Our friends at WPLegion have created a free portfolio theme for WordPress with Vandelay Design readers in mind. Elegantia includes premium-quality features but can be downloaded and used at no cost. View a demo of Elegantia.

Download Elegantia (MB zip file)

If you’re reading this post in an RSS reader or in an email you will need to click through to the site to download the file due to WPLegion’s hotlinking protection.

Some of the features of Elegantia include:

• 7 color schemes
• Simple, clean, and stylish design
• Powerful theme options panel
• Widget ready
• 20+ font styles
• Shortcodes
• Portfolio custom post type
• Filterable portfolio
• Different page layouts
• Blog page included
• Custom widgets
• Clean HTML and CSS
• Nivo slider
• Documentation included in admin panel
• WordPress 3.0 ready (menus, featured images, nested comments)
• Email support from WPLegion

WPLegion will be releasing more themes in the future, so you may want to sign up for their newsletter (bottom right on their home page) to be notified when new themes are available.

Niche or industry-specific job boards are highly useful for job searchers who are looking for work in a specific field, and they’re also great for allowing employers to reach a targeted audience of job searchers.

For those who want to create a job board or add a job board to an existing website or blog, there are several options for creating and managing it. There are several different WordPress plugins and themes that have been developed over the past few years for running job boards.

I have used 2 commercial plugins and 1 commercial theme for job boards with very mixed results. In some cases setting up the job board was rather complicated, and in other cases the support was poor and the developer disappeared. If you’re building a website or a critical part of a website on a commercial plugin or theme it’s important to have confidence that the product will continue to be supported in the future, otherwise you could have major problems as new versions of WordPress are released.

Gravity Forms is a very popular commercial WordPress plugin for creating forms and it includes all of the functionality needed to create a job board. Although it is not specifically a job board plugin there are a few significant reasons why you may want to consider using Gravity Forms if you are looking to create a job board for yourself or for a client:

• Gravity Forms is well-established and due to it’s popularity it is not in danger of becoming unsupported.
• The inteface is easy to use and manage.
• A PayPal add-on is available to those who have a developer’s license of Gravity Forms, so you can easily charge a fee for job submissions.

Because many WordPress designers and developers already have a Gravity Forms license I thought it would be useful to show how this plugin can be used to create your own job board. It is a commercial plugin, so if you don’t currently have a license you would need to at least purchase the $39 personal license in order to use Gravity Forms. That would allow you to set up a job board with free submissions. If you would like to be able to charge companies for the job listings, a developer’s license ($199) is needed in order to get the PayPal add-on.

Please note, this post is not endorsed or sponsored by Gravity Forms. I’ve found it to be a very useful (and time-saving) plugin in my own work so I thought this information may be helpful for others.

Step 1: Upload and Activate Gravity Forms

The very first step is to activate Gravity Forms like any other WordPress plugin.

Step 2: Set Up The Job Categories

Before we create the job submission form it will be helpful to set up the categories for job submissions. To do this, in the WordPress dashboard click on “Posts” and then “Categories”. Here you’ll be able to add the new categories and set up the custom URL slugs.

For the example job board that we’ll be working with in this tutorial I set up three categories, Graphic Design, Web Design, and Web Development (actually, I renamed the Uncategorized category to Graphic Design and created the other two categories). Add as many categories as you would like, including parent/child relationships between categories. When users submit a job they will be able to choose which category should be used.

Step 3: Create the Job Submission Form

We’re now ready to create the form that employers will be using to submit their job listing. Gravity Forms makes it simple to create advanced forms, and it also makes it possible to use the data from the form submission and automatically place it into a post. That way when someone submits a job listing through the form you will be notified by email and you’ll be able to go to the WordPress dashboard to publish the post or delete it if it’s not appropriate.

When you have Gravity Forms activated you will see a “Forms” link in the WordPress dashboard. Click on “New Form”.

Give your form a title and a description by clicking on “edit”.

We’ll need some basic info from the submitter, so to the right under “Advanced Fields” click on “Name” and “Email”. Then hover over the filed and click on “edit”.

That will open up some options. Check the “required” box to make this a required field.

The next field will be the job title. We’ll want this to be used as the post title when the job is published, so click on “Title” under “Post Fields”.

Then click on “edit” and change the name from “Post Title” to “Job Title”, and also make it a required field. Next, we’ll add two custom fields, one for the company name and one for the location. So click on “Custom Field” twice under “Post Fields”. Once the fileds are added to your form, click on “edit”. Change the name of the field and check the radio button for a new custom field name. I’ll leave the company field as optional but I’ll require the location field.

