Crenk » wordpress

W3 Total Cache Wordpress Plugin That Provides a Transparent Content Delivery Network

Steven Finch — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 17:21:31 +0000

W3 Total Cache is a new wordpress plugin that improves the user experience on your blog by improving your server performance. W3 caches every aspect of your site and helps your server to reduce download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

W3 Total Cache plugin remedies numerous performance reducing aspects of any web site going far beyond merely reducing CPU usage (load) and bandwidth consumption for HTML pages alone. Equally important, the plugin requires no theme modifications, modifications to your .htaccess (mod_rewrite rules) or programming compromises to reap the benefits. Setup is easy.

Theme Grade: Free Wordpress Themes Graded by SEO Quality and Overall

Steven Finch — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:51:52 +0000

Today I came across a great new theme directory which really tries to help users and not just show the basic themes. The directory is called ThemeGrade and instead of just showcasing the themes it also rates them in terms of general quality and seo.

Features include:

User-friendly Theme Search

The themes are grouped into many categories that it would be easy to find the themes of your choice. Are you looking for a 3-column magazine style themes that are free? Simply select “3 columns”, “Magazine Style”, “Free” and click on the search button and the themes will be shown in the result page!

Theme General Test

Each and every one of the Wordpress theme listed on ThemeGrade has undergone comprehensive tests. The general tests of a theme give you an idea of how well the designer coded the theme. When pass, the score will be added to the General test. Taking the passed score and divide it with the total tested score and you’ll get the general test score of the theme.

Theme SEO Test

The SEO tests of a theme give you an idea of how well a theme had been optimized for search engines. When pass, the score will be added to the SEO test. Taking the passed score and divide it with the total tested score and you’ll get the SEO test score of the theme.After you get the general and the SEO test score, the total score of a theme can be calculated. To do that, first, take the general test score and multiply by 0.6 and the SEO test score multiply by 0.4. Sum up the two number and you’ll get the total score of a theme.

Different Ranking Status for Themes

What makes ThemeGrade so special is the ranking system. Quality themes will be awarded either a Gold, Silver or Bronze status. The themes with the highest standard are those which score more than 90% and are awarded with the GOLD status! Ever since I outlined the details of each test, I have found out a few things that I could improve for my themes especially the SEO part.

Two New Themes will be reviewed Daily

Selecting good quality themes and reviewing them in such details take a lot of time.

Divine – Create websites from Photoshop to Wordpress

John Steppens — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 22:00:16 +0000

Divine is a clever little tool that allows you to make Wordpress pages using your pre-made Photoshop works, allowing you unlimited customization right down to the smallest details. All this can be done with minimal knowledge of site creation assuming you know how to use Photoshop but that’s a separate issue.

Yes, you are only as good as your Photoshop template. You see, the idea behind this is to design the perfect visual template within Photoshop then to upload it to Divine, adding all the interchangeable information within Divine. It works surprisingly well and at the moment it is absolutely free however because of this they have limited the number of functions.

It’s clear that a lot of effort has been put into the project and the example that have been put up look great. Ease of use is the key term here, the website not only offers a simple tutorial to Divines use but it has a guide to installing wordpress.

I’m impressed, with features including Built-in FTP-client, Supports for all Photoshop filters and Encoding support the internet could be well on its way to being neater and more stylish, well in terms of Wordpress websites anyway and I think we can all agree that’s a good thing.

WordPress Worm and How to Prevent Data Loss

Augusto Alvarez — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:43:02 +0000

If you work as a webmaster and maintain several blogs, or if you just maintain your own hosted somewhere, you would know that it has some extra management costs. WordPress represents the most used platform around the web, which means that vulnerabilities will appear constantly. And the last one it’s making a big impact around the blogger platform.

This vulnerability that appeared recently attacked thousands of WordPress self-hosted blogs (WordPress.com blogs are excluded), and it’s giving a lot of users a big headache. But the good news is for those that upgrade their platform regularly and have already the latest WordPress 2.8.4 are also immune.

Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) wrote a few days ago about this incident and extremely recommending an upgrade to WordPress 2.8.4. This is of course what we would recommend to you to apply as soon as possible.

How do I update my WordPress platform?

You didn’t have the chance to do it already? Here’s a short video (1min 20seconds) about the entire process:

How Can I be certain that my Blog will always be safe?

Simple: You can’t. You can never tell when these vulnerabilities will appear. We can recommend to you this:

Keep your platform updated. Don’t wait until attacks are being public and in massive proportions, use always the last WordPress build.
Keep a daily backup. On a previous post, we mentioned about Blog Backupr, a great and free tool that automates all your backups. Give it a try.

