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

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

Post a free job listing to the DesignM.ag job board for freelance, part-time or full-time positions. Your listing will be seen by thousands of talented designers and developers. - Post a job for free.

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

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

Post a free job listing to the DesignM.ag job board for freelance, part-time or full-time positions. Your listing will be seen by thousands of talented designers and developers. - Post a job for free.

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

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

Post a free job listing to the DesignM.ag job board for freelance, part-time or full-time positions. Your listing will be seen by thousands of talented designers and developers. - Post a job for free.

Styling posts differently according to its category has been possible in the past with WordPress, in fact, I wrote an article several months ago called Enhanced Sidebars with Dynamic Content. That post showed one approach using conditional statements in PHP to enhance the sidebar. With WordPress 2.7 it’s now possible to achieve a similar end result just by using CSS.

What We’re Going to Do:

UPDATE: I’m no longer using this approach on my blog, so you may notice that the examples are no longer relevant.

Instead of focusing on sidebar content like I did in the earlier post, I’m going to show you an easy way to add a brief message at the end of posts in a particular category. There may be a situation with your blog (or one of a client) where you would like to have some type of content at the beginning or end of a post, but only in a specific category. WordPress 2.7 makes this possible because of the new category classes that are added to posts.

Before we get started with the tutorial I’d like to show some potential reasons to use this technique to improve a blog.

1. Add diversity to your blog

Your regular blog readers and visitors will get used to seeing the same design and the same sidebar content, and most of them will tune it out. By adding something to posts in a specific category you can mix things up just enough to catch the attention of some visitors.

2. Make content more relevant and useful to visitors

A lot of times the links in your sidebar or at the bottom of posts may not be very relevant to those who are reading a particular post. With category styling you can add content and navigation that is targeted to specific content, making it easier for visitors to find what interests them.

3. Increase pageviews

One of the results of a more relevant and useful blog is an increase in pageviews per visitor. If you can use category styling to help readers find what they are looking for, they’re liking to stay on your blog longer and visit more pages.

4. Increase subscribers

One of the potential uses of this technique is to add a call for subscriptions on posts from a specific category. Many blogs include a call for subscriptions either before or after posts, but some bloggers choose not to do this because things are a little cleaner and less cluttered without it. But those bloggers may be interested in using a call for subscriptions only on posts in a specific category, such as a “featured posts” category.

5. Monetization

It’s possible that category styling could be used to promote products or services that are more relevant based on the category of the post. We’ll look at some of the possibilities for this in just a minute.

Possible Uses of Category Styling:

Category styling is a neat trick for WordPress developers, but knowing how to do it and applying it in a real-world scenario are two different things. The approach that I’m going to use for this tutorial could be applied for a wide variety of purposes. Here are some of the ways that you could put this tutorial into practice for yourself.

1. Link to a particular page or post that is of interest

Most blogs link to popular posts in their sidebars, but with category-based styling it’s possible to customize the links to point towards posts that are relevant to what the reader is seeing. These links could be in the sidebar or they could be at the bottom of the post, like the approach we’re going to use in this tutorial. Popular posts aren’t the only option here. Take for instance my other blog, DesignM.ag. One of the categories of posts on DesignM.ag is for the community news. Using this technique I could add a brief paragraph to the top of all posts in the news category that encouraged visitors to submit links to the news section, and I could link to the submission page.

2. Promotion of your own services or products

Say you have a design blog and you sell some premium WordPress themes from your site (or from anywhere else for that matter). Most likely you probably write some blog posts about WordPress, maybe tips or tutorials. In this case you could add some content to the beginning or end of the posts in your “WordPress” category that would provide some basic information about your premium themes and link to a page where visitors could buy them. You could do the same thing with any type of product or service. If it’s relevant to a particular category of blog content, the response from readers and visitors should be better.

3. Promote a specific affiliate program

A lot of bloggers attempt to monetize their blog through affiliate products. If you want to include an ad or a link to a product that is relevant to a specific post you could add a section at the end of posts that does just that based on the category of the post.

4. Cross promote another blog

In Enhanced Sidebars with Dynamic Content one of the specific examples that I used placed a sidebar link to my social media blog, Traffikd, when the visitor was seeing a post in the social media category. I could basically do the same thing. With the approach that I’m covering in this post I could add that content at the end of a post rather than in the sidebar and use CSS instead of PHP.

How to Set Up Category-Specific Content in WordPress 2.7

The example that I’m going to walk through in this tutorial will use my blog DesignM.ag. DesignM.ag includes blog posts in various categories, a community news section, and a design gallery. One of the post categories is “Inspiration.” In this category I publish posts that provide various types of design inspiration, and I’m going to assume that visitors who enjoy this type of content might also enjoy visiting the design gallery on the site.

What I’m going to do is set up a brief paragraph that will encourage visitors to browse through the gallery if they are looking for more inspiration. I’m going to use CSS so that this paragraph only shows up on posts in the Inspiration category.

Here is a screenshot of the end result.

Step 1: Add the div or Paragraph to the single.php File of the Theme

Obviously, the content of the paragraph or div that you use will depend on what you’re trying to accomplish. I’m just adding some simple content shown below.

Looking for More Design Inspiration?
We also have a web design gallery that you may enjoy. Several new websites are featured each week. You can subscribe to our all-inclusive feed if you would like to get updates on gallery submissions, articles, and news items.

Step 2: Make Sure The Theme is Set to Produce the Category-Based Class

Most themes being used will need to have a minor tweak in order to take advantage of the new feature in WordPress 2.7. In the DesignM.ag theme I added the following code to a content div that contains the post:

If your blog is on WordPress 2.7 and you have this code, it will produce a class according to the category of the post. For example, the content div in my theme will have the following code on posts in the Inspiration category:

Find a div in your theme that contains the post, and add the code to create the class.

Step 3: Give the Div or Paragraph an ID

In order to style the div I need to give it an ID, so I’m going to call it “gallery-promo”. See the example HTML code from my single.php below.

Step 4: Style the Div or Paragraph to display:none

The first thing we’re going to do is style this paragraph to not be shown. The reason for doing this is that I want to exclude it on every category aside from “Inspiration.” The code used is shown below.

Step 5: Style the Paragraph Appropriately for the Inspiration Category

WordPress 2.7 will add the class “category-inspiration” to all posts in the Inspiration category (Obviously, you would replace the word “inspiration” with whatever category you’re working with. So if your category is called “finance”, the class would be “category-finance”). So I want to add the CSS code shown below, which will override the display:none and the paragraph will be shown and styled on posts in the Inspiration category.

Here’s a screenshot of the end result in action. You can see it live by visiting 40+ Inspirational Non-Profit Websites.

Conclusion:

I now have a little “teaser” paragraph that shows up at the end of all posts in the Inspiration category that attempts to funnel visitors to the gallery. The paragraph only shows up on Inspiration posts. This technique could easily be used for any number of purposes.

Personally, I wouldn’t use this technique too much because your pages will wind up with a lot of code that’s not being displayed because of the CSS. But for one small div I think it’s a decent way to improve a blog.

If you have any thoughts or suggestions or critiques about this technique, please share in the comments.

If you like getting design inspiration by looking at excellent blog designs, you’ll love our new gallery site Blog Design Heroes.

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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.

If you like getting design inspiration by looking at excellent blog designs, you’ll love our new gallery site Blog Design Heroes.

Agregado

A life streaming WordPress theme.

Crafty Cart

Free theme especially for e-commerce.

Album Theme

One of the new Revolution Two themes.

RevolutionTV

A theme for videos.

Church Theme

Revolution’s theme created with churches in mind.

Black Canvas

A photoblogging or gallery theme.

Sharpfolio

One of many themes intended specifically for portfolio sites.

Photo Clip

A gallery theme.

Snapshot

A free theme from WooThemes for galleries or portfolios.

Portfolio

Another popular portfolio theme.

Free Photo Gallery

Another photoblogging or gallery theme.