Next, we’ll need to allow the submitter to choose a category, so click on “Category” under “Post Fields”. Click on edit and change the label to “Job Category” and make the field required. This will add a drop down field to the form for selecting from the available categories (which we set up in step 2).

The last form field that we will be adding is one for the job description and for instructions to those who wish to apply. Click on “Body” under “Post Fields”. Click  on “edit” and change the label and make this field required.

Our form is now complete, so click on the “save” button. You’ll be presented with a few options. Click on “setup email notifications” and we’ll go ahead and set it up so that the form submission emails are customized how we want them.

Here you can set it so that the email notifications come from the name and email address of the person submitting the form, you can choose which email address to send them to, and you can choose which fields to display in the email.

Step 4: Add the Form to a Page

Now that we have our form ready to go we will need to add it to a page. Create a page called “Submit a Job”, or whatever you would like it to be titled. Once you are editing the page adding the form is easy. Click on the icon shown in the image below.

You’ll then be able to select the form that you want and it will be inserted into the page. Publish the page when it is ready.

Step 5: Edit the Theme

We’ll now need to make some changes to the theme to display the information that we want visitors to see. For the purposes of this tutorial we will be making minimal changes. In a real world scenario you would probably want to do additional work with the CSS to improve the look of the theme, but we’re just focusing on getting the job board functional for now.

Let’s start with the font page. We want it to show the most recent job submissions, the date of submission, name of the company, location, and job category. We won’t show any of the post content (the job description) on the front page, visitors will have to click to see those details.

The specific actions in this part will vary depending on the theme that you are using, so these will be rather generic instructions. In the index.php file you’ll want to find the code:

or

depending on whether your theme displays full posts or excerpts on the front page. Remove that code entirely so that neither the post body nor the excerpt are shown on the front page.

Where you want the company name to be displayed, use the code:

This will pull the data entered in the “company” custom field for the post.

Where you want the location to be displayed, use the code:

This will pull the data entered in the “location” custom field for the post.

If your theme does not already show the date and category with posts on the front page you can add them with the following code:

and

You’ll also want to set up the category pages by editing the category.php file to show the same information on each post as the front page, except of course it will only show posts in the selected category. You’ll also want to add the company name and the location to the single.php file (using the same code as shown above). which will add that informtion on the individual job listing posts.

Step 6: Setting Up the Payment

We now have a functional job board that allows employers to post a job for free. If you would like to charge a fee for job submissions you can keep going and integrate the PayPal add-on for Gravity Forms. You’ll need to download the add-on (you will need to be logged in to Gravity Forms to view this page), upload and activate it like any other WordPress plugin. You’ll need to edit a few settings to integrate Gravity Forms and PayPal. Gravity Forms provides excellent instructions (you’ll also need to be logged in for this page) for doing this. Basically, you’ll set the IPN settings in your PayPal account and then set up a PayPal feed in Gravity Forms.

You’ll need to add a product field to the submission form with the price that you would like to charge for submissions.

In the Gravity Forms dashboard you’ll then have a few settings to setup and you’ll be ready to go.

Now when someone completes the form they will automatically be led to pay through PayPal.

So as you can see, setting up a job board in WordPress is quite possible with the Gravity Forms plugin. This tutorial really only covers the basics, you’ll want to set up your theme to meet your needs, but the basics of getting the form submission and job listing posts set up is rather simple.

For more tutorials please see:

• Create an Advanced Contact Form for Client Inqueries
• How to Create a Set of Hand-Drawn Design Elements
• Create a Plaid Pattern in Photoshop
• How to Create an Adobe Illustrator Brush

Most photographers need a website that they can update easily and frequently as they add new photos and sets to their portfolio. WordPress is a great platform for that, in part because there are already a number of well-designed photography templates available. Photography websites often use a minimal design style to keep the focus on the photos, and for this reason templates and pre-made themes can be more appropriate for photographers than for some other types of businesses.

In this post we’ll showcase 27 WordPress themes from various designers that are created especially for photographers.

