Wordpress-Theme 0816
Posted by Robert Hartl on October 24th, 2007
Live demo | Download | Theme URI
Tagged: 2 Column, Blue, Clean, Colors, Dot Dot Dot, GPL, Hearts, Hello Wiki, Inspiration, Keyboard Shortcuts, Layout, My2Gig-Butterfly, New WP Themes, Plugins, Pro Blog 2.0, Prosumer, RSS Feeds, Red, Selection, Social Bookmarking, Themes, Web 2.0-ish, Web Design, White, WordPress, WordPress Skins, WordPress Templates, WordPress Themes, WordPress Themes Gallery, WordPress developers, free, submit your themes, suchmaschinen-optimierungen.info
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Blackred
Posted by Robert Hartl on October 24th, 2007
Live demo | Download | Theme URI
Enjoy.
Tagged: 1 column, Accordion Sky, Black, Black and Tan, Clean, Colors, Cool Buttons, Deep Blue Sea, Design, Design Inspiration, Dot Dot Dot, GPL, Hello Wiki, Inspiration, Keyboard Shortcuts, New WP Themes, Plugins, Prosumer, Red, Samedi, Social Bookmarking, Web 2.0-ish, WordPress, WordPress Skins, WordPress Templates, WordPress Themes, WordPress Themes Gallery, brown, submit your themes, suchmaschinen-optimierungen.info
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How to Easily Add or Change Sandbox Design
Posted by Snap! on August 20th, 2007
There are many new designs that came out of the Sandbox design competition and each design comes with instructions on how to install them. Not following my gut, I decided to instead follow the included instructions and I find out that it never worked for me. So I decided to write my own instructions for those who are planning on using the Sandbox based designs without having to deal with the hassles I faced. BTW, if you have not noticed it already, we started featuring Sandbox competition designs and hope to have more for you soon.
What the instructions say?
It is critical to read this to understand the base structure and why it probably never worked for me.
If you plan on using a Sandbox design, you’ll need the Sandbox theme in the following folder with a file structure like:
/wp-content/themes/sandbox/style.css
This makes sense, Sandbox is a complete theme and when activated works as is.
The instruction also recommends the design file structure is set as below:
/wp-content/themes/some-design-name/style.css
(where some-design-name is the name of the design)
This is the part that does not work for me, mostly all designs are just that: a CSS file and some images, they do not have any template files like index.php and in almost every case result in a “Template is Missing” error when you go to Admin >> Presentation >> Theme.
Irrespective of the WP version you use, or even using the /wp-includes/themes.php patch for Sandbox results in this error, in short, using the instructions included with the design just does not work (again it’s a personal experience, I might be screwing up some place).
So what did I do?
Instead of including the design folder under the main ‘themes’ folder, I placed it within the Sandbox theme folder like below:
/wp-content/themes/sandbox/some-design-name/style.css
I then opened the Sandbox themes stylesheet (/wp-content/themes/sandbox/style.css) and deleted all the styles below the comment /* Just some example content */
I then replaced the style import URL from
@import url(’sandbox-layouts/2c-l.css’);
to
@import url(’ some-design-name/style.css’);
That does it, simple aye.
Tagged: Best WordPress Themes, Blogging Tips, Copyrights and Licenses, Design Tools, Keyboard Shortcuts, PimpDaBlog, RSS Feeds, Resources, Sandbox Theme, Selection, Thumbnail viewer plugin, Tips, Web Tools, WordPress, wpsnap
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- Sandbox Design Competition Results
- Sandbox Design Competition Final Entries
- Sandbox Design Competition - and the Winner is…
Take-Off
Posted by Deeogee on August 17th, 2007
2 Column Travel and Vacation WordPress theme.
Tagged: 2 Column, Black, Blue, GPL, Hearts, Hello Wiki, My2Gig-Butterfly, Plugins, Red, Travel, Vacation, WordPress Skins, WordPress Templates, WordPress Themes, WordPress Themes Gallery, submit your themes
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3 Essential Plugins for High Traffic WordPress Sites
Posted by Snap! on August 10th, 2007
We might as well list all the important plugins that make sites with high traffic stay afloat, but we decided to focus on just three very essential plugins that will be invaluable for your high traffic site.
