Creative WordPress Themes January 2014

Update your creative portfolio with a new look and a new WordPress theme. Check out these great looking portfolio styled WordPress themes to start the year fresh:

Horizontall

Horizontall Premium WordPress Theme is a unique, clean, and modern premium theme with excellent typographic aesthetics that allows for both horizontal navigation and vertical navigation all in one theme. Primarily suited for a creative portfolio with rich content, this theme is extremely customizable and flexible enough to fit all other types of websites. Portfolio images or plain text content can fit in any of the 9 schemes that come with the theme. You can customize sizes, colors, elements to display, and you can display 3 different sections of your site with different custom styles.

Scripts and styles are compressed and images are loaded with Lazyload for fast loading content. Content of individual articles are loaded dynamically into the home page or category page, while the address bar changes accordingly to what you are viewing. This way users can access the content without reloading the page, and share it or bookmark it to come back later.

Warhol

Warhol Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive portfolio theme built with clean design, smooth scroll and functionality to best present your creative work. It has different post types like: blog, service, gallery and testimonial posts. This premium theme is simple to use and its branding features give you numerous options to customize colors and fonts to create your own style. The multi layout option with 13 template pages gives you several choices to create your own unique look. You also have audio playing capabilities for photography sites that want to have audio playing in the background.

PortfolioRx

PortfolioRx Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and well-structured minimalistic Swiss-styled portfolio theme designed for creatives. The overall look and aesthetics coupled with typographic and media choices have a retro flair that will appeal to design agencies. PortfolioRx is perfect for artists from any discipline: web, graphic, motion, sound, print, art whether for an online portfolio or for personal use. It comes with a powerful admin panel, 4 different custom widgets, short codes generator, contact form 7 support, a smart scrollbar (can be enabled in the theme settings), and so much more.

Portal

Portal Premium WordPress Theme is a full screen portfolio template with tons of options for displaying your work. It comes with: 35 layouts for displaying content, a logo portfolio, architecture portfolio, web design portfolio, product portfolio, illustrations portfolio and software portfolio ready for you to insert your content. It also includes a unique horizontal scroll gallery and portfolio sections perfect for presenting your work in a full screen environment. You also have 5 different blog post versions, drag and drop page editing, Revolution Slider, tons of icons, and so many other features design agencies can use to set up their sites.

Dignity

Dignity Premium WordPress Theme is a dynamic multi layout portfolio theme that gives you a ton of layout possibilities for you or your client’s website. This simple & easily reusable One Page styled web template with an expanding portfolio feature is an effective way to present all your creative work all in one page. Featuring 12 home page variants, animated elements, parallax layers, retina ready & responsive layout, full screen BG images / BG video YouTube & Vimeo / Full screen Flickr Images BG, AJAX media portfolio, touch carousels and many more features.

Ebor

Ebor Premium WordPress Theme is an elegant and professional looking portfolio theme perfect for agencies, individuals, freelancers or bloggers looking to present an online portfolio without overdoing it. This simple and straight forward theme packs a lot of hidden power with lots of awesome features. Ebor uses a new custom field in the WordPress Customiser – a Google font selector – curating for you 10 perfectly crafted, hand picked fonts that are just right to create that professional aesthetic. Ebor comes with a built in Coming Soon Page, a built in Maintenance Page,full support for Contact Form 7, included plugins, Revolution Slider, a short code plugin, and many other well-thought out features without the bloat. This premium theme is designed to keep things simple for you without sacrificing design and function.

Angle

Angle Premium WordPress Theme is a multi-purpose, ultra-flexible, fully responsive WordPress theme sporting a flat design from another angle. The unique graphic and geometric aesthetics powered by Bootstrap functionality makes this theme extremely flexible. Key features include: Visual Composer, Revolution Slider, Isotope, SVG PAge Section Decorations, WPML Ready, Font Awesome Icons, and a whole lot more. It also comes with several page templates like Product Launch Page, Shop Page, Blog Page, Pricing Page, 404 Page, Maintenance Mode Page, and several other pages useful to any online service or business.

WordPress News: It’s AutoMATTic!

It’s been an exciting journey for WordPress in the last decade. Who would have known that its scope and reach would expand to its current proportions? And it is unstoppable. Currently powering over 21% of the Internet with big brands running WordPress under the hood, this powerful open source software continues to improve and become more relevant to the demands of this digital generation.

Taking over the helm of the WordPress ship from former WP CEO Toni Schneider is its 30 year old founder, Matt Mullenweg. Matt and Toni have actually been working side by side in running Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and the open source project, WordPress.org. Together, they have steered the company to where it is today. They are currently switching jobs with Toni heading up product development and Matt taking over the executive position.