Carousel ($50)

Work ($49)

Kin ($30)

Sideways ($35)

deLucide (39€)

Photocrati ($79)

DeepFocus ($39 per year membership)

Photocraft ($65)

Landscape ($79.95)

Photobox ($39)

Manhattan ($79.95)

Aperture ($70)

Filtered ($49)

Photo Graphic ($50)

L’Image ($47)

Photolist ($50)

Through the Lens ($50)

Photonic ($25)

Photography ($68)

deFolio (39€)

Photoland ($49)

PhotoPro ($24.95, does not include Genesis Framework)

Art Kid ($25, does not include StartBox Framework)

Photo Nexus ($30)

Photoshot ($35)

PhotoPurePress ($25)

PhotoMe ($30)

You may also be interested in:

• 25 of the Best Photographer Portfolio Websites
• 25 of the Best Photographer Portfolio Websites – Part II
• 25 of the Best Photography Portfolio Sites – Part III
• 25 Amazing Photographer Portfolio Websites

Most churches and non-profit organizations need a website that they can easily update and maintain on their own, and many are also working with limited budgets. For both of these reasons, a WordPress-powered website is a great option for many organizations. While a custom design is almost always preferred, there are a growing number of quality themes created specifically for churches and non-profit organizations, and they are very affordable. In this post we’ll showcase 12 WordPress themes from various designers that have been created especially for these types of organizations.

If your organization is looking for an affordable and professional website, please see the free websites that we have to offer for non-profit organizations and churches.

Grace ($65)

Outreach ($79.95)

Moses ($79)

Church ($79.95)

Light of Peace ($30)

Mu ($50)

Hopefull ($50)

WordPress Church ($50)

Charity Theme ($75)

Non-Profit Theme ($69)

Foundation (free)

Charity Organization ($60)

You may also be interested in:

• 50 of the Best Church Website Designs
• 35 Excellent Church Websites – Part II
• 25 Outstanding Church Websites – Part III
• 25 Beautiful Church Websites – Part IV
• 40 of the Best Websites of Non-Profit Organizations
• Design Inspiration: 25 Non-Profit Websites
• 10 Keys to Effective Non-Profit Organization Websites

Real estate is a very competitive industry and having an attractive, usable and up-to-date website can help agents to stand out and increase the exposure for their listings. In the past, managing a website could be a costly a complicated task for real estate agents. However, there are now many WordPress themes designed specifically for real estate that can make it much easier and affordable.

WordPress is a great platform for most real estate agents because it is simple to add new listings in most real estate themes, professional themes can be purchased for less than $100, and because having a search engine-friendly site is possible with WordPress.

While there are some free real estate themes available, the quality and functionality of most premium themes is far better and prices are very reasonable. In this post we’ll showcase 25 of the best professional real estate themes for WordPress.

AgentPress ($59.95 at StudioPress)

ElegantEstate (Membership to ElegantThemes is $39/year)

deCasa (39 € at ThemeShift)

deCondo (39 € at ThemeShift)

Real Estate ($89.95 from Templatic)

Realtor Press ($79 at Mojo Themes)

Meadow Ridge, a Genesis Child Theme ($50 at Theme Garden)

Estate ($200 at WooThemes)

Real Agent ($79.95 at Gorilla Themes)

Residence ($79.95 at Gorilla Themes)

Broker ($79.95 at Gorilla Themes)

Open House ($79.95 at Gorilla Themes)

Bel Air ($69.95 at Gorilla Themes)

OpenHouse ($35 at ThemeForest)

WP Pro Real Estate ($30 at ThemeForest)

WP Pro Real Estate 2 ($35 at ThemeForest)

Real Estate Theme ($25 at ThemeForest)

Elegant Real Estate ($30 at ThemeForest)

QuickStart Real Estate ($30 at ThemeForest)

Real Estate Gold ($30 at ThemeForest)

OurHome ($25 at ThemeForest)

Realist ($25 at ThemeForest)

ModernRealtor ($30 at ThemeForest)

Homeowner ($79.95 at Gorilla Themes)

Prime Real Estate ($32 at Mojo Themes)

For more WordPress resources please see:

• WordPress Ecommerce: 30+ Resources
• 15 Exceptionally Useful Resources for WordPress Theme Designers
• 20+ Tutorials and Resources for Working with Custom Fields in WordPress
• Top 10 Blogs for the WordPress Community

WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems for blogs, portfolios, and other types of sites, but with the right plugins and/or themes it can also be used for e-commerce. While WordPress is not specifically intended to be used for e-commerce sites, the quality of available plugins and themes has increased in recent years. In this post we’ll feature more than 30 resources and tutorials to help you get started with e-commerce for WordPress.

