UPDATED April 12, 2021: 2021 is sure to be another great year for WordPress Theme development. Like the millions and millions of people using WordPress, we eagerly await the Themes and Plugins to be released this year, and you can …
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 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 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 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 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 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.
Get your website ready for 2014 with these new WordPress plugins that will help you maximize the functionality of your website:
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 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 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 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 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.
Features as plugins! That’s what’s in store in the latest WordPress iteration, version 3.8, now in its first beta version with the next target release dates set – WordPress 3.8 Beta 2 on November 27, code freeze on December 5th and a final release on December 12th. This latest beta version brings together several of the features as plugins projects which include: Admin Help Improvements, Media Library Grid View, Pages & Menus Merge, Better Signups, JSON REST API, among many feature developments being worked on.
The guys over at WordPress.org even made a haiku specifically for this release:
Alphabet soup of
Plugins as features galore
The future is here.
Several items that developers (if you are one) are being asked to test include:
Developers are also being asked to test as many plugins and themes with admin pages against the new features including how to make the admin interface fit the MP6 aesthetic better. For those who are certified WordPress geeks, you can have fun trying to break 3.8 and finding all the bugs and loopholes you can. If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. Or, if you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on the WordPress Trac. There, you can also find a list of known bugs and everything that has been fixed so far.
You may Download WordPress 3.8 Beta 1 (zip) or use the WordPress Beta Tester plugin to grab your copy.
Keep yourself up to date with the latest trends and technology on WordPress and web design with these upcoming events and conferences. Plan your schedules and book early.
Event: Industry 2014 – An Event for Web Professionals
Date: 22 – 23 April 2014
Venue: Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
Topic(s): Managing design in organisations, Metrics, Assumptions and Design, User Experience, CSS, Business, ‘Big Projects’, HTML/JS and Mobile Web and Web Performance
Event: Port80 Handheld Mashup
Date: 27 – 28 Nov 2013
Venue: Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, Wales
Topic(s): Big Ideas for Small Devices
Event: Port80 2014
Date: 16 May 2014
Venue: TBA
Topic(s): TBA
Event: 2014 SXS Interactive Festival Week
Date: 6 – 16 March 2013
Venue: Austin Convention Center, Austin, Texas
Topic(s): Health, privacy, hacking and design, nonprofits, fashion, space exploration and gaming — and everything in between
Event: The Business of Web Design
Date: 18 July 2014
Venue: Cardiff, Wales
Topic(s): Art of web design freelancing and running your own web design show
Event: Le Web’13 Paris
Date: 9 -12 December 2013
Venue: 50 Avenue du President Wilson 93200 La Plaine Saint Denis
Topic(s): Mobile, hardware, social, etc. and their potential trajectories, Technology
Event: International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
Date: 24 -27 February 2014
Venue: Haifa, Israel
Topic(s): Annual meeting of the intelligent interfaces community and serves as the principal international forum for reporting outstanding research and development on intelligent user interfaces
Event: The Next Web Europe 2014
Date: 24 – 25 April 2014
Venue: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Topic(s): Internet and Technology
Event: An Event Apart
Date: 9 – 11 December 2013
Venue: The Palace Hotel, San Francisco CA
Topic(s): Web design, typography, mobile web, CSS
Event: WebVisions NYC
Date: 3 – 4 April 2014
Venue: NYIT Auditorium on Broadway
Topic(s): Explore the Future of the Web
Event: New Media Expo 2014
Date: 4 – 6 January 2014
Venue: Rio All Suite Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada
Topic(s): Blogging, Podcasting, Web TV & Video
WordPress fans will be pleased to know that the latest iteration of WordPress – WordPress 3.7 has been released. If you are a developer or simply a certified WordPress geek you might be interested to test the beta version. The scheduled release for the final version is October as they have decided to shorten the development cycle and focus on a few key improvements.
Here are some of the features that have been updated in this latest beta version that you can test out:
(source: WordPress News)
If you’d like to be more involved in the development and help test WordPress 3.7 beta, try the WordPress Beta Tester plugin. Just make sure you don’t do it on a live site.