Today we’re announcing publicly that Toni and I are switching jobs — he’s going to focus on some of Automattic’s new products, and I’m going to take on the role of CEO. Internally this isn’t a big change as our roles have always been quite fluid, and I’ve had some recent practice filling in for him for a few months last year when he was on sabbatical. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from Toni over the years and I’m looking forward to putting that into practice.

(source:ma.tt)

““The power of the web is not in centralization, it’s not in closed systems or anything like that,” he said. “It’s in its open nature and that’s what allowed it to flourish for the first 10 or 15 years.” He added that Automattic has always been “sort of like a Proctor & Gamble” with multiple brands working under one, and suggested that new products will fit under that model while adhering to those principles about the open web.”

(source:techcrunch.com)

Congratulations, Matt and Toni! Here’s to more exciting things up ahead for WordPress!

Five Drag and Drop WordPress Plugins To Try

The drag and drop feature has become one of the most popular features in WordPress themes lately. We remember how everyone clamored for responsive themes and multiple slider options. Now it’s all about drag and drop. Below are some of the available drag and drop plugins in the marketplace today.

Visual Composer

Visual Composer for WordPress is a popular drag and drop page builder plugin that will save you tons of time working on the site content. Take full control over your WordPress site. Add columns, rows and choose from 40+ predefined elements divided in logic groups with single click, by using intuitive and handy UI. Then simply use your mouse to drag elements around to re-arrange them. You can also use your creativity and skills to extend Visual Composer with unique elements by using the developer API. Outstanding features include: intuitive drag and drop interface, object oriented code, template system, responsive grid, custom post types, WordPress user access support, 40+ built in content blocks, and so many other features. Create totally unique websites with no programming knowledge required with Visual Composer.

Aqua Page Builder

Aqua Page Builder is a powerful WordPress plugin that allows you to create an unlimited number of template variations for use in your WordPress themes. It follows the same user interface used by the Menus & Widgets admin pages – making you feel right at home with the UI. Similar to the Widgets &amps Menus, Aqua Page Builder features the drag and drop interaction to build its templates.This free open source plugin blends seamlessly with the WordPress admin interface making it familiar and easy for users to get used to it. Aqua Page Builder was also designed to reside on a completely independent page, instead of cluttering the post editor. The idea was to offer the freedom to build content outside of the editor, and use it anywhere they like at all. The “template” doesn’t have to be a complete page at all, it can be part of a page that can be re-used on a unlimited amount of pages/post they like.

Themify Builder

The Themify drag & drop Builder for WordPress helps you build any page layouts with a live, frontend preview. Layouts are completely responsive, and what you see is what you get. Easily create complex grid layouts by dragging and dropping on Builder’s intuitive user interface. Content can include static text, images, videos, sliders, galleries, tabs, maps, etc. or dynamic content, such as posts, menus, and even sidebars + widgets. It works on desktop, tablet, and mobile. The Builder comes with any Themify theme as part of the Themify framework. You can also purchase the Themify Builder plugin to use in a non-Themify WordPress theme.

Elegant Themes Builder

The Elegant Themes Builder is a plugin that provides some incredible tools for structuring the content on your page. These tools were previously only available in our Convertible theme, but now they have been added to a new plugin that will work with any theme. The plugin creates a visual drag-and-drop canvas where you can add, arrange and re-size advanced elements on your page. This builder appears below the normal text editor when you create a post or page, creating a unique canvas for each. The builder allows to you quickly create columns, sliders, tabs, buttons, toggles, boxes and so much more. This plugin will work with any theme, not just Elegant Themes but is can be purchased if you are an Elegant Themes member.

Page Layout Builder

Page Layout Builder plugin is a Drag and Drop Page Builder – Layout Builder – Content Builder for WordPress. Building custom WordPress page layout using Page Layout Builder is as easy as dragging-and-dropping. No need to learn HTML or find a coder/designer to change a page layout, modify sidebars, etc. You can directly use more than 3000+ widgets from wordpress.org to place anywhere inside your page content. Modules like sliders, galleries, images, drop-down menu, progress bar, timeline, testimonials, message box, warning box, notification box, loop for custom post type, post loop with various templates, sub-pages, heading, regular html etc. are currently under development. This plugin is available in the WordPress plugin repository.

Miscellaneous WordPress Themes January 2014

Start off the year in style with these miscellaneous WordPress themes to match your online business:

Cafeteria Responsive WordPress Theme

Cafeteria Responsive WordPress Theme is a premium theme designed for a cafeteria web site, a restaurant web site, or any other types of food service website such as bistros, bars, fast foods, bakeshops, etc. The sweet and deliciously saccharine design appeal of this theme will surely put a smile on your clients’ faces. The template is adaptive and very easy to customize sporting a semi retro style complete with parallax effects to help make your site simply irresistible.