WordPress E-Commerce Plugins:

WP e-Commerce Pluign (free with premium upgrades available)

Shopp ($55)

Other free e-commerce plugins:

• eShop
• YAK for WordPress
• QuickShop
• ArtPal
• Simple PayPal Cart

Other premium e-commerce plugins:

• WP Affiliate Platform ($39.95)
• PHPurchase ($49)

WordPress E-Commerce Themes:

ShopperPress ($79)

Crafty Cart (free)

Viroshop ($37)

WPA Storefront ($32)

The Furniture Store ($47)

The Jewelry Shop ($47)

The Clothes Shop ($42)

AppCloud ($35)

Kelontong ($35)

Store ($65)

WP Store ($65)

e-Commerce ($65)

Kidz Store ($65)

eShop ($65)

wpShop ($37)

eGoods ($32)

Ecommerce Theme ($79.95)

Tutorials for Using WordPress for Ecommerce:

• Create an eCommerce Website with WordPress in Under 5 Minutes (video)
• Getting Set Up with the WP e-Commerce Plugin: Settings and Configurations
• WP e-Commerce SEO Tutorial
• WP e-Commerce Review for WordPress
• A Crash Course in Creating E-Commerce Websites with WordPress
• How to Sell Digital or Non-Digital Products Online with WordPress eStore Plugin

Most web designers rely on inquiries from their portfolio website to produce a decent portion of their business. Contact forms can be very simple, collecting a name and contact information, or they can be much more detailed, providing enough information to get an estimate. While the primary purpose of the contact form on our website has always been to make it easy for potential clients to contact us about web design projects, there are also a number of other reasons that visitors use the contact form and a one-size-fits-all approach has its drawbacks. We recently changed the contact form to include some conditional fields that make the form more customized according to the reason the visitor is contacting us, and in this post we’ll go through the process of creating this type of form.

The form we’ll be creating will contain some basic fields (name, email, phone, website, and message) that are shown to all visitors who are filling out the form, but based on the reason they are contacting us they will also see a few other more specific fields. If the visitor selects “Web Design Services” as their reason for contacting us they will be prompted to tell us if it is a new website or a re-design, enter a budget, and tell us how they found us. If they select “Content Development Services” they will also be prompted to enter a budget, but with different options than the budget for web design services, and so on.

In the past our contact form has included a field to allow visitors to select a budget, but that was based on the assumption that they were contacting us regarding web design services. Since the budget field isn’t applicable for someone who is filling out the contact form just to say hi, this “advanced” form will only show what is relevant based on user input.

Conditional logic open up a lot of possibilities with contact forms, especially for designers and agencies that offer a variety of different services. The user has a better experience because they are not confused by fields that are not relevant to them, and more detailed data is possible because not every field will be shown to every user. This tutorial will show just one example of how this type of form can be used, most likely you can come up with some ways to put it into practice on your own site.

For this tutorial we will be using the Gravity Forms plugin for WordPress (a premium plugin). I purchased a developer’s license for this plugin a few months ago because it makes it very simple to create advanced forms, and I’ve already used it on several projects. With Gravity Forms you can create a simple contact form, a more advanced one like we will be doing here, a form that creates user-submitted posts (such as a community news section), and more. This post is not sponsored or supported in any way by Gravity Forms, and it contains no affiliate links. I believe this advanced contact form that we will be creating can be useful for just about any web designer or service provider, and using Gravity Forms provides a quick, simple way to get it done.

Why Use Gravity Forms?

There are countless contact form plugins out there for WordPress, many of them are free, and of course contact forms can also be coded without using a plugin, so why use Gravity Forms? The reason I chose to buy a license for the plugin is because of the time that it can save. Creating a more advanced form with other plugins takes much more time and effort.

Although there is an upfront cost to purchase the license ($39 for a single-site license or $199 for a developer’s license) there is no on-going cost like you would have with some options like Wufoo or FormStack. WordPress users will also like the fact that Gravity Form submissions can be viewed and replied to from within the WordPress dashboard (email notifications can also be set up).

How to Create an Advanced Contact Form with Gravity Forms:

The first thing you’ll need to do is get a license for Gravity Forms. Once you have the purchased the license, download it, install it, and activate it like you would any other WordPress plugin. Once you’ve done that you will see an option for “Forms” in the vertical navigation menu (just below “Comments”) in the WordPress dashboard. Click on “New Form” and we’ll get started. You can hover over the “Untitled” field and click on edit, then you will be able to enter a form title and description.

Setting Up the Basic Fields:

To start with, we’ll create a few basic fields that we want to be a part of every form submission, regardless of the purpose of the inquiry. So we’ll start with the first name and last name fields. Gravity Forms allows you to choose from a list of standard/general form fields (such as single line text, drop down, checkboxes, etc.) and it also includes “advanced” fields for specific purposes, such as name, email, date, etc. We’ll start with the name field, so at the right side of the screen click on the down arrow next to “Advanced Fields” and then click on “Name” and it will add the fields for first and last name.