MacPress: Free Mac Inspired Wordpress Theme

Steven Finch — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:00:14 +0000

Our friends over at Sizlopedia have released a great new free Wordpress theme that is worth a look. The theme is called MacPress and is actually being currently used on the Sizlopedia site itself.

Here you go with some of the features of MacPress:

Compatibility – It is compatible with the latest version of Wordpress.
Elegant Design – Much like Leopard, the theme has a eye-catching UI of its own.
Theme Options – The theme also comes with a built-in Options panel.
Validated Code – From the XHTML to the CSS, every bit of codehas been validated.
SEO Friendly – It bears a fine code with SEO friendly tags and structure.

And some of the features planned for the future releases:

Styles Chooser – The Options panel would allow the user to select a pre-defined style.
Magazine Layout – A switcher between normal/magazine layout modes.

Demo: Sizlopedia

Download: MacPress.zip

Disqus To Launch Their New Comments Platform Soon

Steven Finch — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 11:37:38 +0000

Intense Debate may have been acquired by Automattic (the people behind WordPress), but Disqus remains the blogosphere’s favorite comment networking service. Not content to rest on their laurels, they’re rolling out a slew of new features with Disqus 3 next week.

Now all I need is a white label version of Disqus, and I just might use it on my blogs.

Google Analyticator: Free Google Analytics Plugin for Wordpress Blog

Steven Finch — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:13:08 +0000

Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog. It includes a graph of the last 30 days of visitors, a summary of site usage, the top pages, the top referrers, and the top searches.

Download here.

Add your Twitter timeline to your site with Ptwix

Augusto Alvarez — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 17:31:30 +0000

There are dozens and dozens of these applications, scripts and widgets available, but one of my favorites it is definitely is Ptwix. Simple script that you can use it on your website or blog, that shows your Twitter timeline with a very cool design.

The installation process it’s quite simple, just uploaded to your current server and modify the configuration files with your Twitter account. Since the code is based in PHP and AJAX you will be able to use it in almost any platform, including WordPress of course.

The configuration file is named PtwiX_reader.php and you’ll only need to edit these lines:

$username=”yourtwitterusername”;
$password=”yourtwitterpassword”;
$url_path=”http://www.mysite.com/ptwix/”;
$cache_folder=”/var/www/examplesite/ptwix/cache/”;

You also have three different themes to choose or even design one of your own. Here’s a demo of the script working and a simple procedure about how to install it.

Backing up your blog with BlogBackupr

Augusto Alvarez — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:43:07 +0000

BlogBackupr it’s a simple and nice web app that automatically backups all your posts in your blog. It represents a very easy way for you to not worry so much about vulnerabilities in the platform, loosing data, accidental deletion, etc.

It works with all blogs that have RSS-feed, that is the minimum requirement. Among the features that you can find in this web app:

Completely free.
No installation required.
Once you register, the backups are performed regularly without requiring your intervention.
You can export and import all those backups whenever you want.
Automatic restore supported for WordPress.org, WordPress.com and Blogger.com
WordPress users include these backups: full posts, comments, pages, categories and media.
You can have backups without giving your WordPress credentials. Will just use the public feed.
CSS file and images from the blog template are also saved.

This is your administration site where you can execute all necessary tasks with the added blogs:

Go ahead, give it a try.

WordPress 2.8.1 Beta 2

Augusto Alvarez — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 17:31:27 +0000

As we’ve announced earlier WordPress is releasing the 2.8 version of the platform, and the development team is working on constantly improving this release. That’s why the WordPress 2.8.1 Beta is now available to the public.

The main differences are related in bugs fixing about the previous version. Here are some of them:

Translation of role names fixed
wp_page_menu() defaults to sorting by the user specified menu order rather than the page title
Upload error messages are now correctly reported
Autosave error experienced by some IE users is fixed
Styling glitch in the plugin editor fixed
SSH2 filesystem requirements updated
Switched back to curl as the default transport
Updated the translation library to avoid a problem with mbstring.func_overload

To see all tickets that were fixed from Beta 1, check this link. I really enjoy watching this kind of transparency in projects, where you can give your feedback, insert about a bug and see the evolution about it: owner, priority, state.

Download WordPress 2.8.1 Beta 2.

Wordpress Antivirus Plug-in

Augusto Alvarez — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:30:07 +0000

As we announced earlier, WordPress released their new version: 2.8, that has big performance improvements. Even though this feature isn’t brand new, it is a nice option that you can give it a try: Wordpress Antivirus Plug-In.

The plug-in has a new version, 0.4, that appeared a few days back and it already includes compatibility with the latest WordPress version.

So what exactly a blog antivirus can do? You may ask. Well, this plug-in can help you out on monitoring possible platform vulnerabilities, virus injections, malicious links inserted, etc. Includes also features like email notifications and whitelisting.

The installation process it’s the same as every WordPress plug-in:

1.Download AntiVirus plugin
2.Unzip the archive
3.Upload the folder antivirus into ./wp-content/plugins/
4.Go to tab Plugins
5.Activate AntiVirus
6.Edit settings
7.Ready

WordPress users and webmasters always find the need to keep a good eye on the deployed platform in case any vulnerability appears and, if that happens, just pray for a quick hotfix. It’s nice to have a quick option that can help you be more proactive about the health of your deployments.

Best Free Wordpress News Themes

Steven Finch — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:01:02 +0000

ClassiPress: Classified Ads for Wordpress

Steven Finch — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:04:02 +0000

ClassiPress is the first and only professional classified ads theme for WordPress. Its Craigslist for WordPress. ClassiPress is a very simple and affordable way to turn your Wordpress into a classified ad board. ClassiPress is a simple theme that is easy to install and activate within Wordpress.

Features include:

PayPal Integration – Turn your Web site into a money maker. ClassiPress is built with PayPal integrated right into the theme. This allows you to charge a fee for anyone who wants to post a classified ad on your site. You can also turn this off if you want to offer free ads.
Instant Image Uploading – No more having to wait for customers to email you their images before posting the ad. Your customers can attached multiple images directly to the ad submission form.
Image Manager – Easily see what images have been uploaded and moderate as needed.
Auto Expire Ads – Automatically prune ads older than x amount of days. Makes it easier to set an ad price based on a specific time limit.
Subcategory Support – Our classified ads system supports nested categories for those who are looking for deeper listing capability.

Currently the single use license is only $69 (without the credit link).

Music Provider GrooveShark Wins Top CNET Award

Luis Sandoval — Fri, 29 May 2009 12:00:18 +0000

Grooveshark is an application that was reviewed here on Crenk sometime ago. At the time, I didn’t see the relevance of

Grooveshark awarded CNET's Top 100 Webware Award

the application, though it had some good aspects, I just did not feel comfortable with the entire package. It was not long after that post that officials from Grooveshark contacted me for a dialogue encouraging me to take a look at the offerings again, highlighting features I had not really seen the first time around. In the year that I’ve had with Grooveshark, I’m impressed with the continued efforts it’s making to establish itself as a viable music service for users.

CNET was obviously impressed enough to award it the 2009 Webware Winner for Audio and Music. Grooveshark has indeed come a long way and its user base has grown significantly. With this announcement comes features that again make Grooveshark heads above the rest. For starters their partnership with Ping.fm to build Tinysong API, which allows users to take the code and develop webapps that provide access to Groovesharks extensive library of music. It will be interesting to see what developers come up with as we’ve seen with various other online applications, the opening of the API makes it easy for supplementary apps to proliferate the net.

The second feature that was announced deals specifically with the blogging community. Grooveshark has announced that is now has a Wordpress plugin that allows integration into blog posts for users to set up their favorite songs for specific posts. You can set up just one song, or a playlist of songs for your readers on your site. An interesting option, at the very least you could create a small station of songs on your, possibly with a widget.

Grooveshark is definitely expanding its platform and appeal, and it should be interesting to see how much further they go in 2009!

Intense Debate: Enhance Comments on Your Site or Blog

Steven Finch — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:52:12 +0000

IntenseDebate is a new wordpress plugin which offers an enhanced user commenting experience. Currently IntenseDebate has a easy to add wordpress plugin in which you can add straight into your platform and within a few clicks it can be live and working. Features include: commenting threading, reply by email, profiles, widgets, twitter integration and more.

IntenseDebate is one of many comment plugins that really help you try to increase traffic and build community around your site. I really think this idea has legs, but it needs to be part of a much bigger platform. It would be great if Wordpress took a few ideas from IntenseDebate and added them into their platform.

Imagination: Free Fully Customizable Wordpress Theme

Steven Finch — Wed, 27 May 2009 09:39:50 +0000

Imagination is a Fully Customizable WordPress Theme and comes pre-loaded with 9 different site-wide styles to choose from, with just a click.

