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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Designing for WordPress

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.

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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.

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CSS galleries and collections of inspirational designs are nothing new to designers, but sometimes you may be looking specifically for examples of great WordPress themes. Whether you’re working on a theme to distribute to others or if you’re building a custom theme for your own site, it can sometimes help to look at examples of what others have been able to do with WordPress

We Love WP

The best, most up-to-date gallery for WordPress sites and blogs. We Love WP has been around for over a year and they have a ton of designs for your inspiration (in June they passed 1,000). And of course, you can also subscribe to their feed.

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After writing Effective Use of Blog Sidebars a couple of weeks ago I decided to look into the topic of dynamic sidebars. Typically, most blogs will us a standard sidebar for the entire site. WordPress users have a lot of potential functionality that is rarely used in terms of creating various sidebars and displaying them in different situations.

For example, when I was creating the theme for DesignM.ag I needed to have slightly different sidebars according to the category of the post. You can see the differences by looking at a standard blog post, a post in the community news category, and a post in the gallery category. For items in the news category I wanted a brief introductory paragraph with a button to submit news, followed by a list of recently published news items. On posts in the gallery I wanted the same thing, except for the gallery category instead of the news category. Posts in all other categories have a list of categories followed by recent news items. As a result there are three different left sidebars that are shown depending on the category of the post.

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