All posts in Wordpress Themes

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+

Free WordPress Mobile Pack Plugin

by Chris M on November 23, 2011 in Wordpress Themes with No comments

I’ve been looking at options for mobile solutions for WordPress websites and I came across a really good one, that’s free, called WordPress Mobile Pack. This is a complete toolkit to assist you in mobilizing your WordPress site.

The plugin comes bundled with all sorts of features including a mobile switcher which automatically suggests desktop of mobile presentation, a standard mobile theme, custom colour variations allowing CSS to shape the theme, the theme is standards compliant, it’s got device adaptation, a mobile administration area, mobile analytics and a few other bits and pieces. This really is a power packed WordPress plugin for those who take mobile seriously.

Download for free.

WordPress installation profiles

by Chris M on November 20, 2011 in Wordpress Themes with 5 Comments

Setting up WordPress in theory is quite a quick process, but when it comes to uploading and activating all the plugins, it turns into a rather lengthy process, but that is old new now that there are plugins to assist us.

WP Install Profiles was built to solve this exact problem, in a sentence, it automatically downloads packages of plugins that you’ve chosen. In other words you create a profile of plugins, and you’re then able to automate this process. So if you use 7 plugins in every WordPress install you do, you would map these plugins to a profile and WP Install Profiles would allow you to install the profile and thus automate the process of getting the 7 plugins into place.

Using the plugin is really easy, all you need to know is the slugs of the plugins on the WordPress repo, for example: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tweetbottom/ – the ‘tweetbottom’ would be all that you need. You would get the slugs of all the plugins you want to use and add them to a profile.

That’s it, automatically install your favorite plugins on WordPress without the one by one hassle.

You can download by plugin by clicking here.

Contact Exporter Plugin for WordPress

by Chris M on November 10, 2011 in Wordpress Themes with No comments

Seer Interactive is an overseas SEO company that I follow closely, I love the presentations that Will (owner) gives, so when they release something I normally take a good look and this is one of those times as they’ve released a new WordPress plugin.

Seer Contact Exporter is a WordPress plugin that exports all the commenters on your blog into a CSV file for use in Excel. There’s one extra level though, if you have an SEOmoz account, you can input your API key and get further information on your commenters website such as the page authority and domain authority.

It’s a really simple plugin, download, unpack, upload, activate, run – as simple as that. If you want to download a copy, click here.

Bad quality, but you get the drift:

Fetch a remote page in WordPress

by Chris M on September 17, 2011 in Wordpress Themes with 2 Comments

We’re working on an interesting website at The Forge Web Creations; the website’s driven by WordPress and the idea is to use calls to include a very fancy integrated payment gateway management system. We’ve chosen our technologies to achieve this and everyone’s happy, but I wanted to share another function I found for WordPress, which could be really useful.

The function is wp_remote_get(). This function retrieves a URL using the HTTP GET method, returning results in an array. Results include HTTP headers and content.

Here’s some sample code:

$response = wp_remote_get( ‘http://foo.com/file.txt’ );
if( is_wp_error( $response ) ) {
echo ‘Something went wrong!’;
} else {
echo ‘Response:

';
   print_r( $response );
   echo '

‘;
}

In the example above, $response['body'] will contain the actual page content returned by the server.

There are a lot of uses for this function and I’m sure your mind’s racing with ideas, so I’m going to leave it at that. If you have a cool idea or have used the function to do something interesting, please feel free to leave a comment below.

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