Moreover, You can customize the style according to your mood, occasion or preferences. Use your imagination to create a unique look of your blog/website anytime you want. Imagination theme is free to use and distribute. Feel free to share this theme with anyone and everyone.

Wakoopa: The New Software Social Network

matt — Mon, 25 May 2009 11:15:35 +0000

Wakoopa is a social network that helps people discover the best software, games and web apps on the market. Developed by a team in Holland, Wakoopa could just be the next best tool you play with.

Do you want to know what apps you use on and off the web, and just how much you use them? Do you want to find new stuff that is useful for the tasks you undertake everyday? Do you want to be introduced to people into the same tools and products as you? Wakoopa can do all of this.

First, all you need to do is sign up and download their tracker program. Now usually I’d run a mile at this, but I couldn’t resist after having had a look at the tools on offer.

Like any data collation software, it takes a few days to get the best results, so it’s worth leaving the program running for a few days and then revisiting your profile and start looking at the graphs…

On your dashboard, you find out the top ten tools you use, how much you use them and what you use them for.

What’s really interesting though, is the ‘recommended’ section, which suggests other tools or services to try based on your overall usage. I was recommended to try Evernote, a service I’ve heard of but not investigated – this is something that appeals to me as it “is a software application that allows users to capture information of various types, including text notes, mobile phone snapshots, printed and handwritten text”. I’ll have to give it a go.

I like the interface, it’s intuitive and not too busy. Each piece of information available is put into a particular type of category and this helps to keep data overload to a minimum. There are also several widgets available, and they even work with the basic Wordpress.com blogs, as you’ll see to the side.

This is a great service and something that I would definitely recommend to try if you are fanatical about trying and finding out about new software on the web. You can follow the latest Wakoopa developments on their blog.

Wordpress 2.8 Releases in Beta

Steven Finch — Sun, 17 May 2009 17:01:49 +0000

WordPress Testers and early adopters can now download Wordpress 2.8 and test the new features that promise to make WordPress better and more powerful than before.

There are lots of new features in WordPress 2.8 that are really interesting. Here are a few user features you can look out for

New Theme Installer routines
Add CodePress syntax highlighting to Theme and Plugin editors
Use “Custom Header” for menu text and revise Default theme to reflect change
Separate Comments into a separate postbox, from Discussion postbox, on the Edit Post screen
Make tags accessible without Javascript on the edit screen
Don’t ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
Don’t notify post author of own comments
Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab
Add column “Rating” in Administration > Links > Edit
Improve installer to help people entering wrong email addresses
Per Page option for plugins
Show absolute date instead of relative date for scheduled posts
Autosave post/page when pressing Control/Command+S
Add toggle all button to the Gallery tab in the uploader
Support more than one gallery on the same page
Add per page option to Screen Options for comments, posts, pages, media, categories, and tags
Show Tools menu for all users so they can access Turbo
Fix most popular link category list
Add description field for tags
“Choose a city in the same timezone as you” for Timezone in Administration > Settings > General
In upgrade process, provide better explanation for database upgrade message
Enforce unique email addresses in Add/Edit users
Hide things that need to be available to screen readers via offscreen positioning
Use invisible class for hiding labels and legends
Use a semantic class name for text targeted to screen readers

Download Wordpress 2.8 Beta 1 now and try it out. Since its a beta release, don’t try it on your primary blog.

IsoTherm: New Free Magazine / News Wordpress Theme

Steven Finch — Thu, 07 May 2009 09:23:28 +0000

IsoTherm News is out and ready for professional use. It is magazine styled theme with everything you need to start publishing your own web journal with all the features you will need to attract new visitors. There is a Featured posts box. It supports Video and Popular Posts Widgets as well.

MobilePress: Wordpress Plugin To Turn Your Blog Mobile Compatible

Steven Finch — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 09:35:15 +0000

MobilePress is a WordPress plugin that will render your WordPress blog on mobile handsets, with the ability to use customized themes. The plugin also allows specific themes for specific devices / mobile browsers, such as iPhone, Opera Mini, Windows CE Mobile and other generic handset browsers.

The plugin also allows WordPress theme developers to create custom mobile themes for WordPress blogs using the MobilePress plugin. Therefore, theme designers can create specific iPhone themes or generic themes.

MobilePress also features Mobile SEO which detects Google and Yahoo mobile search bots. These mobile search bots will see the mobile version of you blog which allows your blog to optimized and indexed on Google and Yahoo mobile search.