CSS Gallery Theme 2.0

A theme specifically designed for CSS galleries.

LaunchPad

A theme for use before your site is completed.

WP Contact Manager

For turning WordPress into a contact manager.

Gossip

A theme created for gossip blogs.

Linquist

A simple portfolio theme.

Portfolio Gratuit

Another free portfolio theme.

For more WordPress resources, see:

• Top 10 Blogs for the WordPress Community
• Top 10 Tutorials for Developing WordPress Themes
• Category Hacks for WordPress Theme Designers

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

Post a free job listing to the DesignM.ag job board for freelance, part-time or full-time positions. Your listing will be seen by thousands of talented designers and developers. - Post a job for free.

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.

WPCandy

WPCandy is one of my favorite sources of WordPress-related content. The blog publishes a lot of content that’s helpful for WordPress designers and users, and the site also includes a gallery of WordPress-powered sites, and a place for readers to submit news. You can also find reviews of new themes and plugins.

NETTUTS

NETTUTS is not specifically a WordPress-focused site, but if you’re looking for high-quality tutorials for WP development, this is the place to go. Not all of the content is WordPress-related, but NETTUTS provides some of the best, and most detailed, tutorials for building or customizing WordPress themes.

Daily Blog Tips

Daily Blog Tips is one of the leading blogs about blogging, and Daniel consistently publishes content for WordPress users. In addition to WP-related blog posts, Daily Blog Tips occasionally releases a free theme.

Cats Who Code

Cats Who Code is another excellent blog for finding tutorials for WP designers and users. The blog is updated frequently and the quality of content is high.

Pro Blog Design

Michael Martin of Pro Blog Design writes some of the best articles and tutorials for WP theme designers. The archives at Pro Blog Design provide plenty of content on a number of important issues for WordPress designers and developers.

WPZOOM

WPZOOM is a blog that focuses on all things WordPress. You’ll find collections of themes, theme announcements and reviews, and other information that WordPress users and designers can appreciate.

The WordPress Podcast

The WordPress Podcast is not updated extremely frequently, but for WP-related news it’s a good resource to have in your your feed reader.

WpRecipes

WpRecipes provides a lot of tips and brief tutorials for working with the WordPress platform. This site is only a few months old, but posts are published on a daily basis.

WordPress Hacks

WordPress Hacks publishes frequently, with an archive full of useful content. The posts focus on WordPress news, tips, tutorials, and reviews.

Other Great Resources for the WordPress Community:

Aside from blogs, these resources are excellent resources for both users and designers working with WordPress.

We Love WP

We Love WP is an excellent design gallery that showcases only websites powered by WordPress. If you design WordPress themes of any kind (free, premium, custom), you certainly could benefit from seeing what others are doing on the WordPress platform.

WPscoop

WPscoop is a social media site that focuses exclusively on WordPress-related news and content. Like any niche social media site, the audience is considerably smaller than major social news sites; however, if you’re looking to find the best WordPress tutorials, news, theme and plugin announcements, try WPscoop.

The Official WordPress Forums

If you’re having an issue with a WordPress theme or just have a general question about the platform, the WP forums should be one of your first stops. Often you’ll be able to find what you’re looking for just by searching the existing threads, and if that doesn’t produce an answer you can always post your question. The community at the forums is very active and you’re likely to get a quick and helpful response.

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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.

The price for membership in Elegant Themes can’t be beat (unless you win one of the free memberships, in that case I guess it can be beat ) and the themes are high quality. If you’re not familiar with their work, please take a moment to check them out.

Contest Rules

As I mentioned earlier, Nick has agreed to give away one-year memberships to four of our readers. In order to enter the contest, please leave a comment on this post and simply state why you would like the membership, which theme(s) you would use, or what you would do with the themes if you were to win. I’ll choose two winners based on comments and the other two winners will be selected using a random number generator. Be sure that you leave a vaild email address where you can be reached in case you win. The winners will be chosen on Saturday, November 15th, so be sure to get your comments in before then. Rather than publishing a new post to announce the winners, I’ll update this post and the winners will be contacted by email.