Mercy NGO Charity & Environmental/Political Theme

Mercy Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and elegant theme, developed mainly to setup NGOs, non-profit organizations and corporate websites. It is easy to fully customize the layout, colors and style within minutes due to the superb flexibility of its framework. You can also create unique websites for other purposes like magazine, blog, creative or business. Use the color picker to create your own color scheme and make it as elegant or as high impact as you want. This theme is most suitable for small to large NGO organizations’ website. This clean and minimalist PayPal integrated theme allows you to add as many causes as you need, is translation ready with built in RTL support, and is also WooCommerce ready.

Humbleshop Minimal Easy Digital Downloads Theme

Humbleshop Premium WordPress Theme is a Bootstrap based framework theme designed for the Easy Digital Downloads Plugin. This simple and straightforward responsive theme comes with a real-time theme customizer, related product function, and is additional product image ready. It also includes scripts and plugins: Flexslider, Magnific Popup, Fitvids, Equalize, and Selectnav, to give you more customization options.

Party Night Night Club WordPress Theme

Partynight Premium WordPress Theme is a sleek and modern club and party WordPress Theme for night clubs, parties, night events etc. Its flat, clean, and tidy graphics create a classy vibe sans the usual garish and screaming designs typical of night club or events themes. Enhanced functionality allows users to easily customize the look of the theme. Main Features include: Revolution Slider, Events booking support, Table reservation support, Advanced Events organizer (tickets, event builder), WPML support, News Management, and Blog Management.

Actority WordPress Template for Casting Agencies

Actority Premium WordPress Theme is a professional responsive casting agencies’ WordPress template especially designed for those in the entertainment or theater industry. If you’re a producer looking for background talent, or a background actor looking for work, create your own online portal with Actority. This premium theme can also be for other kinds of agencies like real estate or a travel/tourist agency. This fully responsive theme includes several pages like: For Actors page, Application List page, Contact page, Portfolio page (filterable), and other additional page templates. Actority fits any screen, from the largest desktop screens, to any tablet size, down to the smallest smartphones and is very intuitive on any device.

Membership Plugins For WordPress January 2014

WordPress is a proven powerful tool you can use to create your own website any way you want it. What’s also great about it is that you can take it even further and enhance its functionality to suit your needs with the help of plugins. From personal blogs to eCommerce sites to BuddyPress to so many other types of websites – a plethora of options is available out there for WordPress users.

One of the many ways you can use WordPress for is to make it function as a membership site where you can allow users to register, access or deny specific functions and sections, or create a social hub where fellow users can interact with each other.

Here are some popular WordPress plugins that can turn your website into a fully featured membership site:

Member Mouse

MemberMouse is an easy to use WordPress membership plugin that allows you to sell products, subscriptions and memberships, setup a password protected member’s area, offer 1-click upsells and downsells, manage customers, automate customer service, track critical retention metrics and more. No matter where you’re starting from, MemberMouse has the power you need to maximize revenue and get your business running like a well-oiled machine.

MemberMouse gives you everything you need to easily manage a successful online business. No matter if you sell digital products, subscription content, software as a service, or ship physical goods, MemberMouse provides a flexible platform that you can quickly shape to your business, with absolutely no programming required. This powerful plugin gets you up and running quickly, and handles many of the common tasks in your business, freeing you to focus on your value proposition.

Membership by WPMU Dev

Membership is a flexible, powerful, easy-to-use WordPress plugin for dividing your website into free and premium content. It’s a plugin built by WPMU Dev with WP Multisite in mind that can transform your entire network into a fully featured, multi-tiered membership and subscription site s o you can host a variety of membership sites, for yourself or for clients. Features include: a drag and drop interface to customize according to your exact specifications, control how access to any content or functionality is given, works with BuddyPress, add payment gateways easily (Authorize.NET AIM, 2Checkout, PayPal Express, etc.), built with WP Multisite in mind.

Restrict Content Pro

Restrict Content Pro is a complete membership and premium content manager plugin for WordPress developed by Pippin Williamson. This plugin can help you create an unlimited number of memberships levels, including free, trial and premium. Manage members and their subscriptions, track payments, offer discounts with a complete discount code system, and provide premium, members-only content to your subscribers.

Restrict Content Pro includes a complete member management system that lets you easily view all active, pending, expired, cancelled, and free users. Member’s subscriptions can be added or modified at anytime. This premium plugin is integrated with PayPal payments where all subscription payments are made via PayPal, allowing extremely fast and secure transactions.

Paid Memberships Pro

Paid Memberships Pro is a customizable WordPress Plugin and support community for membership site curators. PMPro’s rich feature set allows you to add a new revenue source to your new or current blog or website and is flexible enough to fit the needs of almost all online and offline businesses. Integrated with Stripe, Authorize.net, or PayPal® for recurring payments, flexible content control, themed registration, checkout, and more to help you process all your business transactions. You can: name and control access for unlimited membership levels. Members are added as a WordPress User at the subscriber level in addition to their selected membership level during registration, create your Payment Gateway with any of the built in payment options and then paste your API information into the plugin’s setup page, control access for each membership level offered, and so much more.

WP eMember

WordPress eMember is a powerful WordPress Membership Plugin that can help you build a secure and reliable fully featured WordPress membership site easily. This easy to install plugin lets you selectively protect articles by creating various membership levels (example: Free, Basic, Premium, Ultimate etc.) and protect the content (posts, pages, comments etc) of your site. The plugin manages all the membership management side of things. Key features include: content protection where you can create different membership levels and select what content (posts, pages, categories, comments) can be viewed by each membership level., unlimited membership levels where you can create “Basic”, “Premium”, “Ultimate”, or any other levels you want, Multi Site License – you can use it on as many sites as you own, Autoresponder Integration – can be integrated with Autoresponders (AWeber, MailChimp, GetResponse) so that members automatically get signed up to your list/campaign for email marketing purpose, and so much more.

Discover the many benefits of creating a membership site with these plugins and build your network faster than ever.

WordPress News Roundup 2013 – The Year That Was

Here are some of the top WordPress stories that made 2013 one of the most exciting years in WordPress history:

  • The release of the Twenty Thirteen default WordPress theme. The 2013 theme for WordPress takes us back to the blog, featuring a full range of post formats, each displayed beautifully in their own unique way.
  • The release of the Twenty Fourteen WordPress theme. This default theme lets you create a responsive magazine website with a sleek, modern design, feature your favorite homepage content in either a grid or a slider, use the three widget areas to customize your website, and change your content’s layout with a full-width page template and a contributor page to show off your authors.
  • Automattic acquires Cloudup, a company founded to easily share videos, photos, music, links, and docs.

The release of the last few WordPress versions, particularly 3.8, marks the beginning of a new era using the plugin-first development process. The ongoing commitment of the WordPress community to come up with better and more responsive software raises the bar and expectations for a more exciting new year ahead.

Hello world. Hello 2014!

Play With The Code Using These WordPress Code Editors

Majority of WordPress users hate messing with code. But, there are those, (developers, but certainly not limited to) who can’t get enough of it and consider spending countless hours of coding simply child’s play. Here are some of these code editing “toys” you can try to get your fill of code poetry heaven.

Shift Edit

This online editor allows you to: access files from various sources (FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Dropbox, Google Drive, or Amazon S3), autocomplete code for HTML tags, CSS and PHP code assist, highlight syntax errors and automatically fix them, do live editing and see realtime updates as you tweak your code, step back to a previous version of the file, open and save files when using the chrome app.

“The online IDE is one of the final frontiers of apps ported to the web. I would like to be able to develop from any computer or operating system and have the same experience without having to install software or configure anything.” – Adam Jimenez (founder)

Codeanywhere

Codeanywhere is a code editor in a browser with an integrated ftp client, and all popular web formats are supported (HTML, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, and XML). It lets you code from anywhere, without the need to bring anything along with you. Just log on to Codeanywhere with any computer or smartphone, and all your servers (FTP, SFTP and Dropbox), files, everything is waiting for you, even the files you left open will be open when you login again. Key features include: syntax highlighting, code folding, smart indentation, full internationalization, displays line number, word wrap, code indention (Tab key), unlimited undo/redo, etc.

BluePen Editor

BluePen Editor is a PHP-powered CSS editor that can be installed to any static or dynamic website and makes live CSS editing possible. It’s an online visual CSS editor and a “must have” web developer tool which makes a difference in styling online content: it runs in a browser (it’s an online application), it makes you see the changes immediately (Real-time editing), it’s a stylesheet editing software (CSS styling).

Advanced Code Editor

Advanced Code Editor enables syntax highlighting in the integrated themes and plugins source code editors. This plugin supports PHP, HTML, CSS and JS. Effectively edit your themes or plugins when you only have access to a browser, by enabling syntax highlighting in WordPress integrated source code editors. Other features include: mixed language syntax highlighting, smart search, full screen editor, multiple undo and redo, ajax create/delete file, ajax create new directory, auto format and indenting code, and so much more.