17 New Wordpress Themes That Will Rock Your Personal Blog

Keshav Khera — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 13:44:51 +0000

Personal blogs are more than a bunch of words put together. A good personal blog reflects your identity, your personality and individualism and a factor of great importace here is the design. It is the first thing that the viewer notices, before making any presumptions about you or your personality. So a good design is necessary to leave a good and long lasting impression on the visitor.

To help you out with the design, we at Crenk have put together 17 new wordpress themes that we believe, will rock your personal blog. Read on.

Creative Art

Theme Info | Demo

Masinop

Theme Info | Demo

Nouice

Theme Info | Demo

Scruffy

Theme Info | Demo

Vigilance

Theme Info | Demo

Simply

Theme Info | Demo

WGrey

Theme Info | Demo

Simple Pro

Theme Info | Demo

Simple Changes

Theme Info | Demo

Reviews Theme

Theme Info | Demo

ProudBlack

Theme Info | Demo

Modicus Remix

Theme Info | Demo

Modern

Theme Info | Demo

LightWeight

Theme Info | Demo

IAMWW W2 DnD

Theme Info | Demo

Bright Spring

Theme Info | Demo

Elegance

Theme Info | Demo

So that ends the list. I hope you liked it, if that’s so, show me some love and Digg it

(By) An avid freelance writer and technology enthusiast, Keshav Khera is young geek from India. Fanatic about the web, he also writes a blog and makes unsuccessful efforts to avoid twitter.

To Do List Plugins for Wordpress

Steven Finch — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 09:00:47 +0000

There are so many sites out there that are based on Wordpress and have numerous writers, including Crenk. Here at Crenk we sometimes find it hard to keep track about what sites to write about and who is writing about these sites. Previously we used Our To Do List Wordpress Plugin to keep track of these tasks, but since Wordpress 2.7 launched we have had numerous issues with this software and we are interested to find out if there is an alternative.

With the Our To Do List Plugin we are currently finding that we can add new tasks but when it comes to removing or editing these tasks it just does work.

Are there alternatives to the Our To Do List Plugin?

Irresistible: Personal Wordpress Theme for Free by WooThemes

Steven Finch — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:43:12 +0000

WooThemes has just released a new Free theme called Irresistible. It is a visually-rich personal blog, with a little bit of a multimedia focus. Incorporating some nifty video-options and widgets, Irresistible should meet all of your personal blogging needs. Just add your content to the mix.

Irresistible: New Free Wordpress Theme from WooThemes

Steven Finch — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 14:08:17 +0000

WooThemes has launched today a new free WordPress Theme. Irresistible is a personal blog theme with a great unique design, available in 9 different color styles. Download and demo it here.

Crenk Showcased In Top Wordpress Galleries

Steven Finch — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 21:27:17 +0000

In the last couple of days Crenk has been fortunate enough to have been profiled on some of the top Wordpress galleries.

WeLoveWp – Crenk page

CSSbased – Crenk page

Crenk » wordpress

W3 Total Cache Wordpress Plugin That Provides a Transparent Content Delivery Network

Theme Grade: Free Wordpress Themes Graded by SEO Quality and Overall

Divine – Create websites from Photoshop to Wordpress

WordPress Worm and How to Prevent Data Loss

MacPress: Free Mac Inspired Wordpress Theme

Disqus To Launch Their New Comments Platform Soon

Google Analyticator: Free Google Analytics Plugin for Wordpress Blog

Add your Twitter timeline to your site with Ptwix

Backing up your blog with BlogBackupr

WordPress 2.8.1 Beta 2

Wordpress Antivirus Plug-in

Best Free Wordpress News Themes

Mimbo

The Morning After

WP Polaroid

ClassiPress: Classified Ads for Wordpress

Music Provider GrooveShark Wins Top CNET Award

Intense Debate: Enhance Comments on Your Site or Blog

Imagination: Free Fully Customizable Wordpress Theme

Wakoopa: The New Software Social Network

Wordpress 2.8 Releases in Beta

IsoTherm: New Free Magazine / News Wordpress Theme

MobilePress: Wordpress Plugin To Turn Your Blog Mobile Compatible

17 New Wordpress Themes That Will Rock Your Personal Blog

Creative Art

Masinop

Nouice

Scruffy

Vigilance

Simply

WGrey

Simple Pro

Simple Changes

Reviews Theme

ProudBlack

Modicus Remix

Modern

LightWeight

IAMWW W2 DnD

Bright Spring

Elegance

To Do List Plugins for Wordpress

Irresistible: Personal Wordpress Theme for Free by WooThemes

Irresistible: New Free Wordpress Theme from WooThemes

Crenk Showcased In Top Wordpress Galleries