Published August 24th, 2009 in WordPress
All bloggers would like to get more interaction and participation from their readers and visitors. In this post we’ll look at nine different things you can do to your WordPress theme to add the possibility of some type of interaction. Some involves comments, social media, and other ways of getting readers involved.
1. Show Most Recent Comments
One of the most important ways that blogs can encourage readers to get involved is through the comments. There are a number of different strategies for increasing comments and participation from readers, and many of them involve placing extra emphasis on the comments. By displaying the most recent comments (in the sidebar for example) you may be able to encourage more comments because visitors will see that you value their participation.
Published August 13th, 2009 in WordPress
One of the great benefits of designing and developing for WordPress is the amount of quality resources that are available from others in the WordPress community. Many times these resources can wind up saving you time in your own development. The only problem is that there are so many resources available that it is difficult to know about them all and sometimes to find what you are looking for.
In this post we’ll feature 15 resources that may be of help to you while you are designing and developing WordPress themes. If you have suggestions for other resources, please leave a comment.
Frameworks:
Thematic
Thematic is a very popular WordPress theme framework created by Ian Stewart. This framework can be used as-is, or is excellent for using with child themes. In fact, a number of child themes for Thematic are available for free or as premium themes, including the free gallery theme distributed by Smashing Magazine.
Published May 13th, 2009 in WordPress
One of the keys to WordPress’s flexibility and endless possibilities is the use of custom fields. With custom fields you can do all kinds of things, but most designers and developers who are new to WordPress are not familiar with how to put custom fields into practice. In this post we’ll look at a number of tutorials that will show you some potential uses of custom fields, as well as a handful of plugins that make it easier or more productive to use custom fields.
Using WordPress Custom Fields: Introduction
This article from Justin Tadlock gives an overview of custom fields, and it’s actually the introductory post to a series on the subject of custom fields (other posts in the series are included in the list). If you’re not familiar with custom fields or if you just want to make sure you get the basics before moving further, this article is a great starting point.
Published January 4th, 2009 in WordPress
A lot has been written about the recent release WordPress 2.7, and I think most WordPress users and developers understand that this release adds some significant features that open up some new options for theme development. I did a little bit of experimenting with one of the changes and I wanted to write a brief tutorial that demonstrates a real-world situation for taking advantage of a new feature.
Published December 7th, 2008 in WordPress
One of the great benefits of using WordPress is the wide variety of themes that are available for all kinds of purposes. As WordPress has become more popular as a CMS rather than just a blogging platform, specialty themes have also become increasingly popular.
About 10 months ago I published a collection of 20 specialty WordPress themes that I had come across at that time. Today I’d like to feature another 17 specialty themes, all of which are free. Over at DesignM.ag I published a list of the top ten premium specialty themes.
Agregado
A life streaming WordPress theme.
Published December 1st, 2008 in WordPress
One of the great things about the WordPress platform is the excellent community surrounding it. Whether you are looking for help with a specific problem or if you’re just interested in finding some blogs to follow for occasional tutorials, there are plenty of resources available. Here is a look at 10 of the best sites for WordPress users and theme designers.
Weblog Tools Collection
There is probably no better resource for staying up-to-date with theme and plugin releases than Weblog Tools Collection. Whether you want to find new themes and plugins from others or get some exposure for your own, Weblog Tools Collection is a great resource. In addition, it’s a great resource for general WP news.
Published November 13th, 2008 in WordPress
If you’re looking for a new theme for your WordPress blog or website, you’re in luck. Nick Roach of Elegant Themes has offered to give four one-year memberships to readers of Vandelay Design.
I’m sure many of you are already familiar with Elegant Themes, but you may or may not be aware of their business model and how it differs from most premium themes. With Elegant Themes you can pay $19.95 per year for unlimited access to their marketplace of themes. There are currently 16 themes available, some with multiple color schemes to choose from, and more themes are being developed.
Published November 9th, 2008 in WordPress
Those of you who have been around the WordPress community for a while are no doubt familiar with Brian Gardner and his popular line of Revolution themes. The Revolution themes have been incredibly well-liked by bloggers, website owners and designers, and they’re probably the most recognizable of the premium WordPress themes.
In recent weeks Brian and Jason Schuller have taken some bold steps with the new generation of Revolution themes, Revolution Two. These high quality themes are now free and open source (the original Revolution themes are no longer available). Since WordPress is an open source platform, the idea was to align the focus of Revolution with that of WordPress in general.
Published October 22nd, 2008 in WordPress
Being able to design custom WordPress themes is almost a must for today’s web designers. The fun thing with WordPress is that there’s always something new that you can learn to make the platform work better for you and your clients. These 10 tutorials will teach basic WordPress theming as well as some more advanced skills.
Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks has a three-part video series for downloading and installing WordPress, all the way through everything else involved with designing a custom theme. The example theme that is built through the series is a personalized homepage theme.
Published September 14th, 2008 in WordPress
One of the fundamental building blocks of the WordPress blog structure is the category. Of course the category serves as a way to organize the content and help visitors with navigation, but it also provides theme developers with opportunities to do some different things to make the theme a bit more distinct or more effective.
In this post we’ll take a look at a number of things you can do with WordPress coding that involve categories in one way or another. Hopefully this will be a helpful guide that you can refer to whenever you’re developing a new theme.
