All posts in Wordpress Themes

Everyday Awesomeness: Christmas for web designers

by Jo B 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.

Native iPhone app for your blog

by Chris M on September 5, 2011 in Blogging, Mobile, Wordpress Themes with No comments

A new service has launched called Wiziapp, which effectively allows you to turn your blog into a native iPhone application that can be searched for, found and downloaded through the App store, worldwide.

The service operates as a WordPress plugin, which requires an install, the setup of some simple config bits and pieces and that’s it.

The core features:

  1. Just ‘plugin’ and play
  2. Native user experience
  3. Available on the App Store
  4. Stats and Data

The plugin isn’t free, but it’s relatively inexpensive, here’s a breakdown:

  • Personal Blog – $19.90 monthly ($199 setup)
  • Pro Blogger – $29.90 monthly ($299 setup)
  • Enterprise – $49.90 monthly ($499 setup)

The main differences between the pages are basically how many push notifications each package provides. Another important thing is that Pro Bloggers and Enterprises are given the ability to monetize their applications.

So what this means is that you can take a blog, where you publish information and seamlessly turn it into a native iPhone application and experience the potential of a massive market.

The question is, should we be jumping at a native iPhone application or should we be using services which do the same for Android devices, which are becoming more popular than iOS ones.

What do you think?

View the service here: http://wiziapp.com/

AdMentor not showing on posts?

by Chris M on September 1, 2011 in Wordpress Themes with No comments

There are several options when it comes to setting up banner advertising on WordPress, from fancy systems such as OpenX to smaller WordPress plugins. The problem I’ve found is that the fancy ones like OpenX take time to setup and require a fair amount of explanation, but on the other hand, most of the WordPress plugins don’t work very well. AdMentor is one that I like using, but it has a very specific problem, you can’t assist it to all the posts or pages on the website – incredibly frustrating, if you’ve run into this, you’ll know what I mean.

There’s a fix for this, and it’s a bit of a messy one, but it works and your banner will display across all the pages on your website. You’ll need to have access to your database and have the ability to make changes to it. In your database there’s a table called admentor_banner, or it will more than likely be called yourname_admentor_banner.

Continue reading →

Free Corporate WordPress theme from eFrog Themes

by Chris M on September 1, 2011 in Wordpress Themes with 2 Comments

Hey folks, got some exciting news, eFrog Themes just turned one today and in celebration they’re giving away a brand spanking new WordPress theme for free, for the next 24 hours.

The theme’s a good one, which features such as: corporate styling, featured slider, products and services area, current news area, widgetized sidebar and footer, stylish highlight colour picker and really simple subscriptions.

Here is a screen shot:

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

It’s absolutely free for the next 24 hours, so grab it whilst you can, here: http://www.efrogthemes.com/product/enterprize/

New Social WordPress plugin from MailChimp

by Chris M on August 22, 2011 in Networking, Wordpress Themes with No comments

MailChimp has launched a new WordPress plugin which aims to assist bloggers with the whole integration of Facebook and Twitter. The aim is to allow you to collect everything and put it all in one place, in other words, your blog.

The plugin comes with a number of awesome features and functions, so if you’re not interested in just the basics, then it would make sense to read up on the features, as it looks like there’s something for everyone who blogs and is a little social.

Here are some screenies:

screenshot-4
screenshot-3
screenshot-2
screenshot-1

The plugin is free, yup, I said free and it’s available right here on the WordPress repo. If you want to read up more and read a bit more about the functions, then click here.

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