Best BuddyPress Themes May 2013

BuddyPress is an open source social networking software package owned by Automattic – essentially, a plugin that can be installed on WordPress to transform it into a social network platform. If you are considering to up the ante on your blog by being more socially connected, here are some of the best BuddyPress themes you can check out:

Flix BuddyPress Ready Team Blogging

Flix is a powerful and flexible community blogging theme for WordPress. you can use to start your own community in no time. This theme includes BuddyPress and bbPress as part of the many superb features of this theme. It also includes a SmartTab system where you can put authors in the spotlight. Easily order the front page by posts from a specific author a specific category without reloading the page. The team blogging feature is perfect for both small and big blogs that have multiple contributors. This responsive theme is also whitelabel enabled which means you can easily customize the theme to suit your business brand.

OneCommunity BuddyPress Theme

OneCommunity theme is a responsive WPMU compatible theme integrated with a BuddyPress plugin. This plugin allows users to register on your site and start creating profiles, posting messages, making connections, creating and interacting in groups and much more. This theme is a social network in a box where you can build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community. The theme includes over 40 inner pages to manage profiles, activities, messages, group messages, invitations, subscriptions, and forums of both members and groups.

Razor

Razor is a responsive and clean, professional looking BuddyPress theme for WordPress. Built on a responsive layout structure and supporting Retina (HiDPI) enabled devices, this theme is packed with powerful modern features and the advanced controls such as Drag and Drop Layout Manager, Contact Form Builder, White Label Admin, Sidebar Manager and so much more. Building websites, communities, social networks is a breeze with this amazing looking theme. The possibilities are endless.

Social Buddy

Social Buddy is a responsive, flexible, BuddyPress and BBPress integrated community WordPress theme that is perfect for niche communities and social networks. Its fully fluid responsive design makes it work beautifully on mobile devices. This theme includes extensive documentation and an intuitive options panel making setup and customization a breeze. Theme support is excellent and top notch.

Best Corporate WordPress Themes May 2013

Here are a few of our current picks for awesome corporate themes for 2013:

Shift Flexibly Creative WP Theme

Time to make the big Shift from your cold and stiff corporate website into a highly creative, extremely customizable, responsive theme WordPress theme – Shift Premium WordPress Theme. This theme includes 12 homepage layouts to choose from. It’s drag & drop enabled feature also allows users to easily arrange, enable/disable sections according to their specific needs or tastes. Each section is customizable, with the option to change background colors, background images even the image position within each section. It is WooCommerce enabled, bbPress ready, retina ready, and fully responsive. This theme was built using the Bootstrap Framework.

Lounge

LOUNGE Premium WordPress Theme is a high quality professional WordPress theme for modern business or interactive creative use. Its clean and professional looking layout creates that sense of reliability and trustworthiness necessary in business. Amazing features include: 4 fluid AJAX animations (can be turned on or off), unlimited Parallax pages, unlimited sliders & slides to each page using two types of built-in sliders, fully responsive, modular shortcodes, and highly intuitive and friendly to use framework.

Co-Worker

CoWorker is a responsive flexible multi purpose theme built for a business, portfolio, corporate, agency or any other kind of website. Salient features include: fully responsive and retina ready design, 12 premium sliders, 30+ page templates, tons of shortcodes including a shortcode generator, 6 header options + menu styles, custom widgets, and many other features to help you redefine your website’s brand.

Moxie

Moxie Premium WordPress Theme is a blend of style, creativity and power. This powerful WordPress theme allows you to take control of your content and build the website you need with the content you want. Creating your own signature website is easy with features such as: Mega Menus, Dynamic animations with Slider Revolution, Drag and Drop feature using Visual Composer, Contact Form Builder, a built in Template System, and so much more.

Stark

Stark Premium WordPress Theme is a highly customizable multi purpose WordPress theme designed by 3 elite Themeforest authors (Damojo, Themepunch, Thunderbuddies) to give you a mega WordPress theme that leaves nothing else to be desired. Quality plugins such Visual Composer, Slider Revolution, Isotope Image Grid Plugin, and FancyBox 2 Lightbox plugin, are just some of the top-notch features included in the premium WordPress theme.