A Glimpse of Elegant Themes

Cion

Influx

Wooden

UPDATE:

The contest has just ended. Here are the winners:

Random winners: Gretchen Imbergamo (comment #14) and Alison (comment #36)
My choices: Pablo (comment #23) and Matt (comment #19).

Congratulation! Nick will be contact you soon with the details.

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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.

Brian covered the subject of changing from premium themes to open source themes on his blog (see his announcement post for all the details). Here is a brief excerpt:

Jason and I want to develop a resource and community that is perfectly aligned with WordPress. Both he and I have been fortunate enough to leave our day jobs within the past year and have developed our own media companies. None of that would have been possible without the existence of WordPress, which is solely built and supported by the open source community.

Currently there are 11 themes available for download, free of charge. Users then have the option to purchase support packages that include access to tutorials as well as general theme support.

Last week Brian was kind enough to take the time to answer a few questions for me. Those of you who work with the WordPress platform will most likely want to get familiar with these themes and the new business model of Revolution Two. The original Revolution themes had a huge impact on the WordPress community and were very influential in the premium theme marketplace. I expect that Revotion Two will also be extremely influential.

Here is the interview with Brian.

Do you currently have plans to release new themes in the future as part
of Revolution Two?

Yes, I currently have 2 themes that I am in the middle of developing, and Jason Schuller has 3 or 4 concepts as well that should be released in the near future.

What has the response been from users to the free themes with optional
services and support as opposed to selling premium themes?

The response has been overwhelmingly positive – this gives users a chance to play with the themes first, and then can purchase the support membership if necessary. Not to mention that $99 or $149 for access to all of the themes and support is a much better deal than any of the other situations out there.

Do the Revolution Two themes have any type of enhanced admin features or
functionalities like some premium themes?

Yes, I have a theme options page which makes implementing video, advertising, Feedburner and some other things very easy to do. I am also working a CSS switcher into the theme options page, so instead of uploading 3 color theme variations, they are built on the same core files and toggled with the switcher.

In the early days of Revolution Two, have you been able to tell if the
response has been stronger from designers or from end users of the themes?

I think the response has been stronger from users – there is a lot of involvement going on in the forums, and a lot of great sites already popping up with the new themes.

As the creator of these themes, how do you feel that Revolution Two
themes stack up to the popular premium Revolution themes?

From a functional and coding standpoint, the new themes were built on the old ones, but are already being enhanced, with plans in the future to continue to raise the bar.

Most premium themes have separate licenses for single use and for
developers who want to use multiple copies. Is there anything similar with
Revolution Two in terms of support? Can designers purchase a support package and use the themes for multiple clients?

Jason and I have completely abandoned the idea of policing theme licenses, which is one of many reasons we went open source. Our membership can be purchased either for 1 year, or lifetime. You can download and use the themes on any number of sites, we have no restrictions.

Thank you Brian for taking the time to answer these questions, and thanks for your contributions to fellow WordPress users!

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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.

How to Create WordPress Themes from Scratch

Kai Loon wrote this popular series (see parts 1, 2, 3a, and 3b). It’s very detailed and covers designing the theme in Photoshop, slicing and coding, and all of the files involved in the theme. If your looking for a great guide to take you through the etire process of desigining and coding, this is a good place to start.

How to Make a Control Panel for Your WordPress Theme

While there are plenty of good tutorials for designing and coding themes, there are very few that touch on the process of creating a control panel. This one from Cats Who Code takes you through the process, as used in the Mimbo theme.

How to Create a WordPress Theme from Scratch

NETTUTS has a two-part series (see parts 1 and 2) that’s a good resource for new theme developers. It cover the basic files of the theme, including CSS, and the tutorial walks through the development of a basic sample theme.

Build a Newspaper Theme with WP_Query and the 960 CSS Framework

For a non-traditional or magazine-style layout, this tutorial will take you through the specific WordPress coding that’s involved and you’ll create a simple, but attractive, sample layout.

