WordPress 3.9 – Jimmy Smith

If you haven’t updated your WordPress version yet, now would be the perfect time to do so. WordPress has just released WordPress 3.9 and as it has been tradition, this release was named after another music legend, jazz organist Jimmy Smith.

As was posted in a previous article, WP 3.9 includes many refinements that will improve the multimedia experience of both site owner and site visitors. Check out the features below:

WordPress 3.9 Key Features

Improved visual editing

The updated visual editor has improved speed, accessibility, and mobile support. You can paste into the visual editor from your word processor without wasting time to clean up messy styling.

Edit images easily

With quicker access to crop and rotation tools, it’s now much easier to edit your images while editing posts. You can also scale images directly in the editor to find just the right fit.

Drag and drop your images

Uploading your images is easier than ever. Just grab them from your desktop and drop them in the editor.

Gallery previews

Galleries display a beautiful grid of images right in the editor, just like they do in your published post.

Do more with audio and video

Images have galleries; They’ve added simple audio and video playlists, so you can showcase your music and clips.

Live widget and header previews

Add, edit, and rearrange your site’s widgets right in the theme customizer. Preview your changes live and only save them when you’re ready. The improved header image tool also lets you upload, crop, and manage headers while customizing your theme.

Stunning new theme browser

WordPress 3.9 comes with the beautiful new theme browser – Twenty Fourteen.

(source: WordPress.org News)

WordPress 3.9 is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard.
ETA: WordPress 3.9.1 update is now available

Must Have Features in Choosing a WordPress Theme for your Website

WordPress theme trends come and go. Some popular features a while back have faded away while others went mainstream and have become basic and essential features integral to a WordPress theme. A lot of the WordPress themes in the marketplace today are feature-packed and sometimes it gets overwhelming to choose the perfect one. Website owners need to be able to sort through long menu of features, pull out those that are relevant to their own specific website needs and goals, just to make sure they don’t get an over bloated and slow-loading website. Here are some basic features to look for in selecting a WordPress theme to fit your website needs.

Flexibility and Ease of Use

User experience is a key factor in web design. WordPress themes must be flexible enough to adapt to the user’s needs and provide way for customization to be simple and easy. A popular feature nowadays is the drag and drop feature where layouts can be configured and reconfigured by simply dragging and dropping elements into specific areas. WordPress themes that include this feature already have a fan base as it makes customization convenient and friendly even for WordPress beginners.

Responsive (On or Off feature)

The emergence of mobile platforms in internet usage makes its users a population that shouldn’t be ignored. A lot of people think that mobile might eventually displace desktop as the dominant platform for internet access. In light of this, website owners need to consider WordPress themes that are 100% responsive enabling content to be presented efficiently on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile or handheld devices. Themes that include features such as menus especially designed for mobile devices, responsive sliders, and responsive images are also a plus factor. Some also prefer that they have control over whether they want the responsive feature turned on or off which means that WordPress themes that have this option will appeal to this type of web user.

Search Engine Optimization

It would be a pity for a site with amazing content to be left to obscurity because search engines can’t find it. According to Joost de Valk, creator of the popular SEO plugin Yoast,

“Out of the box, WordPress is a pretty well optimized system, and does a far better job at allowing every single page to be indexed than every other CMS I have used. But there are a few things you should do to make it a lot easier still to work with.”

WordPress themes that are built according to best code practices and are integrated with sound SEO measures will do well as far as search engine visibility and ranking are concerned.

Multi Media Handling Capabilities

Gone are the days where people are merely content reading stuff on the web. Today’s generation of internet users seek more interactive and media heavy content. Website users tend to lean towards WordPress themes that are flexible enough to handle all types of media formats (audio, video, images, etc). Support for self-hosted videos, Youtube, Vimeo and SoundCloud, and other third party multi media content hosts is always a plus as internet users today.

Animations, Parallax, Sliders, etc.

Some people detest sliders and other visual eye candy. Some don’t even think that it helps a site at all while some consider these visual effects necessary features in a website. When people get to your site, you want to ensure that they get enough interest to go through your content. The use of all these visual effects can go from cheesy to spectacular depending on how it is presented. Today’s media bombarded user can benefit from well-thought of and creative visual presentations that feed both the eyes and the mind.

Translation or Multi Lingual Ready

WordPress already powers more than 21% of the Internet and will continue to increase even as of this writing. This means that more non-English speaking users will be thrown in the mix of users and will need themes that can be translated into their own languages and with RTL (right to left provision). This segment of WordPress users will be more attracted to themes that are easier to adapt to their local audiences.

These features listed here may or may not be on the top of your list. If you do have some suggestions, feel free to leave us a comment and tell us why you think so. We’d love to hear from you.

Top 5 BuddyPress Themes April 2014

BuddyPress ready themes enable you to create your own special social network centered around your website and content. This means that visitors can register as members and connect and network with other members who are part of your specific niche community. This is especially useful in creating and growing a social network where members share common interests. Here’s a rundown of the top 5 themes that have BuddyPress integrated into them.

WPLMS

WPLMS Premium WordPress Theme is a learning management solution for WordPress. It is designed to deliver and manage educational content for an online audience. WPLMS enables you to create and sell courses as single items, as subscriptions or as a combination of both. You can embed videos and other multimedia content into your courses, create your own question bank with multiple choice, single answer or essay type questions including quiz timers, timelines and auto submit with WPMLS’s built-in quiz and test capabilities. WPLMS includes an instructor dashboard allowing you to check submissions of students as well as your own course content. The theme also has a progress page for users to track progress and l badges and certificates earned and attained. This theme uses BuddyPress for collaboration and discussion with other learners.

Kleo

Kleo Premium WordPress Theme is a multipurpose theme designed to meet various requirements of most websites.This BuddyPress and bbPress ready theme gives you great flexibility to create a membership site with complete ease. Powered by the popular visual composer plugin, Kleo enables you to simply drag and drop elements into a single page. Kleo enables managing content according to membership level. The theme gives you the ability to restrict content according the type of membership one has. Kleo comes with key features such as an awesome option panel, shortcodes and templates for easy customization, 700+ Fontello icons, WPML ready, and so much more.

Xphoria

Xphoria Premium WordPress Theme showcases what BuddyPress and bbPress plugins are capable of doing. Xphoria gives you the ability to create display forums turning your site into a big social network exchange. Visitors can join groups, post messages, make connections and the like. Conversations are displayed in a neat tiled fashion showing the number of posts under each thumbnail. Groups are displayed on the homepage and may be viewed according to popularity, alphabetical order, activity or date created while each group has a separate page displaying member info and conversations. Essentially, a social network in a box, Xphoria can hel you build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community.

Plexus

Plexus Premium WordPress Theme is a multisite theme created especially for enabling your site to host a blog network within WordPress. This theme is fully integrated with BuddyPress and bbPress giving the social networking power fitting for a blog network. It comes with specific network settings that give you control over what blog admins can do with it. Aside from BuddyPress and bbPress full integration, the theme also includes: Visual Composer plugin for that drag and drop convenience in customization, Layer Slider plugin to create a responsive slider with hundreds of transitions, site wide widgets that display content across the blog networks, and so much more.

Klein

Klein Premium WordPress Theme is a powerful community theme that gives you the utmost power to maximize social networking. At the heart of this theme is the Gears core framework that enables you to integrate other plugins easily. This innovative WordPress theme was built to support BuddyPress, bbPress, and WooCommerce. It is ideal for a website that interacts with a lot of users. Members can create profiles, send messages, add connections, or simply share what’s happening. It also allows members to collaborate through forums or sell any products you require. Key features include: Visual Composer plugin for drag and drop layouts, paid membership pro features to manage subscription packages, supports Woocommerce to set up a vibrant private online ecosystem, etc. This theme works well with BuddyPress plugins such as Events Manage and Album Plus, extending the power of your site’s network.

Nick Roach’s Elegant Themes Review

Elegant Themes - Updated Review for 2014

Updated: April 12, 2021 – 2021 is nearing the middle of the year, and now is a good time to update one of our most popular articles here on Blogging Experiment. For several years we have been singing the praises of Elegant Themes, and 2014 is shaping up to be no different. In a day and age where companies and websites come and go, Elegant Themes has not only stood the test of time, they have continued to innovate by creating massive value for their over 250,000 customers! In the following article, we’d like to give you a detailed overview of just why we call Elegant Themes the Best Deal in WordPress!

After all, having the right WordPress Theme is crucial to your websites’ success. It’s kind of like the study that showed how people looking to buy a home can make up their mind within 8 seconds of walking in the door whether they like it or not – by not giving your visitors the right first impression (your design) – you’re literally inviting them to hit the back button.