I say “high trafficâ€? only because WordPress powered sites “as is” can work really well for most sites, but when your traffic increases, the equation changes with increased load on the server and need for better management.
The plugins are listed in no particular order:
Akismet/ Bad Behavior/ Spam Karma 2: As your traffic increases, so does your spam, the affinity of spammers to your site is not due to the popularity of your site alone, but imagine this scenario, if every 3rd comment is a spam, the more comments you have, the spam you will too. The simplest solution to stop comment spams in conjunction with the aforementioned spam blockers (that can be downloaded from wp-plugins.net or Codex) is to use a plugin like reCAPTCHA.
WordPress Database Backup: The newer version of WP has built-in backup via XML downloads, however that is not as good as the original plugin based sql download. The newer version of WP does not include it as a default plugin, but here’s a link to the original plugin managed by a new and reliable developer. Use this tool to back your database as often as you like, you’ll never realize how valuable it is, but let’s hope you’ll never need to go through the excruciating pain of restoring your DB ever!
WP Cache: This plugin does what the name suggests, caches WP files, and it does it in two phases. The first phase checks if the requested URL is already cached, if so it serves from the static file and finishes, the second phase stores the generated page in a static file for further request. Collectively it can reduce the load on your database server significantly and improve site load speed.
So there you go, 3 essential plugins for your WordPress site that all sites should consider installing.
Tagged: Akismet, Bad Behavior, Big City, Blogging Tips, CMS, Copyrights and Licenses, Keyboard Shortcuts, PimpDaBlog, Plugins, RSS Feeds, Resources, Spam Karma, Thumbnail viewer plugin, Tips, Top Plugins, WP Cache, WordPress, WordPress Database Backup, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials, reCAPTCHA, wpsnap
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WPSnap Recent Discussion on WLTC
Posted by Snap! on August 9th, 2007
This is in response to comments regarding Hello 2007 on Weblogtoolscollection.com, here’s an excerpt:
indeed. you should probably be making sure to not just repost wpsnap’s posts blindly. the theme author’s page is here: http://hellowiki.com/2007/02/28/wordpress-theme-hello-2007/
adam — 08/2/2007 @ 8:02 am
Adam continues in a subsequent comment
why not link the author’s page, and link wpsnap as a translation, if that’s all it is?
i’m a little leary of wpsnap, as their theme posts don’t make it clear that they’re referring to someone else’s work, and they hotlink downloads on designer’s servers. adam — 08/2/2007 @ 9:30 am
We strive to make the process of finding new and exciting themes easier on wpSnap by adding a “Download” link, a “Demo” link and a direct link to the “Theme URI”. We are little surprised that despite the information provided, some are still leery of what we are trying to accomplish! In short, we are not a theme redistribution site, we simply highlight work that stands out from the crowd!
As for hotlinking, most theme authors prefer hotlinking over redistribution of the themes for two reasons, 1) they have better control of the content users download 2) they can manage their stats better. If authors specify that hotlinking is not desired, we ensure to comply. Also, by allowing downloads directly from the author site, we make sure they are getting the themes from the most legitimate place possible!
Also, we have a disclaimer that clearly tells the users of our site what we do and what we don’t, we encourage all users to please take a moment to read it. Aside from that, we also ensure:
- You have a “Sort by” option to choose the designer
- A direct link to the theme author’s website is provided in every blog post (tell us how many theme distribution sites bother to do that?)
- Since we do not redistribute themes, none of the zip/rar files will have any link the author has not added and definitely no link to www.wpsnap.com.
- We wanted to release a theme by Clazh, but we didn’t only because he doesn’t want his themes hotlinked.
- Our disclaimer clearly says that we will remove themes by designers who do not want their themes listed on our site.
- We try our very best to ensure no copyright violated themes or blatant rip-offs are promoted on our site (the reason why the theme that triggered off this debate Hello 2007 was removed).
