Not Your Usual WordPress Themes Roundup

Multipurpose WordPress Themes are great for creating all types of websites but sometimes it’s more convenient and it saves a lot of time to use a ready-made theme that’s specific to your website requirements. Here are a few WordPress themes that are more than just your usual WordPress theme designs. Check them out:

Joglo – Woocommerce Real Estate Theme

Joglo Premium WordPress Theme is a modern real estate theme especially built for the real estate business. This WooCommerce enabled premium theme makes it easy to run an online realty company that can handle transactions like offering property for sale or home/apartment renting service. It has a sleek and dynamic design packed with features and functions like: Advanced Search where customers can easily browse any property filtered according to price, location, type or some other category or tag; Agents page listing agents names, description, and contact information; Responsive and custom layout; Property page with a contact form; and, Property detail page with map

Advocator: Professional Nonprofit Organizations

Advocator Premium WordPress Theme is primarily designed for non-profit, charity, organization, or advocacy related websites that aim to be interactive with their audience. This theme boasts of professional level accessibility and performance having been built using the Foundation 5 framework by Zurb. Key features include: audience can engage with you on mobile devices with ease, you can accept donations seamlessly, you can add Events for your organization, you can collect emails using Mailchimp, and if you’re a developer, you can customize super fast and efficiently.

Frisieur – WordPress Theme for Hairdressers

Frisieur Premium WordPress Theme is a fully responsive theme designed for hairdressers, hair salons, stylists, makeup artists, and similar professionals you need to set appointments with. This theme includes features and functions like: Working Appointment form, Approximate time with timepicker (compatible with two time types), Opening hours table, Google Map with geolocalization, and Working Contact Form, – elements necessary to booking clients online.

Pump – Responsive Wedding & Multi-purpose Theme

Pump Premium WordPress Theme is a Wedding Event & Multipurpose WordPress Theme all rolled into one. This super simple and yet fully functional responsive theme has endless possibilities not only for Weddings and events but even for business, corporate, or portfolio applications. This theme can grow with its users and convert into something else and adjust as the couple’s needs and interests evolve. It is also WooCommerce, BuddyPress, bbPress, and WPML ready.

WooCommerce Supermarket Theme – GoMarket

Woocommerce GoMarket Premium WordPress is a complete shopping solution for eCommerce owners. This theme includes 6 pre-designed stores making it easy to set up the store of your dreams. It features a
combination of Vertical Menu and Main Mega Menu to help customers navigate through the site easily.

Events and Entertainment WordPress Themes – December 2013

Get into the groove with these cool WordPress themes just in time for the most event-filled season of the year. Create a site for you or your clients that will surely stand out with these creative events and entertainment WordPress themes.

POLARIS – Responsive WordPress Theme

Polaris Premium WordPress Theme is an ultra responsive and modern one page WordPress Theme suitable for events or parties. This premium retina ready theme comes in 16 color styles and includes: Magnific popup, Font Awesome iconic font, parallax, easy to extend and much more. It is a great way to present your important events and activities all in one sweep.This premium theme is based on popular Twitter Bootstrap framework. This template uses the latest HTML5 and CSS3 technologies.

Clubix – Nightlife, Music & Events WordPress Theme

Clubix Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive theme designed especially for nightlife, events, and music related websites. Party goers,fans, followers, or nightlife club hoppers are always on the lookout for the latest happenings around town. A cool way to address the needs of this specific market is putting up an online calendar of events, concerts, gigs, tours, launches, and other events or nightlife activities that will keep them up to date. For music enthusiasts, Clubix has two custom post types ‘under the hood’ to help you create and upload new songs organised on albums and events. You can customize your background image and also the color of the main elements from the theme, add music players, sliders, WooCommerce, Google maps, and so much more.

Flycase – Complete Music Solution for WordPress

Flycase Premium WordPress Theme is a professional and easy-to-use Music WordPress Theme that is highly and easily customizable, ready for all devices, simple to set up, and even e-commerce ready. Specifically designed for music enthusiasts, professional or not, this theme includes all the features you need to present, promote and sell for your band or label. This edgy, modern theme has everything a fan wants and everything a music artist needs – from photo/video galleries, discography, tour dates, multiple playlists, etc. – all in one cool theme.

Amplify WordPress Theme

Amplify Premium WordPress Theme is not your typical band theme with its minimalist and clean design but still capable of managing music website requirement such as gigs, discography, and videos with ease using the AudioTheme plugin. The WordPress admin panel is transformed into your band’s ultimate management tool with an easy-to-use user interface. Add your own language and display RTL languages as intended. Upload your tracks and allow users to play clips or full songs on every page of your website with the custom audio player. It ties in directly to your AudioTheme tracks and offers an easy-to-use interface for selecting and updating tracks in the jukebox. This theme is powered by Foundation by Zurb and Sass, a powerful CSS pre-processor where you can either edit the CSS directly or use Sass to regenerate your theme CSS easily and quickly.

Applause – One-Page Responsive Music & DJ WP Theme

Applause Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive one page band & musicians theme, built using Bootstrap framework using HTML5 & CSS3. For all who love music or those who are in the music industry such as music bands, musicians, DJs, producers, labels or organizers of events and festivals, this theme is the perfect solution to organizing necessary information and media such as Events, