WP Wall is a “Wall” widget that appears in your blog’s side bar. Readers can add a quick comment about the blog as a whole, and the comment will appear in the sidebar immediately (without reloading the page).
All comments are internally handled by WordPress so that means you have normal comment moderation, SPAM protection and new comment notification. WP Wall is fully customizable with a CSS file and included graphics.
It always amazes me that people come up with specific season related wordpress themes and icons. Here is a new set for Christmas.
The theme is decorated using Smashing Christmas Icon Set and its main goal is to give a blog a very festive, snowy, New Year’s atmosphere. The theme has no particular requirements, except that the WordPress 2.8.5+ should be installed.
The theme is free to use in private and commerical projects. It is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions.
Author Exposed is a simple Wordpress plugin that allows your visitors easy and elegant way to see more details about the post author.
This plugin does the same thing as the_author() tag only this time it’s linked to hidden layer (div). By clicking on the author link the layer pop’s up with author info gathered from the profile page, plus gravatar photo, if author email is assigned with one.
Playtime is a new premium wordpress theme from Zidalgo. Playtime has to be one of the best premium video wordpress themes I have seen in a while. The theme is complete centered around the publishing of video content.
Features include:
Rotating Featured Article Header Section (can also be disabled)
Fully supports WP 2.x, including threaded comments
Custom widgets such as Flickr gallery display, top rated posts, latest tweets, recent acts, jump menu, more featured videos, sideblog, and live-search
User ratings system
Easily embed videos from YouTube (including playlists), Google Video, DailyMotion, Vimeo, Veoh, Viddler, Metacafe, Blip.tv, Flickr videos, Spike, and MySpaceTV. As well as these file types: Flash Video Files (FLV), QuickTime (MOV, etc.), Generic video files (AVI, MPEG, WMV, etc.)
Easy language translation
Smart jQuery integration for dynamic and impressive user interface features
Multiple theme layout options – choose between 1 or 2 column display.
Don’t like having the same theme as everyone else on your Wordpress blog and can’t find one just right for you? Well then just create your own – no coding necessary. WPTheme Creator is an online web app that allows you to generate your own custom Wordpress theme by simple entering in things like how many columns you want and what colours you would like certain aspects to be.
As you can see in the screenshot, the options are fairly basic but they return good results when you really put some thought and effort into creating your new Wordpress theme.
The generated themes will run on Worpress programs up to the most recent one – 2.8 right the way from the fairly ancient 2.1 Wordpress release. One you have finished creating your theme you simply click ‘Save’ and then download it as you would any other theme. Then, go to ‘the Appearance tab in the wp-admin screen of your Wordpress blog and upload the theme, then click Activate once it has finished installing. Your new generated theme will be active on your blog.
Spectrum is free Wordpress Theme designed and delivered to you by Ignacio Ricci. This theme looks very bright and colourful. You can also give this theme a whole new feeling simply by changing the background image. Take a look around to check out it’s features. Enjoy using this lovely theme in your blog.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
