One fine day I was trying to fill in an important official form online on my Mozilla Firefox’s browser. After spending about half an hour I reached the last few questions of the form. One question there asked me to click a checkbox to answer but I could see no checkbox on the screen. After wasting a lot of time reading the instructions and every possible detail over and over again I asked for advice from my friends. One person told me that I should try to refill the form on Internet Explorer. I tried it and now the checkbox appeared and I successfully completed and submitted the form online.
The problem just described occurred because the form was designed to work especially for Internet Explorer. You see, designing an application for all systems is tedious as one has to tweak the runtime code again and again to make it compatible to work with different systems. Here is where Adobe AIR jumps in. If an internet application is designed using Adobe AIR then it will automatically work for all systems and browsers.
Technically speaking:
“Adobe AIR is a cross-operating system runtime that lets developers combine HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flash and Flex technologies, and Action Script to deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on a broad range of devices including desktop computers, netbooks, tablets, smartphones, and TVs. AIR allows developers to use familiar tools such as Adobe Dreamweaver®, Flash Builder®, Flash Catalyst®, Flash Professional, or any text editor to build their applications and easily deliver a single application installer that works across operating systems.” – Adobe’s website.
Adobe AIR has a wide array of apps that can help designers design better applications. Below I have selected 17 of them.
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Free WordPress themes have come a long way since Kubrick. Twenty Ten, Twenty Eleven, and the latest – Twenty Twelve – is the newest Kubrick as far as Free WordPress themes go. Twenty Twelve is the current default WordPress theme.
Let’s take a look at some of the features of this free default WordPress theme:
- Front Page Template where you can add text, images, video
- Responsive, Mobile-first Layout
- Custom ”Open Sans” Font
- Custom post formats: links, quotes, asides, statuses, images
- Widgets and No-sidebar layout
- Custom menu, custom header image, custom background color and image
- Multi columns
- Sidebar
- Flexible width
- Editor style
- Flexible header
- Featured images
- Full width template
- Post formats
- Sticky post
- Theme options
- Infinite Scroll
Those are a lot of features coming from a free WordPress theme, don’t you think? And most of these features are what you also get from a lot of Premium WordPress themes. If we use Twenty Twelve as our standard, what then can we expect in 2013, as far as Free WordPress themes are concerned?
- All of the features listed above will become standard features
- More Premium-like features
- eCommerce options
- Typography options
- Drag and drop options
- Page-builder options
- More Single Page Themes
- Free themes for email, mobile, etc.
- HTML5 and CSS3 and adhering to WordPress Coding standards
Many WordPress themes authors, providers and developers give away free themes as samples of their work. These samples, albeit free, are not necessarily inferior to Premium themes being sold in the marketplace. In truth, some of them are even better (or Best – shameless plug). The fact that these free samples are marketing tools to introduce these new authors to the market should be a weighty incentive for them to release high quality products that will catch the attention of WordPress professionals who are always on the lookout for something fresh.
Believe it or not, 2013 is right around the corner, and we want you to be prepared. Thanks to some big advancements in eCommerce functionality for WordPress in 2012, the Best eCommerce Themes of 2013 are sure to be amazing. eCommerce is simply the commerce conducted through the Internet. With millions of websites, blogs, and Internet users, more and more businesses are taking their products online. The successes of sites like Amazon and Ebay has dispelled all skepticism about eCommerce websites – not to mention the scores of “mom and pop” operations selling everything from ebooks to digital hugs…yes…some people are making money selling completely made up things.
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With WordPress being one of the most popular content management systems available today, many WordPress users, developers or not, are beginning to realize that there is a market out there seeking for new and innovative themes for their WordPress powered sites. So how do you start make your very own WordPress theme? Let’s look at a few resources available on the web to help us do that.
Our first stop is the WordPress Codex. This compendium of WordPress resources is rich with “how to’s” from installing your WordPress theme to playing around with code. If you go to the Codex’s Theme Development section, you will find all the useful information from the structure of a WP theme, to template files to practically everything you want to know about WordPress. It has links to sections on theme design, teaching about the proper layout and other design aspects of the theme. Studying the Codex is essential to serious players in the WordPress community.
When you’re ready to try our information you learned from the codex, siteground.com has an interesting tutorial to build a simple wordpress theme. The site helps you go through the process of creating simple code to generate a simple WordPress theme. You can play around with the code to make more complicated themes if you wish. This would be a great place to help you take your baby steps a little further as you work towards being a more experienced theme developer.
If you’re really in a hurry to build your theme because of an opportunity you just can’t miss, you can probably start off your first few themes with Artisteer. This is a WYSIWYG theme builder software which enables you to make professional looking WordPress themes in minutes. You can create a theme in Artisteer then export it to WordPress in the form of a folder containing the normal WordPress files. Studying the files and your Artisteer rendition will give you a lot of information about building themes. The Artisteer’s home edition is available for download at artisteer.com at a price of $49.95.
A lot of folks who want to develop themes are more designers rather than code geeks. If you feel more comfortable with photoshop than messing around in notepad to tweak code, then you might fancy psd2cssonline.com. This utility enables you to convert your photoshop design into the equivalent wordpress files in a few minutes. Now you can spend more time working on the aesthetic aspects of your theme and worry about the code later. Check out this video to get an idea of how easy it is to use psd2cssonline.
You can also check out an excellent article on Lifehacker entitled “How to Create a Custom Theme for Your WordPress Blog with Minimal Coding Required.” What’s great about this article is its simple approach on what you can expect as you go through the process of creating your own theme. It also has valuable resources like links to creating photoshop files for your theme as well as basic html/css knowledge for you to complete your task. The article also explains the structure and files of a typical WordPress theme.
Other Resources You can Check Out
These resources will definitely whet your appetite for theme building skills. There’s a ton of other resources available out there for your to refine your WordPress coding skills. As the WordPress mantra goes, “Code is Poetry.” Start writing your WordPress poems today.
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