“All our themes refer to others’ work,” we’re announcing this loud and clear, in case there is still a doubt.
If that were not enough, “we verify” themes before allowing to upload. Check this theme, we asked the author if he had permission to re-distribute Wolfgang Bartelme’s theme with color variation, and he brought to our attention that others had done the same and the original author was fine with that!
In the name of GPL, many authors use popular themes and make minor mods to gain instant popularity. Now, if all designers made different color versions of Bartelme, tell me how fair would that be? Look at Paul Enderson’s version, it’s the best of all, but he has retained it that way, without trying to re-distribute. Of course, we don’t want to be the moral police, so we can’t dispute what is allowed under GPL, but we want you to know that we do CARE equally for theme users safety as well as theme authors’ rights!
The objective of WPSNAP is to promote all designers based on the quality of their work. We request that users directly contact us if there were any questions or concern.
Tagged: Copyrights infringements, GPL, Hello 2007, Hello Wiki, PimpDaBlog, Plugins, Theme Distribution, WLTC, WordPress Themes, weblogtoolscollection.com, wpsnap
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How to Widgetize a Theme in 3 Easy Steps!
Posted by Snap! on August 6th, 2007
We were contacted earlier by Karen, a user of wpSnap who was trying to widgetize a non-widget theme from a couple years ago. The theme in question was from the pre-sidebar widget days and there are many good themes on this site that fall in that category. So rather than providing a fix to each theme individually, we decided to write a short and easy tutorial for one and all.
Here’s what you might need in addition to access to your WP Admin panel, you need to have access to your server via FTP to add a functions.php file to your theme folder if it does not exist. So let’s get started:
1) If you open your sidebar.php file or any other file where your sidebar elements like categories, archives, blogroll or whatever else that people fancy reside, you will notice it is invariably in an unordered list format. Usually it will be as below:
<ul>
<li>
<h3>Categories</h3>
<ul class=”categories”>
<?php wp_list_cats(’sort_column=name&hide_empty=0′); ?>
</ul><h3>Archives</h3>
<ul class=”archives”>
<?php get_archives(’monthly’,”,”,’<li>’,'</li>’,”); ?>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Your default sidebar need not necessarily have this very code, it could be anything, it could even be a JavaScript as in the case with the Japanese Cherry Blossom theme that triggered this post. Also, it’s not a must to have h2 as the heading, although that is what the widget sidebar uses. We will fix that in the CSS so let’s not worry about it for now.
2) You need to just add two lines of code to this mark up, one at the top and one at the bottom of the list as shown below:
<ul>
<?php if ( function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’) && dynamic_sidebar() ) : else : ?>
<li>
<h3>Categories</h3>
<ul class=”categories”>
<?php wp_list_cats(’sort_column=name&hide_empty=0′); ?>
</ul><h3>Archives</h3>
<ul class=”archives”>
<?php get_archives(’monthly’,”,”,’<li>’,'</li>’,”); ?>
</ul>
</li>
<?php endif; ?>
</ul>
3) Open functions.php if you have one in the theme, if not, create a file, call it functions.php and add this line to it:
<?php
if (function_exists(’register_sidebars’)) register_sidebars(1, array(’before_widget’ => ”,’after_widget’ => ”));
?>
Note how I highlighted the 1 in the above code, it indicates the number of widget boxes in the whole theme. Since in the above example, we created only one dynamic sidebar, we will leave it at 1.
One last step that is seldom needed is in cases where h2 is not used in the default unordered list as heading. Say h3 was used as in our example, the easiest hack to address this would be to open style.css and look for styling for h3, copy and paste it right below (or above) the h3 styling and call it h2 instead. For example, say you find the following code for h3 in style.css:
h3{
color: #FFFFFF;
font-size: 1.15em;
font-weight: normal;
}
Copy paste and make it h2 like below:
h2{
color: #FFFFFF;
font-size: 1.15em;
font-weight: normal;
}h3{
color: #FFFFFF;
font-size: 1.15em;
font-weight: normal;
}
That is pretty much it, the theme is now widget ready.