WordPress Themes 2014? What Does the Future Hold?

Did you know that there are approximately 8 months and 2 weeks till January 2014? What?! 2014 already? You might think that’s still too far away but in reality, big businesses usually have 2-year, 3-year, and 5-year plans already pencilled in place. It’s not unusual for them to think beyond today and they probably already have activities and processes scheduled even beyond that time frame.

So what’s our fearless forecast for 2014? Is it too early to tell? Let’s take a few “wild” but calculated guesses on what we think is to come.

Mobile – The Handheld and Portable Desktop

This forecast is not new and developments in the past 2 years or so have all been pointing to this direction. Smartphones, tablets, androids, iOs devices are more and more in stiff competition with each other as people rely more and more on their devices to get everything done. As this trend continues, WordPress theme authors and developers need to think of ways, as early as now, not just adapt to the move but perhaps innovate something revolutionary that will inspire a fresh way of doing things. The move towards drag, drop, click one button, one size fits all types of themes is great but could always be better – more personalized, easier to customize and brand, and perhaps an easy to maneuver app-like admin panel – especially on a tiny 3.5” inch display using a tiny unwieldy touch keyboard.

Retina Display

Manufacturers of LCD, LED, HD and all the other display devices are probably well into production already filled with orders for the Christmas season and early next year and we bet that retina display is high up in one of their specs somewhere. What to do? WordPress authors and developers need to update, create, and optimize themes in anticipation of that. Apple is already set to require retina display in their iOS apps which means all current apps need to be updated and all future apps need to be designed with this in mind. Android phones are probably not too far behind. Mobile versions of WordPress themes need to anticipate this as well.

User Friendly Analytics

As Google continues to purge the SERPS from “spammy” and over “optimized” websites, perhaps more simple and built-in tools to help provide the average WordPress user the statistics needed to analyze and improve key aspects of his or her website. There are numerous plugins that add functionalities like performance and analytics to determine site speed, word frequencies, user interactivity, analytics and all those wonderful tools but it would be nice to have all these capabilities, in simple user friendly format, already built into the theme to reduce risks of compatibility issues.

Design

Simple and minimalistic designs will continue on till the next year with designs becoming more and more intuitive eliminating a lot of code fear and analysis on the part of the user. Features will still be consumer driven but will eventually be trimmed down to the essentials as more and more WordPress users become more educated and less “awed” by multiple sliders and 1000+ ways to change colors and backgrounds.

More Social

Social networking through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and other similar websites have made it so simple for people to connect with each other. WordPress themes need features like these that make it as simple and as easy for the website owner to encourage more user interactivity within his website and his other social media networks. The flow from website to social networks needs to be seamless and streamlined to encourage more interconnectivity, engagement, and exchange. It’s part of the high quality ranking site Google equation.

Of course, nothing is carved in stone and anything can happen between now and then. These are fearless or fearful forecasts, you might say. It does help to understand how businesses move – whether they are aggressive or conservative in their strategies, and to keep abreast of what is going on in the whole web design industry in general. That way, your efforts as a WordPress professional will be more strategic and more deliberate.

Tasty Food and Restaurant WordPress Themes to try this 2013

Mobile devices have changed the way people access the internet. More and more people use it to search for information relevant to their locations. As a result, mobile internet and mobile computing have helped boost local businesses that have an online presence. If your local business isn’t online yet, you need to be. Here are some delicious food and restaurant WordPress themes to help drum up some noise for your business:

Bistro Responsive Foodie App Theme

Bistro Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive theme that includes a great booking app system to help you monitor & manage customer bookings and reservations. It also features: a specials, promotions and event management system, a calendar system, photo galleries, google maps integration with driving directions, countless custom widgets, and is also translation ready.

Eatery – Responsive Restaurant WordPress Theme

Eatery Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive restaurant/cafe theme that includes: a flexible full menu system easily customizable using custom posts, a built-in 24hr-enabled reservations form template, shortcodes options for elegant text styling, image galleries & slideshows, numerous color theme options with 5 preset color styles to start with, and global currency support.