The Dilemma

As a blogger your focus should be on content. Blog design is important, but when you think about it, do people go to Craigslist because it looks pretty? Absolutely not. They use it because they’re the best in the field.

Since we’re not all Craigslists, we must merge the design and content aspects together in as seamless a manner as possible. You want to have a nice looking design, but you most likely are not strong in design itself (much less coding that pretty design). You want a unique, impressive look that conveys professionalism and passion about your craft, but you’re probably not an expert at usability (how “usuable” your site is to visitors). And finally, you want to do all this in the cheapest, most cost effictive way possible (nothing wrong with that).

Elegant Themes

Have you ever spent any length of time browsing around countless free wordpress theme sites only to be left feeling unsatisfied? Does it seem like most of the free themes are … well … free for a reason? Where are all the best wordpress themes? After going through these motions for a period of time, I decided to take a look at some premium wordpress themes to see if they were really that much better than the free ones. Shortly thereafter, I discovered Nick Roach’s Elegant Themes, and that changed everything for me.

I knew I could hire a web designer to create a nice looking website as I’ve done countless times in the past. But at $800 to $3500/pop, designers can be expensive. I was interested in finding a nice looking design that I could learn to tweak and modify myself to make it more personalized and customized to my liking.

As a website and blog developer, I am frequently developing new sites, and aside from the content itself, I want each design to be unique and professional. Enter ElegantThemes.

Elegant Themes Premium WordPress Theme Club

Forget $200 to $500 like many other premium theme clubs, for $69…YES, $69 – members get unlimited access and unlimited use to all of Nicks’ premium WordPress Themes. To date there are 80+ elegant WordPress Themes.

I’m going to get out of the way and let Nick’s design speak for itself. As you will see, these are top notch designs that would normally run you several thousand dollars a piece (I’ve researched hiring a good WordPress theme designer, and that is the going rate – typically the floor of their going rate).

Without further ado, here are some of the premium WordPress themes from Elegant Themes:

Nexus WordPress Theme

Blogex image_nexus

Nexus Features:

  • Magazine style
  • Responsive design
  • Unlimited color schemes
  • Secure and valid code
  • Complete localization
  • Browser compatibility
  • Perpetual updates
  • Unparalleled support
  • ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
  • ADVANCED: shortcode collection
  • ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the Nexus Theme (Showcase):

More Information On Nexus From Elegant Themes:

Demo Nexus

 

Vertex WordPress Theme

Blogex image_vertex

Vertex Features:

  • Responsive design
  • Unlimited color schemes
  • Secure and valid code
  • Complete localization
  • Browser compatibility
  • Perpetual updates
  • Unparalleled support
  • ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
  • ADVANCED: shortcode collection
  • ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the Vertex Theme (Showcase):

  • Email us if you are using the Vertex Theme, and we’ll list you here.

More Information On Vertex From Elegant Themes:

Demo Vertex

 

Fable WordPress Theme

Blogex image_fable

Fable Features:

  • Responsive design
  • Unlimited color schemes
  • Secure and valid code
  • Complete localization
  • Browser compatibility
  • Perpetual updates
  • Unparalleled support
  • ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
  • ADVANCED: shortcode collection
  • ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the Fable Theme (Showcase):

  • Email us if you are using the Fable Theme, and we’ll list you here.

More Information On Fable From Elegant Themes:

Demo Fable

 

Foxy WordPress Theme

Blogex image_foxy

Foxy Features:

  • eCommerce
  • Responsive design
  • Unlimited color schemes
  • Secure and valid code
  • Complete localization
  • Browser compatibility
  • Perpetual updates
  • Unparalleled support
  • ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
  • ADVANCED: shortcode collection
  • ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the Foxy Theme (Showcase):

  • Email us if you are using the Foxy Theme, and we’ll list you here.

More Information On Foxy From Elegant Themes:

Demo Foxy

 

Explorable WordPress Theme

Blogex image_explorable

Explorable Features:

  • Location based directory
  • Responsive design
  • Unlimited color schemes
  • Secure and valid code
  • Complete localization
  • Browser compatibility
  • Perpetual updates
  • Unparalleled support
  • ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
  • ADVANCED: shortcode collection
  • ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the Explorable Theme (Showcase):

  • Email us if you are using the Explorable Theme, and we’ll list you here.