We’ll make the name fields required, so hover over the fields and you’ll see an “Edit” link appear.

Click on “Edit” and it will open up some options. At the bottom click on the checkbox next to “Required”. This will prevent the form from being submitted without the name filled out.

After you have done that you can click on “Close” where the “Edit” link had been.

Next, we’ll open up the options for the standard fields by clicking on the down arrow, and we’ll select “Single Line Text”.

Click to edit this field, and chance the name from “Untitled” to “Company/Organization”, and then close.

The next field we want to add is for the user’s email address, so click on “Email” under the “Advanced Fields”.

We also want the email address to be a required field, so click on “Edit” and check “Required”, and close.

Then we’ll add a field for the phone number, so click on “Phone” under “Advanced Fields”. Next we’ll add a field for a URL, so select “Website” under “Advance Fields”. Neither of these will be required fields.

The next field we’re going to create will be the most important one, because it will impact what other fields are shown. We’ll create a drop down that allows the user to select the reason for contacting us. Click on “Drop Down” under “Standard Fields”. Then click on “Edit” and change the field label to “Reason for Contacting Us”. For the purposes of this tutorial we are going to create 6 options to chose, but what you create will of course be based upon the services that you offer and the other options that you want to allow visitors to select. The six options that we are using are: 1) Web Design Services, 2) SEO Services, 3) Content Development Services, 4) Consulting, 5) Advertising, and 6) Other. If the user selects “Web Design Services” they will see certain other relevant fields, if they choose “SEO Services” they will see different fields, and so on. So we’re going to create the first option to say “Please Select” so that none of the conditional fields are shown until the reason of contact is chosen (if “Web Design Services” is selected by default, all of those conditional fields will be shown before the user has really chosen “Web Design Services”). We’ll also check the box to make this a required field.

Using Conditional Logic:

Now we can start creating some fields that will be conditional based on the response to the previous field. First, we’ll add a checkbox (under “Standard Fields”) and click on “Edit”. Change the field label to “New Website or Re-Design” and edit the choices to be “New Website” and “Re-Design, and delete the third choice. Now, to make it conditional, click on the advanced tab and at the bottom you will see a checkbox for “Enable Conditional Logic”. Check that box and you’ll see some new options appear. Since we have only created one field that could be used for conditional logic it is the only one you will see. Change “Please Select” to “Web Design Services” and this field will be shown whenever someone is filling out a contact form regarding web design, but not for other services.

Next, we’ll create a drop down menu that allows users to select their budget range for web design services. So click on “Drop Down” under “Standard Fields” and enter whatever budget ranges are appropriate. Then, click on the “Advanced” tab, check the box for “Enable Conditional Logic”, and have it appear when the user selects “Web Design Services”.

We’ll also ask our potential web design clients how they found us, so once again click on “Drop Down” under “Standard Fields”. This time we’ll enter a few different options including search engine, referral, link from another website, I’m a blog reader, and other. Again, click on the “Advanced” tab and make it conditional on the user selecting “Web Design Services”.

Next, we’ll create a checkbox field that is relevant to SEO services, so click on “Checkboxes” under “Standard Fields”. We’re editing the field label to say “What Package Would You Like?”, and adding the following choices: keyword research, competitor analysis, and full site evaluation. Click on the “Advanced” tab and check the box for “Enable Conditional Logic”, and this time change it to be “SEO Services”.

Next, we’ll create a budget drop down that will apply to content development services. So click on “Drop Down” under “Standard Fields”. Change the field label to be “Budget” and add the appropriate budget ranges. Then click on “Advanced” and check the box for “Enable Conditional Logic”, and make it conditional upon the user selecting “Content Development Services”.

The last field we’re going to create is the message field that will not be conditional, every user will see it, and it will allow the user to add their comments or questions that will be emailed to us. Click on “Paragraph Text” under “Standard Fields”. Edit the field label to be “Message”, and make no other changes.

Setting Up Email Notifications:

Click on the “Save Form” button at the bottom of the page. Now that our form has been created we will set it up to send email notifications when a new inquiry is submitted, so click on “Setup Email Notification for This Form”.

Check the box next to “Enable email notification to administrators”. Then enter the email address where you would like it to be sent in the “Send to Email” field. (Gravity Forms includes routing options which sends the email to different addresses based on a field in the form, but we will not be using this feature for this tutorial.) In the “From Email” field select “Email” in the drop down. This will use the email address entered by the user as the “from” address, so if you reply to an email it will go to the user.

