Does your theme look like every other basic WordPress site? Here are some simple updates you can apply to your theme to make things a a little more interesting and engaging. Most of these are fairly do-it-yourself friendly and can be achieved with a little bit of copy and paste or via plugins.
1. Add Post Thumbnails
This is a great way to make your theme more visually appealing. Don’t just stick to the standard 150px square thumbnails. Get creative with the sizes for a more unique design. If your theme doesn’t support post thumbnails here’s how to add them – simply paste this into your theme’s functions.php:
add_theme_support( 'post-thumbnails' );
Then you’ll paste this into your theme files where you want the thumbnails, perhaps on your front page or archives page:
<?php the_post_thumbnail(); ?>
Adding post thumbnails can take a boring archives page from plain to awesome.
2. Display Related or Popular Posts Visually With Thumbnails
People love images. An image can say more than a title ever could. Try the nRelate Related Content plugin for a quick implementation of related post thumbnails. Or, follow along with my tutorial for showing popular posts from scratch.
3. Add the Themekit for WordPress Plugin
Themekit is a relatively new plugin that offers you a host of preconfigured options, including Google Fonts integration for sprucing up your theme’s typography.
Themekit also has pre-built controls for orders, text, checkboxes, radio buttons and more, so that you can easily add a little more style to your UI.
Never underestimate the power of a quality fontstack. If you’re handy with CSS you may want to check out a couple of our tutorials for implementing custom fonts using the @font-face rule, because it will give you more options than Google fonts. If you don’t enjoy working with CSS, then Themekit is a great entryway to getting custom fonts.
4. Utilize Custom Page Templates and Layouts
Not every page needs a sidebar with loads of meta content, archives, and the other typical WordPress stuff. If your theme offers custom page templates, make use of them. If not, you can easily create your own with some simple instructions from the WordPress codex.
You can also change some basic layout options via plugin shortcodes. Try a plugin such as the Easy Columns plugin to create a grid system or magazine style columns for your pages when it suits your content.
5. Remember: Less is More.
In art economy is always beauty. – Henry James
Don’t load up your site with too many social sharing outlets. Oftentimes, you’ll visit WordPress sites with every possible social bookmarking and networking icon attached to posts and sidebars. This is the last thing you want to do. People are bombarded with social networking every day. Get to know your demographic and display networks that are relevant to your users. Or, find a creative way to selectively hide/show the icons with JavaScript. Too many social icons splattered everywhere can make a site annoying. Keep your site as simple and focused as possible so your content can be the centerpiece.
Daily Tip: How to Reverse WordPress Comment Order to Show the Latest on Top
April 2, 2011
Here’s a handy little hack that I found over at iwebsource.net. It basically reverses your comment order to show the latest ones on top, so that you don’t have to scroll all the way to the bottom to find read the most recent comments.
Add this to your theme’s functions.php file:
if (!function_exists('iweb_reverse_comments')) { function iweb_reverse_comments($comments) { return array_reverse($comments); } } add_filter ('comments_array', 'iweb_reverse_comments');
I tested this hack on the WordPress 3.1 and it works as advertised. It’s very useful if you have posts that get pages and pages worth of comments.
Daily Tip: Free Login and Logout Redirect Plugins for WordPress
April 1, 2011
WPMU Dev has recently listed 20 plugins and themes for free and our featured pair today is among them.
The Login Redirect and Logout Redirect plugins are like salt and pepper shakers. Usually when you log in to WordPress, you’ll be sent directly to the dashboard. The Login Redirect plugin lets you specify the URL for redirection after users log in, just as you might imagine. The Logout Redirect plugin lets you set a custom URL for automatic redirection after users log out.
Download both of the plugins for free today from WPMU Dev.
Support Your Favorite Theme Shop at WP Candy’s Theme Madness
April 1, 2011
Ryan at WP Candy has launched their Theme Madness competition. It’s some sort of theme-off or theme-shop-off (is that the right term)? Whatever it is it’s a great way to show some love for your favorite themers from across the WordPress community.