More Information On Explorable From Elegant Themes:

Demo Explorable

 

StyleShop WordPress Theme

Blogex image_styleshop

StyleShop Features:

  • eCommerce
  • Responsive design
  • Unlimited color schemes
  • Secure and valid code
  • Complete localization
  • Browser compatibility
  • Perpetual updates
  • Unparalleled support
  • ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
  • ADVANCED: shortcode collection
  • ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the StyleShop Theme (Showcase):

  • Email us if you are using the StyleShop Theme, and we’ll list you here.

More Information On StyleShop From Elegant Themes:

Demo StyleShop

 

Fusion WordPress Theme

Fusion Theme from ElegantThemes.com

Fusion Features:

  • Responsive design
  • Unlimited color schemes
  • Secure and valid code
  • Complete localization
  • Browser compatibility
  • Perpetual updates
  • Unparalleled support
  • ADVANCED: ePanel theme options
  • ADVANCED: shortcode collection
  • ADVANCED: page templates

Example Site(s) using the Fusion Theme (Showcase):

  • Email us if you are using the Fusion Theme, and we’ll list you here.

More Information On Fusion From Elegant Themes:

(more…)

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.

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.

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 Plugins – January 2014

Get your website ready for 2014 with these new WordPress plugins that will help you maximize the functionality of your website:

Icon Box for Visual Composer

Icon Box plugin is an add on for Visual Composer Page Builder that allows you to create nice looking informative boxes with icons easily. Icon Box is ntegrated with real time icon search to help you find the right icon you need quickly. This plugin provides you with three box option styles with over 9 customization possibilities giving you more than 25 different designs to match your website design. This plugin works with all installations of Visual Composer.

WordPress User Bookmarks for UserPro

WordPress User Bookmarks for UserPro is an extension for the UserPro Profiles Plugin for WordPress. This plugin will allow users to bookmark any content they want, posts, forum topics, custom posts, and also manage their bookmarks into collections. This ajax-powered plugin offers a simple way to show the bookmarks and bookmark widget and can be integrated into any theme. You can show the bookmark widget in different ways: via dynamic sidebar widget, via automatic mode below post content, or via a shortcode.

Simple Social Bar

Simple Social Bar is a premium WordPress plugin with drag and drop functionality that allows you to show your social bar 3 ways: top, bottom, or static. Its floating feature allows it to be visible to your visitors all the time. Main features include: simple user interface, multiple languages support, Socialite support, floating bar, embedded color picker. It is also fully customizable.

Drag and Drop Shortcodes

Drag and Drop Shortcodes is a great WordPress plugin that lets you create remarkable things even with mediocre themes. Spice up your content and draw visitors attention with dynamic animation and modern parallax effects.
This plugin lets you create content of pages and posts by simply using the drag and drop interface, without messing with code. No need to remember any shortcode as each attribute is accessible from pop-up modal windows and forms.
For advanced users, this plugin supports shortcode editing in text editor. Simply highlight shortcode and press Add/Edit Shortcode button, and shortcode will be loaded in modal window form.

Commentator WordPress Plugin

Commentator WordPress Plugin is a fully featured ajaxified comments system for your WordPress website that lets you easily supercharge your discussions. Main features include: social login (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+), ajaxified comment form, login and register, and pagination, comments upvotes and downvotes, thread likes, front end comments sorting, customizable icons and colors, easy integration, translation ready, with more features on the way.

Innovative WordPress 3.8!

WordPress 3.8 Parker is here and it’s right on time! This latest release, named after bebop innovator Charles Parker, sports a sleek new dashboard and an overhauled admin panel, the default panel of which is reminiscent of Photoshop and Lightroom interfaces but with additional schemes that add a more colorful twist to it. Aiming for simple, clean, and uncluttered aesthetics and functionality, WordPress 3.8 addresses the needs of the modern website – responsive and friendly to all types of devices.

Major Features Include:

  • A fresh, modern, uncluttered admin design – clean typography, large and comfortable type, responsive interface
  • simpler, smoother, click-to-add widget management with improved drag and drop experience
  • new default responsive magazine theme – 2014
  • 8 new admin color schemes to match your style
  • refined theme management
  • updated extended libraries
  • better RTL support
  • responsive toolbars
  • improved menus experience for mobile users

Not only has this version improved its overall design and functionality but it has also improved in speed with its high-definition vector-based icons that scale to your screen size. Sharper and lighter pixels loading significantly faster.

These new features have been in the works for several months since 3.6 was announced and 3.9 is probably churning even as this release is still hot off the press. More exciting things to expect from WordPress in 2014, but in the meantime, grab your copy of WP 3.8 and enjoy the beautiful new look.