You can then set up the subject of the emails, and you can use form fields. So we’ll type in the text “A Message from” and then using the drop down we will select the first name and the last name.

Next, we’ll customize the body of the message that we receive. You can use the drop down to select form fields to include in the message, but we’ll keep it simple by selecting “All Submitted Fields”.

So the body of the message will now include all information that is provided by the user in the contact form.

Inserting the Form:

The last thing left to do is to insert the form into our Contact Page. So edit the page in WordPress, or create a new page if one doesn’t already exist, and you’ll see an icon to insert a form from Gravity Forms.

Place your cursor where you would like to enter the form and click on the icon. Then select the form from the drop down and you can choose to show or hide the form title and description.

Click “Insert Form” and you’re done. Now you’ll have an advanced contact form that makes it easier for visitors and provides more relevant information to you.

I hope this post has given you some ideas that can be put into practice on your own site.

For more WordPress-related content please see:

• 9 WordPress Hacks to User Interactivity
• 15 Exceptionally Useful Resources for WordPress Theme Designers
• 20+ Tutorials and Resources for Working with Custom Fields 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.

To display a list of the most recent comments, use the following code in your theme:

Source: WP Hacks

2. Allow Visitors to Email Posts to Their Friends

If your readers enjoy and appreciate the posts on your blog they may be interested in emailing them to their friends. On most news websites you’ll see a link that says “email to a friend,” but it’s not as common on blogs. Adding this functionality into your theme is not as difficult as you might think.

To add an “email this” link, use the following code in your single.php file:

Source: WP Recipes

3. Add a “Share on Facebook” Link

While social media and social networking are commonly integrated with blogging, it’s more common to see a Digg or Tweetmeme button than one that will allow readers to share the link via Facebook. Since Facebook is such an incredibly popular site, it may provide additional exposure for your blog and provide more opportunities for your readers to interact with your content.

To add a “share on Facebook” link, use the following code:

Source: WP Recipes

4. Add Custom Bookmark Links

Many blogs receive tremendous exposure from social media sites, and encouraging your readers to interact by voting or bookmarking can make a big difference in terms of traffic levels. There are plugins and widgets available for this purpose, as well as buttons and badges from the social media sites, but if you’d like more control over the look or if you would just like to do it yourself it is possible.

Bookmark with Delicious:

Digg:

Twitter:

StumbleUpon:

Source: Perishable Press

5. Rearrange the Comments to Show Most Recent Comments First

Having a blog that receives a lot of comments from readers can in some ways discourage others from participating. Some readers will not take the time to leave a comment if they feel like theirs will be buried below 100 other comments. One trick to reward those who are going to take the time to comment is to list the comments with the most recent on top, rather than the oldest one being on top.

Find the following code in your comments.php file (please note that not all themes use the same coding for the comments.php file):

and before it add:

Source: WordPress Forums

6. Add a User-Submitted News Section

User-submitted news or community news sections can be a great way for visitors to get involved at your site. With a news section you will be able to display links to relevant posts at other blogs, and your readers will be able to submit posts that they have found to be helpful, or get some extra promotion by submitting links to their own posts.

I included a news section when I launched DesignM.ag last year and since day one it has drawn significant interest from readers.

The process of adding a news section is more involved than just copying and pasting some code, so I will not be providing code for this one, but Tripwire Magazine published a post a few months ago that will lead you through the process. See How to: WordPress 2.7+ User Link Feed Submit Form and Widget.

7. Add Translation Links

As a blogger, you may be surprised to see how many of your visitors and subscribers come from various countries. While these people may be able to read and understand your posts, there may be some times when they have difficulty or where they would like to share the post with someone who may not be able to read it. In these case, translation can come in handy.

Inserting the code shown below will allow your visitors to easily use Google’s translation services:

Source: Perishable Press

8. Google Custom Search

One of the best ways for visitors to find what they are looking for is to use a site-wide search. Unfortunately, the default WordPress search isn’t much help in most cases. However, you can easily add custom search powered by Google to your blog (plus you can monetize the search through AdSense).

In order to get your own custom search from Google, you will need to sign up with them and they will provide the code. Pro Blog Design has a tutorial that takes you through all of the steps that are involved. See Make a Google Custom Search for Your Blog, and Make Money.

9. Display Facebook Status on Your Blog

Many blogs display most recent tweets, but it’s also possible to share your Facebook status on your blog. There are a few steps involved in doing this with WordPress, and Hongkiat has a tutorial that will lead you through the process. See How to Display Facebook Statuses on WordPress Blog.

For more WordPress-related posts please see:

• 15 Exceptionally Useful Resources for WordPress Theme Designers
• 20+ Tutorials and Resources for Working with Custom Fields in WordPress
• Top 10 Tutorials for Developing WordPress Themes
• 10 Excellent Sources for WordPress Design Inspiration

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.

Hybrid Theme Framework

The Hybrid theme framework, by Justin Tadlock, has also been created with child themes in mind. It includes 13 page templates for various purposes, 15+ plugins supported within the theme, breadcrumbs, and tutorials to help you get started.

Starkers

Starkers is a “bare-bones, blank-canvas, starting-point WordPress theme” from Elliot Jay Stocks.  Starkers has no formatting whatsoever, which will provide you will a starting point that can save time in development of your own themes.

Carrington Theme Framework

Carrington is a theme framework that better enables WordPress to be used as a CMS. Carrington makes it easier to create unique looks for different categories and posts with custom templates.

Testing WordPress Themes:

Using XAMPP for Local WordPress Theme Development

Jacob Gube of Six Revisions shows how to set up a local environment for theme development. This is a detailed tutorial that may be able to save you a lot of time and make your theme development much quicker and easier.

How to Set Up a Killer WordPress Testing Environment Locally

NETTUTS also has a tutorial for setting up a local testing environment. If you are designing and developing many WordPress themes you will want to check out one of these two tutorials.

nkthemeswitch

The theme switch plugin will allow you to show a different theme to anyone who is logged in to your site. This makes it easy to test a theme in development without your visitors seeing it.

Dummy Content:

WP XML Test Data Import

When developing themes one of the biggest frustrations can be the lack on content on a new installation of WordPress. Self Conclusion has put together an XML file with several posts and pages of dummy content with tags, categories, comments, links, lists, and everything you will need to test a theme. You can easily download this file and import it into WordPress to save the time of adding your own dummy content.

Sandbox Dummy Content

For Sandbox design competitions, a set of dummy content was released. It achieves the same purpose as the content from Self Conclusion that was just mentioned.

WordPress Test Post Pack

Think Design Blog also has a pack of dummy content that can be downloaded and imported into WordPress.

Cheat Sheets and Reference Guides:

Complete WordPress Theme Guide

Nick La of Web Designer Wall put together a three-part series to help those who want to learn more about WordPress theme development. The three parts are: installing WordPress locally, building a custom WordPress theme, and moving and exporting WordPress.

WordPress Template Tag Reference Guide

The template tag reference guide is a great resource to have close by when you are coding a WordPress theme. It lists all of the template tags, which can save a good bit of time during development.

WordPress Theme Development Checklist

This PDF checklist is helpful to make sure that you are not forgetting any steps during theme development. The checklist will help you to know what you have done and what still needs to be completed.

WordPress Template Design Cheat Sheet

The template design cheat sheet is another resource that is good to have handy during development.  It lists the various template files, template hierarchy, sample template coding, template functions, and more.

Coding Services:

WPCoder

If you are a WordPress designer and you would like to save some time in development of the theme, WPCoder is a group of developers that specialize in taking your designs in PSD format and coding them into WordPress themes.

PSD to WP

PSD to WP is another coding service similar to WPCoder.

From the WordPress Codex:

• Theme Development
• The Loop
• Template Tags
• Conditional Tags
• Stepping into Templates
• Template Hierarchy
• Custom Fields

For more WordPress-related content, please see:

• 20+ Tutorials and Resources for Working with Custom Fields in WordPress
• Top 10 Tutorials for Developing WordPress Themes
• Category Hacks for WordPress Theme Designers
• 10 Excellent Sources for WordPress Design Inspiration

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.

Using Custom Fields

The WordPress Codex of course provides some documentation on the subject of custom fields. Although many of the articles that are featured here will get into more specifics, it’s always a good idea to remeber that the codex is available when you have questions, or keep useful articles on the Codex like this one bookmarked.

WordPress Custom Field Tutorial

Jin Yang explains custom fields and shows how you can use them to customize a blog post by styling the background. In the example he chooses a custom background image for the post, which is a pretty cool trick for making your blog unique.

Using WordPress Custom Fields: Part 1 – The Basics

Perishable Press has a two=part series on custom fields. The first part includes some basic information and shows a few ways that custom fields can be used, including adding images to the sidebar.

WordPress Custom Fields: Part 2 – Tips and Tricks

The second part of the Perishable Press series goes into more detail on working with custom fields. The article covers topics like conditional display of custom field data, and showing data only if a custom field exists.

