All posts in Wordpress Themes

Everyday Awesomeness: introducing the Sensei

by on January 23, 2013 in Wordpress Themes with 1 Comment

This is tremendous news if you’ve been planning to create and sell courses online. Local company, WooThemes, has developed a WordPress plugin called Sensei that enables you to build courses, write lessons, and craft exams to test your learners.

How Sensei works

  • Courses are built on the basic “post” principle, using “Lessons” as a custom post type
  • Users sign up using the traditional WordPress registration. Each learner has their own dashboard and can track their progress through lessons and coursework
  • You can charge for your courses by using the wildly popular (and free) WooCommerce plugin which integrates with Sensei
  • Sensei includes course analytics, so you can monitor your content, results and students
  • As an added bonus, the plugin is designed to work with any well-coded WordPress theme

Read the announcement post and watch the intro video here.

Sensei is available for the introductory price of $79 (single site licence) for a “limited time”, so if you’re interested, visit WooThemes for more info while the promotion is still running.

Get more social shares for your content

by Chris M on November 14, 2012 in Equipment, Networking, Wordpress Themes with 1 Comment

I really felt that I would start this blog post by stating that content is king and then going onto saying that context is king and then trying to say something ever more clever about content marketing and social media, but it’s 11h20ish and I’m exhausted, so instead I’m just going to tell you about an awesome plugin that’s going to assist you with getting more social shares on your content. See, we all want to earn shares and likes for our carefully written content and not all of us are brilliant at conversion optimization, so instead, let’s get something that will do the work for us.

Viral Lock is one of the best little plugins/extensions out there that “unlocks” content when your visitors share something on Twitter, Facebook or Google+. In other words, for a visitor to read more or receive something from you, they’ll need to share something in return.. can you think of a better way to get shares?

The plugin is built for WordPress, so it’s a quick and easy install – It’s not a freebie though, the plugin costs $16 (Approx: R140), which in my opinion is a small price to pay for the potential traffic you’ll gain through the shares. There’s a demo too.

Delete clutter in your WordPress database

by Chris M on November 8, 2012 in Wordpress Themes with No comments

Each time you write a post in WordPress, revisions are saved in the database. These revisions increase the size of the table that your posts are stored in, the bigger the table, the longer it takes to locate a post and publish the content to the reader. In other words, these revisions slow down your WordPress website. The good news is that there are methods of removing these old cluttered revisions and the simplest way is using a plugin.

Better Delete Revision is one such plugin that removes revisions, but it goes a step further and removes related information that might be causing hassles in other database tables such as meta tags and other relationship data. A further bonus is a database optimization feature, which further clears up your database and frees it from clutter and potential speed loss.

The plugin has been downloaded over 33,000 times, which isn’t amazing, but it’s not bad either. On top of that it’s received excellent reviews. My worry was that it is compatible up to WordPress 3.1.4, which isn’t the latest version of WordPress, but I tested it out and it worked on the latest version, so that’s reassuring.

Plugin installation is as simple as ever: Download, Upload, Activate.

Although it worked for me, I highly recommend backing up your database before using a plugin of this nature.

WordCamp Cape Town next week!

by Chris M on September 25, 2012 in Cape Town, Events, Industry News, Wordpress Themes with 7 Comments

I can’t believe how fast this year has gone, to think that we’re entering October in a few days is quite scary to say the least. What it does mean though, and is more exciting, is that WordCamp is upon us in just over a week, October 4th to be exact.

Like the last event, there are some great speakers this year, including some new faces to the talking space, you can read about the speakers on the website. To name a few companies, RSAWeb, Pricecheck and WooThemes.

Tickets are dirt cheap for what you’ll be getting, just R165 per person (register here)!

iMod Digital is a proud WordCamp sponsor.

I'm sponsoring WordCamp Cape Town 2012!

Hope to see you all there!

Free fully responsive WordPress Theme

by Chris M on May 11, 2012 in Wordpress Themes with No comments

I came across a really great full responsive portfolio-type WordPress theme today called Adapt. The whole responsive thing is a new buzz word, but it’s a buzz word that I feel will stick around for a while as it’s hugely important, so I’ve done some research, looked at some example websites and then turned to WordPress to see what I could play with.

Adapt is a cool theme because it’s very minimalist, it has a great slider and there are custom post types done correctly for the portfolio items. I also love the page templates that come with it for a blog, portfolio, full width page and a landing page.

You can grab a copy by clicking here (warning: tweet to download required).