Aside: As a non-American, the whole March Madness thing totally passed me by until I read this post at Theme Sorter. I thought March Madness was something to do with filling in your taxes, because, you know, it’s the end of March and we’ve all got to do our taxes and it makes us mad…….. doh!!!!
Here’s what Ryan had to say.
In short, this month we’re running Theme Madness 2011 at WPCandy. This means:
- 64 WordPress theme shops will be facing off, head to head, to find out just who the most beloved theme shop is. Each match will consist of a period of voting, where users and fans will decide the winner themselves.
- You can fill out a Theme Madness 2011 bracket and compete with other WPCandy readers for total bracket domination.
- In the end, the winning team and the winning bracket will be awarded a hand made WPCandy trophy, pictured below.
- Hopefully we’ll all have a good deal of fun!
Honestly, I’m not quite sure of the rules and I’m still baffling at my own ignorance of basketball. But it’s definitely worth taking a trip over to WP Candy to check it all out. Especially if you’re a fan of filling in forms and voting for stuff – which I am.
Not to be biased but I’ll be plugging for Graph Paper Press and WP Shower, two of my absolute favorite WordPress theme shops.
Needless to say, the best thing about the competition has got to be the handmade WP Candy trophy which looks both impressive and delicious. They’re lucky I haven’t got my hands on it because I would probably lick it to see if it’s actually minty.
Good luck theme shops!
9 New BuddyPress Plugins That Kick Ass
April 1, 2011
BuddyPress developers have been plugging along, writing some excellent extensions for the platform. I’ve rounded up 9 of the newest, most exciting plugins created for BuddyPress so far in 2011.
BP Tweet URLs
This plugin works with YOURLS and BuddyPress to create your own URL shortening service for tweeting items from the activity stream.
Download Plugin
BuddyPress Mandatory Groups
This plugin lets site administrators lock users into BuddyPress groups. Mandatory group membership can be handy when you want reserve a group for support information, announcements, or simply to place your users into assigned sections.
Download Plugin
Anti-Splog
Anti-Splog is the best way to stop and kill splogs on your BuddyPress site. It implements four layers of protection to outsmart the bots that keep bombarding your BuddyPress site with spam users. It is most powerful when you enable the highly intelligent and ever-learning Anti-Splog API.
Download Plugin
YD Profile Visitor Tracker
This plugin tracks and displays who has been visiting your profile or other personal pages on a BuddyPress website. Check out the plugin’s homepage for advanced usage and customization examples.
Download Plugin
WordPress Chat Plugin
The WordPress Chat plugin lets you easily run as many live chats as you want on your WordPress, Multisite or BuddyPress site. A user can log in with WordPress, BuddyPress, Twitter, or Facebook. The plugin includes gravatars, emoticons, logs and many more customization options for your site.
Download Plugin
Newsletter Sign Up
This is a great option for getting your BuddyPress users signed up to your newsletter. It integrates an opt-in checkbox with your comment forms or registration form and supports several major newsletter service providers, including Aweber, Mailchimp, iContact, PHPList, Feedblitz.
Download Plugin
BP Unread Posts
Every forum should have the ability to show unread posts. It makes navigating forum post much less overwhelming. Your users will thank you for installing this plugin.
Download Plugin
BuddyPress Docs
This is a seriously kickass plugin that brings collaborative work spaces to your BuddyPress community with wiki-style document editing. Features include group-specific documents, taxonomy, fully sortable and filterable doc lists, TinyMCE front-end document editing, and much more.
Download Plugin
BuddyPress Privacy
Right now this is the only real option for getting privacy capabilities added to BuddyPress. There’s currently no other plugin like it and until the project decides to include some form of privacy in the core, you’ll need to use a plugin. This one does the job, although it’s not currently under active development. However, a great deal of work went into the creation of BuddyPress Privacy, and it’s an excellent starting point for adding your own custom privacy options.
