Learn how to create a sleek and stylish WordPress theme in Photoshop with this tutorial from PSDVibe. A little tweak with a little creativity could land you a personalized theme. Once you put together your new theme, don’t forget to offer it to others to download and enjoy!
Learn some new tricks and discover new tools and plugins to speed up your WordPress blog. I have run into some scalability issues with this blog recently and have learned quite a bit.
Jean-Baptiste tells us about 10 awesome .htaccess hacks for your WordPress blog including the ability to redirect visitors to a maintenance page while you can continue to see and work on your blog.
Technorati Tags: blog, blogger
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, blogger, news
WordCamp China 2009 coming soon to Shanghai: WordCamp is coming to the Fudan University in Shanghai, China on the 4th of April. If you are close by, be sure to register and attend.
Technorati Tags: blog
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog
New Plugins
Simple Referal Stat
This plugin is a simple blog stat. You can see where does your traffic come from and how many page view.
Twitter LiveBlog
Twitter LiveBlog integrates with Twitter and lets you liveblog on your WordPress blog.
Image Optimizer
Reduce uploaded images’s size with Optipng and Jhead. There is no option for this plugin.
Silverlight for WordPress
Silverlight for WordPress allows a WordPress user to specify a Silverlight application (XAP) to embed within their WordPress content
Link Hopper
Easily set up links like /hop/google/ to redirect users to www.google.com. This can be useful in masking your affiliate links. If your affiliate link needs to change, you can just change the HOP values in a single place, without having to search your site for outdated links.
Updated Plugins
GD Star Rating
GD Star Rating is post, page and comment rating plugin for WordPress. Plugin supports different image sets, rating moderation, vote rules, time restricted voting, templates, trend calculations, has a […]
Original post by Ajay
Technorati Tags: blog
Dion Hulse a.k.a. DD32 who is a very active WordPress contributor created a ticket in Trac about eight weeks ago outlining his proposal for a new theme to be based on the current WordPress codebase. It’s long been known that a majority of themes that are created for WordPress end up using Kubrick as the base theme. In this day in age, that is not such a good idea as this leads to themes that are not easy to customize, little documentation, and possibly ugly code.
DD32’s proposal for a new base theme contains the following suggestions:
Uses clean markup
Has a basic style included, Which is designed to be replaced.
The default style should be able to be used by itself, But it should be in such a way that its simple to be customized
Doesn’t rely upon fixed width styling, or fixed background images
Uses limited JavaScript
Uses the Theme […]
Original post by Jeff Chandler
Technorati Tags: blog
What is cSprites for WordPress?
cSprites for WordPress plugin helps speed up your blog by reducing the number of requests made for images. When activated all images within a post will automatically be stitched up and displayed properly as compressed CSS sprites.
Screenshots
Before activating, all images within a post are being retrieved using separate requests.
After activating, all images are stitched together into one compressed image and retrieved using only one request.
The plugin then uses CSS magic to display these image sprites properly within the post.
Features
Quality and style settings let you specify the compression level for the stitched up image sprite.
Ability to include/exclude certain types.
Cache expiration tuning.
SEO Options for SEO nerds.
What I Like About It
cSprites for WordPress was written to do one thing (convert all post images into compressed image sprites to speed up your blog) and it does it very well.
Installation was very easy. Just download it, activate it, and […]
Original post by Thaya Kareeson
Technorati Tags: blog
Jeff Chandler over at WPTavern.com recently published an interview with Andrew Ozz. Andrew is the man responsible for the integration of TinyMCE into WordPress. He’s also a core committer for the WordPress project. In his interview, Jeff asked a number of questions that I believe are on the minds of many who have used the visual editor. Here is an example:
Jeff - TinyMCE is labeled as a WYSIWYG editor. However, in my experience most times what I see is not what I get. For example, I’ll be in the visual editor and block quote a piece of text. But when I press enter to begin a new line, my cursor is stuck within the blockquote tag. This also works for any other styling elements as well. Why is that? I think the WYSIWYG a.k.a. RTE (rich text editor) comes from the early implementation of support for editing in the browsers. […]
Original post by Ajay
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Like most of you, I have experimented with many WordPress plugins. I have seen a lot of great plugins and also a lot of bad plugins. I am a bit of a WordPress plugin developer myself, and I admit that I borrow many ideas from other good WordPress plugins. From that experience I have consolidated these good ideas into a checklist that you can follow when reviewing or coding a new WordPress plugin. Here are my picks of the top characteristics that make a great WordPress plugin.
10. Easy Installation
I have seen plugins that require you to modify code after plugin activation to be able to get it to work properly. The instructions were documented clearly in the readme.txt file, but most of the users seem to have missed it (I could tell from the frustration in the plugin support thread). Not everybody reads the […]
Original post by Thaya Kareeson
Technorati Tags: blog
Manifest
Manifest consists of a clean and streamlined layout that focuses on the content and not the distractions. It utilizes a single column, 500 pixel wide layout.
Aether
A new freechild theme for Thematic 0.9: Aether. A single column layout, Twitter plugin ready, configurable via an option page.
The Integrity Theme
Clean, simple, minimalist, professional and usable. Several options for the blog index, including a static + tab approach, or a traditional blog approach. The design has it’s own control panel. The design will be modified as time goes on to include more sidebar options and usability choices.
Shades of Blue
Shades of Blue is a 2-column theme created for WordPress. The sidebar and the footer are fully widgetized, and the navigation is coded for drop-down menus. Shades of Blue has been developed to accommodate threaded comments and sticky posts.
Technorati Tags: blog, feed
Original post by Ajay
Technorati Tags: blog, feed
New Plugins
3DArmory
3DArmory for Wordpress is a simple but effective plugin for players of the popular Massive Multiplayer Online game World of Warcraft. In few words, it renders players in-game World of Warcraft character as 3D Model on their blog. The model is zoomable and rotatable.
Template Tag Shortcodes
Template Tag Shortcodes is a plugin that turns WordPress template tags into easy-to-use [shortcodes] that can be inserted into your posts and pages. This release is packaged with 40 shortcodes to use.
12seconds Widget
Adds a sidebar widget to display http://12seconds.tv video status updates. For those of you who are familiar with Twitter; 12seconds is like Twitter, but with video instead of text updates.
Amazon QuickTags Plugin
Adds a few buttons to the “Edit Post” page — both the TinyMCE / WYSIWYG version and the HTML version — to easily add links to Amazon items with your affiliate ID.
WP No Category Base
As the name suggests this plugin will […]
Original post by Ajay
Technorati Tags: blog
I have two last-minute meshU tickets to giveaway. Submit a comment in this post before Apr 1, 2009 for a chance to get a free ticket. MeshU is a one-day event of workshops on design, development, and management that will take place in Toronto, April 6th, 2009. Although I’ve never been to the meshU before, but the speaker/workshop list sounds very interesting. If you want to purchase the event tickets, it is not too late yet. Head over to the meshU website for more details. (more…)
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Original post by Nick La
Technorati Tags: blog