WordPress is dominating the market

by Chris M on April 11, 2012 in Blogging, Wordpress Themes with 4 Comments

Over the years WordPress has become one of the leading content management systems, to think back to days where people questioned its ability to be more than a blogging platform only leads me to a good chuckle. I’ve played with so many content management systems, from Drupal to Expression Engine to Joomla to even some smaller ones, I can honestly say that WordPress has it all.

WordPress powers over 70 million blogs on the Internet, if you want to look at the activity, WordPress has an awesome stats page with a global activity map and more over here. A more impressive statistic is that WordPress powers 49% of the top blogs on Technorati’s list.

Take a look at this:

Pretty darn impressive for a “blogging platform” if you ask me.

On a side note: iMod ran for several years on a custom CMS that I wrote myself, also powered by PHP and MySQL, but I finally went over to the dark side and the three things that have kept me plugged into WordPress are:

  1. Community Support
  2. Security Updates
  3. Plugins

Just those three things alone make WordPress an incredible platform.

Are you using WordPress? What is your favourite feature?

Live Streaming WordPress Plugin

by Chris M on March 25, 2012 in Blogging, Sport, Wordpress Themes with No comments

I was involved in the conceptualization and building of a new WordPress plugin called WP Live Stream. It’s a very straight forward plugin, but has a lot to offer for those of you who live attending events and live streaming without wanting to clog your Twitter stream, or for those of you who just like keeping your visitors on your blog.

You download the plugin, activate it and place a widget in your sidebar – that’s it.

The plugin allows you to configure all the colours and so forth to ensure that it fits in with your blog, and there are tools to include the live stream on a page rather than a widget, just in case you want to keep everything in one place. On top of this, you can authenticate against Twitter and send out a tweet when you start live streaming, just so your Twitter followers know that you’re about to get going.

I’ve positioned WP Live Stream at the top of my sidebar as you can see and have received some good feedback from readers thus far. Not everyone’s plugged into Twitter all the time, but more importantly, most people on Twitter follow a number of people and therefore it’s tricky trying to just follow one persons tweets when you might also want to see other people’s tweets.

You can download the plugin by click here, there’s no sign up, no catches, just right-click save as style.

ColorCoded WordPress Theme

by Chris M on March 3, 2012 in Wordpress Themes with No comments

At Work, we’ve been working on a new Premium WordPress Theme called ColorCoded, which was conceptualized many months ago and has finally become something. The theme’s very minimalist, but the power is in the colours – you have the ability to assign a colour to each category on your blog so as to create a level of control for a reader as they click around your side.

Here’s what it looks like:

Here are some other features:

  • Clean code & design – Designed to be able to withstand an injection of colour, the theme is clean, minimal, and incredibly easy to setup and get started.
  • Customizable – With a fully widgetized sidebar and independent footer areas, as well as a custom logo uploader – ColorCoded is highly customizable – all from the WordPress dashboard.
  • Built in advertising – Our custom eFrog advertising widget allows you to quickly and easily add advertising to your blog, independent of plugins.
  • Fully Social – Social sharing is included on all posts and pages, as well as links to your social profiles should you choose to add them.

The theme sells for $35 and you can purchase and give it a trial run by clicking here.

Everyday Awesomeness: Christmas for web designers

by on December 15, 2011 in Wordpress Themes with 2 Comments

One of the benefits of Christmas time is the specials. Supermarkets, electronics stores, direct sellers-everyone wants to get in on the Christmas action! This Christmas it’s the web designers’ turn. Both eFrog Digital Design and WooThemes are running great Christmas specials.

eFrog Digital Design is running a half price special on all themes from 24-26 December. Here’s a snapshot of a few of their themes:

WooThemes is doing a 12 days of Christmas promotion (today is the second day). Each day offers a new special that runs for 24 hours.

WooThemes most recent themes:

Don’t we all love a good deal? Head over to both these sites to get yourself a bargain!

Add the Google+ button to your blog posts

by Chris M on December 9, 2011 in Code, Wordpress Themes with No comments

We’ve all got “share on Facebook” or “Like” or “Tweet this” on our blog posts, but I’ve noticed a lot of people who don’t have Google+ share buttons and it’s incredibly easy to add them if you’re using WordPress.

Open up your functions.php file and add the following lines of code at the bottom of the file:

add_filter('the_content', 'wpr_google_plusone'); 
function wpr_google_plusone($content) 
{ $content = $content.'<div><g:plusone size="tall" href="'.get_permalink().'"></g:plusone></div>'; return $content; } 
add_action ('wp_enqueue_scripts','wpr_google_plusone_script'); 
function wpr_google_plusone_script() 
{ wp_enqueue_script('google-plusone', 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js', array(), null); }

Save your functions.php file and enjoy allowing people to share your posts on Google+

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