Elegantia – Restaurant and Cafe WordPress Theme

Elegantia is a rich and luxurious-looking premium WordPress theme for restaurants & cafes. It has many features specifically designed for a restaurant business like: ajax-based Reservation template, Food Menu Module, Events Module, sortable Gallery module, ajax based and Google maps-enabled Contact module, and an impressive Homepage with full width slider and services information.

Coffee Shop – Responsive WP Theme for Restaurant

Coffee Shop is an easy to install premium responsive WP template for cafes and bistros. This dark styled responsive theme is feature packed. It includes: custom post types and templates for menu, events, staff, it is fully localized, has numerous color options, custom widgets, and includes 5 layered PSD files for further customization.

Delicieux Restaurant WordPress Theme

Delicieux Premium WordPress Theme is a visually appetizing theme perfect for restaurants. It comes with a Drag and Drop Page Builder feature for managing different page elements in the theme. It features a menu system, a google maps enabled contact page, a widgetized footer with 6 layouts, a blog page with 8 layout options, and advanced theme options panel for creating custom theme changes like background image changes, sliders, and shortcodes management.

WordPress Themes 2013: The Must-Have List

WordPress Themes are here to stay. Throughout the years, we’ve seen many different design styles and trends – some good, some not so good. With WordPress powering a colossal 1/5 of the entire Internet, WordPress Themes have become big business with many individual theme shops and developers pulling in millions every year.

Any way you slice it, WordPress is here to stay, and for that reason so are the free and premium themes we’ve all come to know and love. If you have spent any amount of time searching for the top WordPress Themes, you’ll notice that several names continue to appear at or close to the top of the list. Elegant Themes, Themeforest, and StudioPress to name some of the more popular ones.

In this article, we’d like to introduce you to some very creative and compelling WordPress Themes of 2013. Each and every one of these themes was released in 2013 so you can rest assured these are among the latest and greatest that WordPress has to offer.

Stay in the know with our list of the top overall WordPress Themes as well. Updated at least once per month, this article covers the best WordPress Themes in all the different categories including responsive, portfolio, magazine, business, and E-commerce just to name a few.

For the time being, here are a few of our absolute FAVORITE WordPress Themes for 2013.

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Turbo Charge your Website with WordPress Widgets

WordPress is one of the most popular Content Management Systems around. Not only is it powerful and feature laden, it is also has some of the most beautifully designed themes available out there. Even if you do compare other platforms, you can tell a WordPress site apart. The great part about building your site using WordPress is that you can make a great product even better. One way to do that is by adding widgets to your theme.

Widgets are a quick and easy solution to add a little more “oomph” to your website. These small pieces of content or tools can be placed in any of the widgetized areas of your WordPress theme. Widget areas are the predefined blocks or sections of your theme where you place widgets. These widgets can be added, removed, arranged, reordered any way you want in areas such as your sidebar, header, footer, the homepage, or any other defined area in the WordPress theme’s design.

Widgets can either be static or dynamic. Some of the default WordPress widgets include “meta” data, categories, popular posts, archives, and so many others. You can also add 3rd party widgets like subscriptions forms, advertisements, dynamic content such as RSS feeds and social networking feeds, custom code, Javascript, etc. to boost the functionalities and features of your theme. Some of these widgets may also come built-in with the theme you choose to install. Below is a sample of how the Widgets section appears in the admin panel of your WordPress theme.

The left side of the screen is where you have a listing of your available widgets. It’s as simple as dragging and dropping any widget you like into the sections on the right. These widgets will appear live on your site in as soon as you drop them in place. You can access your widgets from the Appearance ? Widgets screen in your Dashboard. From here you can: add, configure, remove, delete, enable accessibility mode, or troubleshoot your widgets if necessary.

Adding widgets require no coding skills at all. Even a WordPress beginner can do it. You don’t need to be an expert to install a widget. Sometimes, you may need to copy and paste scripts or codes from 3rd parties if you find a widget you really like. Otherwise it’s a very simple and easy way to improve user experience and the overall aesthetics of your WordPress theme.

Top 5 Widgets to Supercharge your WordPress Theme

Widgets are always plugins but not all plugins have widgets. Do you agree? Whether you agree or not, here are some great widgets you can use to supercharge your WordPress theme.