WP Editor

WP Editor is a plugin for WordPress that replaces the default plugin and theme editors as well as the page/post editor. Using integrations with CodeMirror and FancyBox to create a feature rich environment, WP Editor completely reworks the default WordPress file editing capabilities. Using Asynchronous Javascript and XML (AJAX) to retrieve files and folders, WP Editor sets a new standard for speed and reliability in a web-based editing atmosphere.

Better File Editor

This plugin replaces the boring, clunky, and difficult to use theme and plugin editor with a full-featured code editor using the Ajax.org Cloud9 Editor. Adds line numbers, syntax highlighting, code folding, and lots more to the theme and plugin editors in the admin panel.

Popular WordPress Theme Features To Watch in 2014

WordPress theme designs come in all shapes and sizes packed with features that don’t get used at all. Here are some of the most popular features users look for in a WordPress theme and a few others that could be the next big theme feature in the future:

Drag and Drop

This feature is one of the most popular features users look for in a WordPress theme because of its ease of use especially for non-coders. Chris Lema defines drag and drop like this:

The end user can assemble the design of a web page by dragging and dropping key elements/components onto a “canvas” designing the layout/structure of the page.

For a more in depth analysis on drag and drop, check out Chris’ post: Design without coding: Comparing Drag and Drop WordPress themes.

Single Page with smooth scrolling

The single page smooth scrolling feature is where all of the content is on one page that the user can scroll up and down or side to side. More and more users are opting for this single or one page website design to contain all their content because it’s easy and simple enough to build and maintain yourself, as opposed to more complex multipage websites.

Flat, simple and then some

Flat has a long way to go yet, and so the main changes I think we’ll see in the next year are more fun, but faddish, trends like long shadows and the like. In similar fashion I think we’ll see some more depth, layering, graduations, and other visual distinctions making their way back in, but in a more refined and subtle way than the old days. – Collis Ta’eed, Envato CEO

Clean and Standards compliant code

Adherence to proper coding protocols (PHP, HTML, CSS, privacy, security). Clean and quality code is the backbone of a quality website and ensures that it is easier to maintain and flexible enough to run with other properly coded scripts. Clean code also contributes to speed and loading time.

eCommerce option

The eCommerce feature is as the responsive feature was – it is becoming more and more a staple feature included in WordPress themes.

All in One Design bundles

WordPress theme designers are expanding themes to include a variety of add-ons to provide a complete design package. These extras can include: letterhead, business cards, social media branding package (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), newsletters that work with external email clients, etc., aside from the WordPress theme itself so that all brand materials are consistent. Bundles are popular because they present a complete brand package and include everything you need to get a site launched and promoted.

User Friendly and Mobile Friendly Menu/Navigation System

The era of a website having traditional navigation is quickly ending. Users are now used to on demand menus, sticky navigation and fixed headers that follow you as you scroll. These new tools allow for cleaner, simpler web design.

These are just a few of the most popular WordPress features that we think will continue to evolve and improve in 2014. Exciting times ahead!

WordPress Design and Development Trends 2014

What do you think WordPress has in store for the coming year?

Here are some of the ideas shared by key people in the WordPress community:

From Tomas Puig, WordCamp Chicago 2013:

  • Device fragmentation is driving the adoption of CMS technologies.
  • WordPress is going to be used as the backend to drive core business for small and large audiences
  • WordPress is the best system of record that is used by lots of people and is a pleasure to work with compared to other systems.
  • 30% of the Internet are familiar with WordPress. In the world of CMS’s, WordPress user acceptance is easy.
  • WordPress is democratizing the serving of content to native applications across all platforms. Not only is it a blogging platform alone but it is already being used and optimized as an application framework.

From Collis Ta’eed, CEO (Envato)

  • Flat has a long way to go yet, and so the main changes I think we’ll see in the next year are more fun, but faddish, trends like long shadows and the like. In similar fashion I think we’ll see some more depth, layering, graduations, and other visual distinctions making their way back in, but in a more refined and subtle way than the old days.
  • Incorporating motion in its various forms is another logical build on flat design. Everything is pointing to this becoming a major piece of interface design going forward.
  • WordPress will continue to dominate the open source CMS market. Its position feels unassailable thanks to a heady combination of usable software, massive community, and constantly improving product.
  • 2014 will see even more diversity in the tooling landscape from indie software development houses, SaaS companies, and the big A.

Currently powering over 21% of all websites – with 46 million downloads and thousands of WordPress themes built, bought and sold each day, the future of one of the most popular open source CMS’s existing today burns brighter than ever.