WordPress Custom Fields: Adding Images to Posts

One of the more common uses for custom fields is to add images to a post. This article is part of Justin Tadlock’s series and he provides all the instruction and code that you will need to get a custom field to show an image on your posts.

Add Thumbnails to WordPress with Custom Fields

Tutorial9 also provides a similar tutorial for giving the basics of custom fields and using them to show thumbnails on the front page or on the post page.

WordPress Custom Fields: Laying Text Over Your Lead Graphic

Derek Punsalan shows a really nice approach to use a custom field for adding a background image behind the post title. This is another way to take advantage of the power of custom fields to create a blog that looks a little more unique.

How to Easily Get the Value of a Custom Field

This is a brif post from WPRecipes that explains how you can the value of a custom field, with the necessary code provided.

An Easy Way to Get the Contents of a Custom Field

In this article Nathan Rice shows a way to get the contents of a custom field by using less code. His approach involves editing the functions.php file, which he explains.

How to Display Multiple Values of a Custom Field Key

This article shows how you can use custom fields in situations where a post may have zero, one or multiple values of the same custom code. The example used in the tutorial is quotes. Some post may have none, while others may have several.

Display Inline Ads with Custom Fields and WordPress

This post shows how you can use custom fields to add AdSense or other ads to specific posts. While there are plugins for this purpose, knowing how to do it manually is never a bad thing.

How to Add Videos to Your WordPress Sidebar

This is another post in Justin Tadlock’s series. In this article he shows how you can add YouTube videos to your sidebar, controlled by custom fields. This is an interesting idea that you don’t see in action very often, but could have a lot of potential in the right situation.

WordPress Custom Fields: Listing a Series of Posts

If you often write posts in a series, Justin Tadlock shows how you can list other posts from the series by using custom fields. The end result would be similar to a related posts plugin, except you would have more control over which posts are listed.

In Praise of WordPress Template Tags: Part 2

Darren Hoyt has a two-part series about template tags and magazine-style themes. In the second part he covers a number of items, including custom fields as they relate to the magazine-style layout.

WordPress Tip: 3 Awesome Custom Field Tricks

Chris Cagle’s article covers three things you can do with custom fields: 1) a custom “read more”, 2) awesome thumbnailed recent posts, and 3) post-specific CSS overrides.

Jazz Up Your Site: 28 Ways to Use Custom Fields

Raj Dash’s article on Performancing can be helpful for seeing the potential of custom fields. You may see a few ideas on here that you hadn’t thought of before that would be useful on your site or for a client project.

Creating Custom Write Panels in WordPress

While custom fields have plenty of power and potential, they’re not always the most user-friendly for clients. Function has provided this tutorial for creating custom write panels that will allow you to accomplish the same things as custom fields, but may be a little more manageable for some people, especially non-tech-savvy clients.

Plugins for Working with Custom Fields:

In addition to the tutorials featured above, there are a number of plugins that enhance the use of custom fields in some way, or make them easier to use. Here is a small sampling of useful plugins that are compatible with the latest version of WordPress, 2.7.1.

Custom Field Template

This plugin adds the default custom fields on the Write Post/Page, making it a little bit easier to work with.

Custom Fields Shortcode

You can use this plugin to show custom fields in your posts by using shortcode, with no modification required for your theme.

Custom Field Images

With this plugin you can easily add images to your posts, pages and feeds. There is also functionality to display recent posts as images instead of text links.

Custom Field Taxonomies

Custom Field Taxonomies will allow you to enhance the capabilities of your site by making some of your custom fields act like tags.

Advanced Custom Field Widget

This plugin will allow you to easily show custom field data in the sidebar of specific posts, providing essentially limitless possibilities.

Custom Field List Widget

This plugin lists all values of a choosable custom field name, groups the values of of a post and (hyper-) links the values to their posts as a sidebar widget.

WP Custom Fields Search

This plugin helps to improve the functionality of the WordPress search by allowing multiple form inputs to search different aspects of a post. An example use (and the reason the plugin was created) is for searching a real estate website by factors such as price.

More Fields

More Fields is a WordPress plugin that adds boxes to the Write/Edit page. These boxes contains input fields, so that additional (more) fields can be added to a post.

For more WordPress-related content, please see:

• Top 10 Blogs for the WordPress Community
• Top 10 Tutorials for Developing WordPress Themes
• Category Hacks for WordPress Theme Designers
• 10 Excellent Sources for WordPress Design Inspiration