Additional Usage and Styling
Say you need 2 widget bars now, simply follow the same example as above, but when you create widgets, make sure it’s as below:
<?php if ( function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’) && dynamic_sidebar(1) ) : else : ?>
Unordered list
<?php endif; ?><?php if ( function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’) && dynamic_sidebar(2) ) : else : ?>
Another unordered list
<?php endif; ?>
then in the functions file, change the 1 to 2 as below:
<?php
if (function_exists(’register_sidebars’)) register_sidebars(2, array(’before_widget’ => ”,’after_widget’ => ”));
?>
You can take it one step further and add a specific styling before and after the widget as shown below (I’ve used <em> as an example where x is the number of widgetized sidebar lists):
<?php
if (function_exists(’register_sidebars’)) register_sidebars(x, array(’before_widget’ => ‘<em>‘,’after_widget’ => ‘</em>‘));
?>
Specific fix for Japanese Cherry Blossom Theme
Karen wanted the 3rd bottom column to be widgetized. We open sidebar.php and find this as the 3rd column/block elements:
<div class=”block”>
<h3>In Other News</h3>
<ul class=”counts”>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://del.icio.us/feeds/js/krisandapril?extended;count=1″></script>
<noscript><a href=”http://del.icio.us/krisandapril”>my del.icio.us</a></noscript>
</div>
Right away I can tell there is an issue, the open unordered list <ul> is not closed with a </ul>, so we add it like below (although this step is unnecessary):
<div class=”block”>
<h3>In Other News</h3>
<ul class=”counts”>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://del.icio.us/feeds/js/krisandapril?extended;count=1″></script>
<noscript><a href=”http://del.icio.us/krisandapril”>my del.icio.us</a></noscript>
</div>
</ul>
Next we gut out the del.icio.us Java, so we end with this:
<div class=”block”>
<h3>In Other News</h3>
<ul class=”counts”></ul>
Then we add the famous dynamic sidebar call like below:
<div class=”block”>
<h3>In Other News</h3>
<ul class=”counts”>
<?php if ( function_exists(’dynamic_sidebar’) && dynamic_sidebar() ) : else : ?><?php endif; ?>
</ul>
and add the following code to the empty functions.php file that came with the theme.
<?php
if (function_exists(’register_sidebars’)) register_sidebars(1, array(’before_widget’ => ”,’after_widget’ => ”));
?>
The style.css for this theme shows that both h2 and h3 are styled alike, so all you will need then is the sidebar widget plugin and you are good to go.
Hope this helps!
Tagged: CMS, Copyrights and Licenses, Dark Helium, Dot Dot Dot, How to widgetize, Keyboard Shortcuts, PimpDaBlog, Tips, Tutorials, Web Design, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Tutorials, WordPress plugins, wpsnap
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Note of Caution and WordPress Themes for Aug 4, 2007
Posted by Snap! on August 4th, 2007
Wide Green is a neat 3 column theme by AskGraphics.
Games Central is a 2 column dark wordpress theme.
Charisma is a plain, professional, two column Wordpress Theme with a right sidebar by wordpressthemesbiz. (No links provided)
Also note:
Artistic and Hibiscus by Freewpthemes.net. (No attribution to freecsstemplates.org in any of the themes)
http://www.templatesbrowser.com/wordpress-themes/ has been removing designer links, adding their own and re-distributing themes with hidden advertisements.
Also, web2themes.com, earlier banned from http://themes.wordpress.net has listed their site as one of the sites for further references and collections here.
Tagged: Blogging, Copyright Violation, Copyrights and Licenses, Evolution 3C, Free Downloads, New WP Themes, PimpDaBlog, Plugins, Prosumer, RSS Feeds, WordPress Skins, WordPress Templates, WordPress Themes, templatesbrowser.com, web2themes.com, wpsnap
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Related Posts:
- Sandbox Design Competition Final Entries
- Graphic Design Inspiration
- WordPress Themes New Releases for July 31 and Aug 1, 2007
