This is a Guest Post by Dan Norris. Dan might be writing more for Weblog Tools Collection in the near future. So please stay tuned.
5 years ago when I started Web Circle I did a bunch of research on which CMS to choose and decided on Joomla!.
For a year or so it was the CMS we used for pretty much every website and it was very sophisticated for what it could do at the time – particularly with the growing extensions directory. However as time went on and WordPress got better and better we gradually moved to using WordPress for most of our small business websites.
Since these days we focus predominantly on small business website design, WordPress has become the platform we use for the majority of our new sites (note we also still use Joomla!).
In 2006
In 2006 WordPress was seen mainly as a blogging tool and Joomla! was in […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, blogging
The anatomy of a WordPress theme: Joost de Valk from Yoast has posted a fantastic infographic (a very tall and descriptive image) of all the details on how a WordPress theme works. Very interesting for new theme developers, and a good frame of reference for WordPress DIYers looking to find a quick solution to a theme issue.
Technorati Tags: blog, news, google
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, news, google
The year is quickly coming to a close, and it’s time to look back and reflect on the year that we have so commonly referred to as 2010.
We’ve already shared part 1 of our highlights from 2010, but what about you? What is your most memorable WordPress-related highlight from the year 2010? This could be anything from the first 3.1 release candidate to that time when you spent all night fixing your friend’s blog.
To start the ball rolling, I’d have to say that the hiring of Andrew Nacin as a full-time developer certainly stands out as my favorite WordPress moment of 2010. So, what’s yours?
Technorati Tags: blog
Original post by James Huff
Technorati Tags: blog
Two weeks ago, we asked to hear about your favorite WordPress themes. We had over 125 responses, but even with such a variety of responses, only 5 came out as the clear favorites. Without further delay, here are your top 5 themes.
Swift is the fastest loading, SEO optimized, server friendly WordPress theme. This theme is mainly for blogs running on low server resources and for those who like clean and simple designs. [directory listing]
Hybrid is a user-friendly, search-engine optimized theme framework, featuring 15 custom page templates and 8 widget-ready areas, allowing you to create any type of site you want. [directory listing]
Twenty Ten is stylish, customizable, simple, and readable — make it yours with a custom menu, header image, and background. Twenty Ten supports six widgetized areas (two in the sidebar, four in the footer) and featured images (thumbnails for gallery posts and custom header images for posts […]
Original post by James Huff
Technorati Tags: blog
WordPress.com users are limited to about a hundred styles and no way to modify them except a few simple options, a variety of widgets, and the Custom CSS upgrade.
Those of you with WordPress theme design and modification experience may find the lack of being able to edit the template files to be quite limiting, but nothing could be further from the truth.
If you’re a WordPress.com user seeking to produce your own unique design, look no further than this collection for some of the best Custom CSS blogs on WordPress.com.
Some of the blogs in this collection used the Sandbox theme (practically a blank slate) to build their unique design using nothing but their own CSS, but some have used their Custom CSS upgrade to build extensively on top of existing fully designed themes.
Do you use custom CSS on your WordPress.com blog? If so, we’d love to see it!
Technorati Tags: blog, blogging
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Original post by James Huff
Technorati Tags: blog, blogging
Not too long ago, we asked about your top 5 plugins and got some interesting results.
Well, I’m sure you could have guessed that this was coming next, so without further ado, we’d love to know what your favorite WordPress themes are and why they rank #1 out of the thousands available.
Technorati Tags: blog, blogger, yahoo, google
Original post by James Huff
Technorati Tags: blog, blogger, yahoo, google
A couple of days ago, James mentioned the 2010 WordPress Honors website, which aims to be to WordPress what the Oscars are to the movie industry. This site is a very good initiative and there are three compelling reasons why you should register and vote.
Reason 1: you can’t beat “free”
This one is pretty obvious: there are plenty of stuff to win, and you might win one. Check out the Sponsors page and peruse the growing list of goodies provided by several benefactors of our community. Vote and one could be yours. Not interested in any prize? Vote anyway, win one and sell it during your next front yard sell!
Reason 2: it’s good for the community
Our community consists in users using products, and authors crafting those products (themes, plugins, tutorials and news sites…). This event is an occasion for users to show their support, admiration, thankfulness or love to makers. Some […]
Original post by Ozh
Technorati Tags: blog, news
The 2010 WordPress Honors launched earlier this week and is currently seeking submissions and votes for your favorite WordPress plugins, themes, sites, and personalities.
Final voting will begin once the nominees have been announced in mid November, and the winners will be announced in early January.
What’s your take on award ceremonies like this? Will WPHonors show the best that the WordPress community has to offer, or will this be just another popularity content?
Tweet
Technorati Tags: blog, google
Original post by James Huff
Technorati Tags: blog, google
A few days ago, Mark asked to hear about your “top 5 plugins that you WordPress geniuses use in every one of your WordPress installs.” With almost fifty responses, it’s great to see that so many people consider the same or similar plugins as their top five. Without further delay, here are the top ten of your top five plugins.
Akismet: This plugin should be the front line of your blog’s anti-spam defenses. According to its directory listing, it’s been downloaded individually over 4,060,000 times, but it’s also bundled with WordPress. Just to give you an idea, the current version of WordPress has been downloaded over 15,800,000 times. Considering those numbers, it’s no wonder that this is the most popular WordPress plugin and the top of almost every commentator’s top five list. [directory listing]
Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin was the first XML sitemap generator for WordPress. Though […]
Original post by James Huff
Technorati Tags: blog
The most requested search item on this blog is “WordPress admin themes”. With variations of the various search terms, I would guess that we receive many hundreds of hits a day on just this blog from WordPress enthusiasts looking for themes to adorn their admin panel with. A simple search on Google reveals an old post from this blog listing 9 admin themes (I don’t link to it because most of the themes listed are dead or deprecated). Here is a list of nice admin themes that I can find, which are still being produced and regularly updated.
Fluency Admin by Dean J. Robinson. A nice looking, well documented, well translated admin theme that is often updated.
Wait for it ….. thats it!! (that I could find, please let us know if you know of others that are of high quality and updated regularly) There are various useful and popular tools to […]
Original post by Mark Ghosh
Technorati Tags: blog, google