Freelancer Widgets Bundle

Freelancers will rejoice with this bundle. It’s got 7 great widgets: advertisement, biography, buy me a beer/coffee, contact widget, contact form widget, opening hours widget, and social links widget all in one big bundle. These widgets are highly customizable & can be modified easily. Freelancers like musicians, artists, designers, developers, creative professionals,etc. will find this widget a useful addition to their website.

Posts By Author Widget Pro for WordPress

If you’d like to provide your readers with an easy way to compile posts by a favorite author on your website, this powerful widget is what you need. Posts by author allows you to: compile, sort, show post excerpts, control number of posts to display, display thumbnails, in 15 configurable ways. This widget is especially useful for multi-author websites to help readers sort posts by their favorite authors.

Smart Navigation Widgets

User experience is key to getting repeat visits and one way to ensure that is to keep your navigation user friendly. Smart Navigation Widgets is a powerful widget ideal for websites with large archives. This Ajax-powered widgets allows the user to navigate deeper only when he needs to. Scouring and clicking thru long lists can get boring and make users bored waiting for content to load. This widget allows you to control the number of links displayed and speed up websites in the process.

M7 Easy Accordion Menus Widget for WordPress

This cool widget makes adding an accordion menu to your sidebar as easy as dragging and dropping. It’s a fresh way to combine menus on your sidebar. You can define: general settings, design and layout settings, thumb settings, excerpt settings, post settings, and the read more text settings to display the widgets you want to feature. Super cool and elegant space saving feature. It’s responsive too!

Announcements!

How would you like to manage your announcements and schedule them way, way, ahead of time? If you are handling an events website, an eCommerce site, or a business site that holds regular events, keep your users informed by scheduling your announcements automatically with this handy widget. Whether it’s a big sale, an important event, a greeting or any type of announcement you need, simply set it and forget it. This widget gives you 4 options for scheduling your announcements: weekly, annual, monthly, or using custom start and end dates.

The WordPress Dashboard for WP Beginners

According to the WordPress,

The Dashboard is a tool to quickly access the most used areas of your blog’s Administration and to provide glimpses into other areas of the WordPress community. The Dashboard Screen presents information in blocks called modules. WordPress delivers eight modules: Right Now, Recent Comments, Incoming Links, Plugins,QuickPress, Recent Drafts, WordPress Blog, and Other WordPress News.

The first screen you see when you log into the administration area of your blog is your Dashboard. The main idea of the dashboard is to give you a place where you can get an at-a-glance overview of what’s happening with your blog. You can catch up on news, view your draft posts, see who’s linking to you or how popular your content’s been, quickly put out a no-frills post, or check out and moderate your latest comments.

The Dashboard acts like a cockpit with all the controls and switches you need to help your website function the way you want it to. This might seem basic to those who have been using WordPress for quite some time now but there are still quite a few out there who are still struggling to figure out how to find their way through the backend, scared to death lest they “break” their website beyond repair.

Getting to know your WordPress Dashboard

If you are a WordPress beginner, the Admin Section or backend can be quite intimidating at first, but once you become familiar with the different sections, everything will make sense. What do you see after you successfully login to your WordPress website? Here’s what you can expect.

The Dashboard contains the following default modules. These modules can be dragged, dropped, repositioned, or toggled on and off according to your preferences.

Right Now

This module, at its basic, gives you a concise overview of your what’s going on with your site. It contains information and stats about your content (posts, pages, categories, tags), discussions (approved, pending, or spam comments), the name of your WordPress theme and the number of active widgets you are using, users online, and the WordPress version installed. More information can be included in this module depending on any additional plugins you install. You can also customize your Privacy Settings if you wish to keep your site private.

QuickPress

This module is the best and quickest way you can create a simple post. You can add a title, content, media files, custom forms, tags, and save your post as a draft or publish immediately. It’s a great tool for capturing and publishing ideas without going through the “Add New Post” module.

Recent Comments

If you allow comments on your website, this module helps you moderate the discussions on your posts. You can approve (unapprove), edit, reply, mark as spam, or delete comments right on the dashboard.

Recent Drafts

This module displays saved drafts of posts and pages that you are working on which still needs to be edited or published.

