WordPress Theme Black Buttons

Posted by WP Town on June 26th, 2008

Black Buttons Theme is a unique Widget ready WordPress theme with 2 columns, right sidebar, rounded corners and

fixed width. Tested on Firefox, Internet Explorer 6, 7 and Opera. Theme is XHTML/CSS valid and SEO friendly.

Black Buttons Theme Screenshot

Tagged: 2 Column, Black, New WP Themes, WordPress, WordPress 2.5, WordPress Skins, WordPress Templates, WordPress Themes, WordPress Themes Gallery, submit your themes

Posted by Snap! on April 27th, 2008

As you may have noticed, we are missing a few blog posts (nothing significant) and some comments as a result of a recent database issue which is being investigated. Just so you are warned, multi-author WordPress install such as our own site should not be running version 2.5 for the reason we all have come to know as CVE 2008 1930. Upgrading to version 2.5.1 now will save you a lot of hassle, trust me us this.

We believe a recent attack on our site due to that WordPress vulnerability was responsible for the issues we encountered lately. We assure you that we have taken all the steps necessary to rectify it. Although the BBPress powered WP News Forum was linked, we were able to restore all the fields and posts without any loss of data.

Here are some symptoms and diagnosis for the issue:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/172004
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/168964

We will post a detailed step by step correction process once we confirm the issue was indeed related. Although having a backup of your database from pre-2.5 might help, we feel it can be accomplished without any backup.

Sunny has a post detailing some WordPress 2.5 troubleshooting tips!

Tagged: Tutorials, Web Tools, WordPress, WordPress 2.5, wpSnap News, wpsnap

Share // 2 Feedbacks

Posted by bobek on September 26th, 2007

Contemporary Red

Beautiful 2 columns black and red WordPress theme. Suitable for many modern blogs.
The theme is for free.
Licence: Creative Commons | Download

Tagged: 2 Column, Black, Bobek, CMS, Clean, Contemporary Red, Free Downloads, Keyboard Shortcuts, My2Gig-Butterfly, New WP Themes, Plugins, Prosumer, RSS Feeds, Red, Selection, Themes, WordPress, WordPress Skins, WordPress Templates, WordPress Themes, WordPress Themes Gallery, submit your themes, words of wisdom

Share // Feedback »

Think Color

WordPress Themes for Aug 20-23

Posted by Snap! on August 23rd, 2007

Minyx 2.0 Lite, Terra Blue and FTW are new releases featured on wpSnap!

Confidence Coffee is a fixed width, three-column layout in brown and white.

Bicycling is a fixed width 979px, three-column layout, tested in the newest version WordPress 2.2 and WordPress 2.2.2.

Words of Wisdom is a 2 column dark WordPress theme.

Simply Beautiful is a neat 2 Column, easily customizable WordPress theme.

Green Art is a clean green blue theme with Widgets support by Depi.

Paradise Philippines is a cool WordPress theme, ideal for travel, communication and transportation related blogs, or even a personal blog.

Shadow Green is a neatly organized two columns layout with a widget-ready sidebar and 3 columns in the footer. It is gray in color with nice green headings.

4u Hemingway Red is a red version of 4u Hemingway theme by Utombox.

Particles is a lightweight 4 Column Theme from Devlounge.

Symbiot is a neat widget-ready 3 column WordPress theme with right sidebars and a fluid width.

Summer Sky is a neat 2-column WordPress theme.

Lvive is a professional WordPress Theme with rounded edges.

Tagged: Best WordPress Themes, Bicycling, Confidence Coffee, FTW, Keyboard Shortcuts, Misty Blue, New WP Themes, PimpDaBlog, Plugins, Prosumer, WordPress, WordPress Skins, WordPress Templates, WordPress Themes, WordPress Upgrades, green art, lvive, minyx 2.0 lite, paradise philippines, particles, summer sky, symbiot, terra blue, words of wisdom, wpsnap

Share // Feedback »

Posted by Benedikt on August 13th, 2007

Geekish

Geekish is a clean 3 column WordPress theme by Benedikt. It’s not widget-ready yet.

Download | Demo not available | Theme URI

Tagged: 2.2.2, 3 Column, Benedikt, Blue, Colors, Deep Blue Sea, Dot Dot Dot, Geekish, Hearts, Layout, New WP Themes, Plugins, Prosumer, Selection, Themes, Web 2.0-ish, Web Design, WordPress Skins, WordPress Templates, WordPress Themes, WordPress Themes Gallery, submit your themes

Share // Feedback »

No related posts

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 No Spam

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.

Database Backup

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

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

Share // 2 Feedbacks

Posted by Snap! on August 6th, 2007

widget 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 letâ€™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, itâ€™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 letâ€™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 itâ€™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 (Iâ€™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

Share // 8 Feedbacks

Posted by Snap! on August 6th, 2007

WordPress 2.2.2 and 2.0.11 upgrades include security and minor bugfixes without any plugin or theme compatibility issues. Do share your feedback if you upgrade.

Download | Instructions | Extended Upgrade Guide