Build a Basic Newspaper Layout with WordPress and jQuery

This is another excellent tutorial from NETTUTS for building a different newspaper layout. Of course, it covers all the coding of the various WP files involved.

So You Want to Create WordPress Themes Huh?

Small Potato wrote a detail 16-part series on all aspects of theme development. Most of the individual sections of the theme are not that long, so 16 parts isn’t as intimidating or time-consuming as it may seem.

How to Create a WordPress Template or Theme

This tutorial from Aneko Studios was one of the first ones I read on WordPress theme development. It covers the different files that make up the WordPress theme and the basic coding that is involved with each.

Dissection of a WordPress Theme

An older tutorial, but still relevant, this is an in-depth series from Urban Giraffe (See parts 1, 2, 3, and 4) that will take you through the entire process of developing a WordPress theme, with plenty of explanation to go along with the code samples.

Developing a WordPress Theme

Deziner Folio did a tutorial that covers the basics of the header, sidebar, footer and index files. This one is not as in-depth as some of the others on this list, but it is a good place to get a quicker understanding of theme development.

One Final Resource

In addition to the ten tutorials listed above, the WordPress Codex is also a great resource with loads of information. The section for theme development is a great resource, especially if your new to WP theme development.

For more posts on WordPress, see:

• Category Hacks for WordPress Theme Designers
• Enhanced Sidebars with Dynamic Content
• 10 Excellent Sources for WordPress Design Inspiration
• 20 Specialty WordPress Themes

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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.

Exclude Specific Categories from Your Category List:

Most blogs include a list of categories in the sidebar to help visitors find the content that they want. However, there may be times when you want to exclude certain categories from the list. Fortunately it’s a very simple change.

This is the code to display all categories.

This is the code to exclude categories number 4 and 5 (you can get the category numbers in from the WP dashboard).

Remove a Category from the RSS Feed:

You may also want to exclude posts in a specific category from being included in your RSS feed. Sideblogs are increasingly popular and usually you’ll want to exclude these posts from the main feed. Again, excluding categories is pretty easy. You could always use a plugin like Advanced Category Excluder (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/advanced-category-excluder/), or you could make the changes manually.

To exclude a category, use this URL for your feed:

http://example.com/feed?cat=-4

That would exclude category number 4. To exclude multiple categories, use a URL like this:

http://example.com/feed?cat=-3&cat=-4&cat=-5

Exclude Posts in a Category from Appearing on the Homepage:

There may be situations where you want to exclude posts from the front page based on their category. Often this will be in the same situations where you also want to exclude it from the feed.

To exclude a category from the loop on the front page, find this code:

and change it to this:

This will exclude posts in category number four from being displayed on the front page.

Show Links to the Most Recent Posts from a Specific Category in the Sidebar:

Many blogs use simple WordPress coding to show links to the most recent 5 or 10 posts in the  sidebar. You can adapt this to include or exclude specific categories.

To show the 10 most recent posts in category number 4, use this code:

To exclude category number for, simply put a minus sign (-) in front of the category number, like this:

The code above will show the 10 most recent posts from all categories except number four. To exclude multiple categories simply add a comma, like this:

</ul>

Set Up a Separate Feed for a Category:

If you exclude a category from your main feed you may also want to offer a separate feed for the one excluded category (again, this is common for sideblogs). WordPress will easily give you the feed for any one category by using a URL like this one:

http://example.com/category/nameofyourcategory/feed/

If you want, you can take that URL and run it through FeedBurner and treat it like any other feed.

Show Post Excerpts on Category Pages:

To avoid duplicate content and to reduce the length or category pages, many bloggers choose to show excerpts instead of full posts. It’s a simple change. Find this code:

And change it to this:

Show Only Post Titles on Category Pages:

Another option is to only show post titles. You can do that by using this code:

Most likely your theme already has this code surrounded by a link to the permalink of the post. So what you will want to do is just delete the code that calls the excerpt or the content and leave the title and link intact.

Hopefully this post gave you some ideas that you can implement in your own themes.

If you like getting design inspiration by looking at excellent blog designs, you’ll love our new gallery site Blog Design Heroes.

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