Incoming Links

This module reveals the urls of other websites that has linked to your WordPress website. You may or may not find this module useful as it does not always include all the websites that link to you. You can also configure incoming links you allow by editing the RSS feed information ( url, number of items to display, item date).

What’s Hot

This module displays recent posts from the official WordPress Blog, Other WordPress News, Popular or Latest Posts from around WordPress. This keeps you updated on the latest WordPress related news such as version announcements, security notices, and general WordPress community posts and updates.

Plugins

This module lists the Most Popular, Newest, and Recently Updated plugins available. If you are adventurous and you want to experiment with how different plugins work on your site, this is the perfect resource to find plugins to play with.

Site Stats

This module is probably the one you need to pay most attention to. It shows you a graph of your website’s activities – views, visitors, traffic – per day, week, or month. It’s a great tool to find out how many visits you get, what your top posts are, top searches on your website, and overall statistics to help you improve, maintain, and optimize your site even further.

Knowing the functions of each of these modules will help you learn how to use them to manage your website. Take some time to go through each one of these modules and familiarize yourself with each of them. You’ll soon be mastering all of them and it’ll be instinctive later on.

WordPress 3.5 – New Features to be excited about in 2013

Drumroll please, Elvin Jones is in the house! WordPress house, that is. In keeping with WordPress code naming tradition, the latest WordPress update released – WordPress 3.5 has been named “Elvin” in honor of drummer Elvin Jones, and there is a lot to drum about.

Here are some of the new features that have been updated in WordPress 3.5:

New Media Manager

The Drag and Drop feature is streamlined, fast and easy to use. Creating galleries is faster with inline caption editing capabilities and simplified controls. Insert multiple images at once with Shift/Ctrl+click or insert multiple galleries per post and independently order images as you like.

New Default Theme

Twenty Twelve (2012) theme for WordPress is a simple, flexible and elegant theme with a gorgeous open sans typeface. It is currently the default theme for WordPress 3.5. It is mobile friendly, fully responsive and looks great on any device. This theme includes all the latest theme features including a front-page template with its own widgets which you can customize and also set up as a single page.

Favorite Plugin Support

Mark all your favorite or often used plugins in the WordPress Plugin Direcotry and access all of them directly in the Admin Panel>Plugins> Install Plugins page using your WordPress.org user name. This pulls out all your favorite go to plugins and saves a lot of time especially when you are setting up multiple sites.

Admin Enhancements

WordPress 3.5 sports a new Welcome Screen, simpler and easier to use even by WordPress beginners. All the basic tasks are accessible in this new interface – from Getting Started to Writing your First Blog Post to Managing Widgets – user-friendly indeed.

Retina display support

WordPress 3.5 is also Retina-Ready (HiDPI) where many visual elements have been updated and converted to CSS3 elements to support the new displays so that they look good on these higher resolution screens.

Support for Instagram, oEmbed support for SoundCloud and Slideshare

oEmbed is a format for allowing an embedded representation of a URL on third party sites. The simple API allows a website to display embedded content (such as photos or videos) when a user posts a link to that resource, without having to parse the resource directly. Great news for Instagram, Soundcloud and Slideshare users as WordPress 3.5 supports these services and it is now easier to integrate them to your site without touching any code.

Link Manager Gone

And its absence will hardly be felt probably. WordPress 3.5 hides the Link Manager by default for new installs but if you truly miss it, this feature can still be enabled via the Link Manager plugin. All sites with existing links are left as is.

XML-RPC is enabled by default

This means better accessibility for screen readers, touch devices, and keyboard users. This feature is also for remote publishing/mobile and easier connection with mobile apps like the Official WordPress iOS app. Those who are using Atom will need to use a 3rd party plugin.

New Tumblr importer

If you’ve been wanting to import your Tumblr content into WordPress for years now is the time to do so. WordPress 3.5 has now made this possible.

Multisites can now be installed and used in the subdirectory

Another improvement in WordPress 3.5 which multisite developers will appreciate is the ability to install WordPress Multisite in the subdirectory and not in the document root.

There’s more under the hood goodness that can be further explored if you want to. Some people wait a while before they install the latest WordPress update to give plugin developers time to update their own plugins. Make sure to backup your files before you do any updates.