Technology has one of the fastest turnovers in terms of design and features. If you are into technology and the latest tech products out there, show them off on your website on an equally tech-savvy looking theme like these WordPress themes we’ve found:
Host Depot is a theme designed for modern hosting and server services. It has a built-in layer slider that allows you to do 170 3D and 2D hardware accelerated transitions to catch the eye of visitors. The theme also has a hassle-free and easy to use pricing table editor. Host Depot integrates well with WHMCS to give you seamless processing of your financial and logistic transactions. You can easily set-up forums on your site with the bbPress plugin. HostDepot is indeed a great solution for those in the web hosting business.
Elegant Hosting is a sleek WordPress theme designed for web hosting services. The main strength of this theme is the easy to manage hosting plan tables. This theme has a special feature to add hosting plans right at the admin panel. With the plans displayed side by side, comparison may conveniently be done by potential customers. You can customize the theme with shortcodes to create the look most appropriate to your marketing efforts. Theme also comes with a slider which will be useful in marketing.
Appland Premium Theme is a WordPress theme designed for promoting your hottest app. Built on the powerful Twitter Bootstrap, this theme is designed to work well on mobile devices incorporating touch gestures that works even on the Flexslider. Appland also has amazing eye-catching 3D parallax effects to help you keep visitors glued to your site. Customization is easy with the plethora of design options and features such as using the shortcode generator, available Google fonts, the quick uploader feature, awesome icons, and so much more. Appland is responsive fitting for a theme designed for mobile.
Mega Host Premium WordPress Theme is an impressive and modern theme designed for virtual hosting services. Although primarily designed for web hosting, this theme includes all the necessary features to build a corporate website as well. A notable feature of this theme is that it is built on twitter bootstrap, making it more mobile device friendly. Its advanced admin panel and its CSS design make it easy to customize. Mega Host is also built for retina-ready devices giving you sharp stunning images on these devices.
Create that interactive effect with this stunning WordPress Theme – Rocking Parallax a WordPress theme especially designed to showcase your iPhone apps. This theme makes a great one page solution to your marketing needs. This theme’s awesome parallax 3d effects will definitely make your apps shine. It features many design elements that allow you to create countless mix and match combinations and layouts that will match your design aesthetics. Rocking Parallax Premium WordPress Theme is the perfect tool for marketing and promoting your iPhone apps.
Mobile apps are one of the hottest ways to make it big in the market. The influx of free and paid apps flooding the market is an indicator of what people are interested in nowadays. Apley Mobile WordPress Page is a clean and modern theme designed to showcase mobile apps. The elegant black, minimalist features suggests the theme’s affinity to most mobile devices. It has an easy to use WordPress customizer to help you tweak the theme according to your preferences. Apley also has a fully working blog, a custom homepage, a custom subscribe form, a shortcodes plugin to help you customize in minutes, and many more features.
Cloud Hoster is a professional looking WordPress theme designed to promote your web hosting and server services. This theme is equipped with the popular Revolution Slider so you can create stunning slideshows with different and customizable transitions to grab the attention of casual visitors. Cloud Hoster also has a unique two color blog which can be configured at the backend. Shortcodes give you the power to customize and stylize this theme with ease.
This responsive theme is also built on twitter bootstrap with advanced API features to help your site look good on mobile devices and ensure a pleasant browsing experience for your users.
WordPress professionals like theme and plugin authors, developers and other WordPress service providers constantly face the challenge of providing ample, quality after-sales support to their customers. It is a tricky area that even seasoned professionals need to constantly juggle. For those who are starting out new in the WordPress marketplace, it can be overwhelming to have a successful and highly-popular WordPress theme doing well as far as sales go because of the twin responsibility of providing high-volume customer support. Customer support can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back on any theme that sells like hotcakes which explains a lot of WordPress theme one-hit wonders. That’s why it is crucial to also include setting up a framework for addressing customer support during a WordPress theme’s development process and not be caught unprepared. Here are some useful tools and plugins to consider to address that need:
Live2support is a leading live chat software with advanced features. Live2Support! Live Chat Software service is a simple plug and play hosted service and does not require any software installation or IT expertise.
You just need to place small code into your webpage to enable Live Support on your website. Live2Support’s flexibility and versatility allows you to tailor independent and separate chat windows for departments such as sales, product promotions, technical support, billing and customer service departments. Live2Support’s live support application generates detailed chat transcripts. This enables you to use these transcripts to conduct market research, develop customer profiles, train chat operators and evaluate chat operator performance.
WordPress Advanced Ticket System (WATS) is the ultimate ticketing system for all organizations looking at enhancing their customer relationship experience. This is a plugin that adds to WordPress the features of a complete ticket system: ticket numbering, ticket integration, ticket keys, ticket submission, ticket followup, ticket notification, et cetera. This allows users to submit tickets to report problems or get support on whatever you want. Users can set the status, priority, product and type of each ticket.
wpsc Support Tickets is an open source WordPress support ticket system for WordPress using jQuery. It is a plugin for WordPress that allows you to offer support tickets to your website visitors & customers. It is lightweight, open source, Ajax enabled, and easy to use and administrate.
Add a powerful FAQ & Knowledge Base on your WordPress Blog or Website with this plugin from Casengo. Casengo’s Cloud-based, affordable social customer support software brings the human touch back into customer service. Regardless of channel type, it simplifies real-time conversation by presenting a unique Hybrid Messaging Timeline.
Add live chat to your blog or website quick and easy with Casengo, so you can handle enquiries via email and live chat directly from your website. Casengo helps you to respond to customers faster than ever and improve their satisfaction with a groovy mixture of real-time chat and email. Casengo’s cloud application for customer support blends the best of email and chat. It empowers web shops and other small businesses to more readily deliver the right answer at once.
Zendesk for WordPress allows you to bring your helpdesk, powered by Zendesk, into your blog or site. Zendesk offers: easy-to-use self-service options with knowledge-base and community features, one-on-one support through any channel (website, phone, email, Twitter, Facebook, chat) and turns it into a ticket, a ticketing system built for speed (simplified support team workflow) with streamlined systems for managing support content, access to all the info you need all in one workspace, efficient group conversations, and last, but not the least, portability through mobile apps on all devices.
SabaiDiscuss is a premium questions and answers plugin for WordPress. The plugin features the ability for users to ask and answer questions similar to Stack Overflow or Yahoo Answers. SabaiDiscuss is an ideal tool not only for building a community driven question-and-answer website but also for building a discussion forum, a knowledge base, or even a helpdesk portal for WordPress.
In an article on WordPress Plugin vulnerabilities, we mentioned that the top 50 most popular plugins were tested for security and vulnerability by Checkmarx, a leading provider in application security. The first scan was conducted in January 2013 where it was discovered that more than a third of the 50 plugins were vulnerable. The second scan, conducted in early June 2013, was performed on the updated versions of all plugins. However, only six of these updates were free of those previously found vulnerabilities. These were:
– creates a social network for the organization. # Downloads: 1,319,743.
A BuddyPress Plugin is a program, or a set of one or more functions, written in the PHP scripting language, that adds a specific set of features or services to the BuddyPress site, which can be seamlessly integrated with the site using access points and methods provided by the BuddyPress Plugin API. BuddyPress allows easy modification, customization, and enhancement to a BuddyPress powered WordPress site. Instead of changing the core programming of BuddyPress, you can add functionality with BuddyPress Plugins.
– forum software. # Downloads: 483,28. Alerted by Checkmarx to their vulnerabilities.
bbPress is forum software, made the WordPress way – simple to setup, fully integrated, multisite forum, simple interface, customizable templates, highly extensible
– shopping cart plugin. # Downloads: 2,209,352.
WP e-Commerce is a free WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin that lets customers buy your products, services and digital downloads online.
– an e-commerce store. # Downloads: 469,503
WooCommerce is a free, powerful WordPress eCommerce plugin. With the extendability of a huge catalog of commercial themes and extensions we have all the tools you might need to get your shop running. Transform your WordPress website into a thoroughbred eCommerce store, delivering enterprise-level quality and features whilst backed by a name (WooThemes) you can trust.
– site optimization by caching. # Downloads: 1,450,980. Most likely fixed as part of a security overhaul following an external full disclosure of some vulnerabilities.
W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your site by increasing server performance, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.
– site optimization by caching. # Downloads: 3,984,976. Most likely fixed as part of a security overhaul as with W3 Total Cache.
A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files. This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. Supercache really comes into it’s own if your server is underpowered, or you’re experiencing heavy traffic. Super Cached html files will be served more quickly than PHP generated cached files but in everyday use, the difference isn’t noticeable.
Note: Downloads statistics are as of the time of the tests.