Theme Test Drive Plugin for WP Designers

Posted by Snap! on December 6th, 2007

new theme switcher plugin Here’s a neat little plugin by Vladimir that allows WordPress designers and admin’s alike to test drive a new theme while the users/visitors of your site still enjoy and experience your “current theme”.

Of course your cache needs to be disabled while you are testing, but sure beats the old method of using Theme Switcher plugin with /?wptheme=newtheme to switch back and forth.

Give this plugin a test drive!

Tagged: Design, Design Tools, New Release, Resources, Test Drive, Tricks, WordPress CMS, WordPress Plugins, WordPress developers, wpSnap News, wpsnap

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Posted by Snap! on August 20th, 2007

sandbox icon 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, youâ€™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 itâ€™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’);

@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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Posted by Snap! on July 28th, 2007

Photoshop brushes are artistic tools for creating collages, icons, making borders of photographs and images, blending images and graphics, which artists and web designers cannot do without. If you have already bookmarked Bittbox set of freebies, here’s another one to bookmark.

“Making brushes is easier than I thought. Just drawing, saving as a brush and that’s it!”, says the Polish artist from Hawksmont.com.

Wow, if only it were as easy for all!

Here’s a small collection of some of the various possibilites of creating various impressions with varied textures which evoke different feelings altogether. You can download these free Photoshop brushes and many more such as grunge, bubbles, stars, guns, etc. from the Hawksmont.com Free Graphic Resources.

Free Fingerprints Photoshop Brushes
Free Fingerprints Brushes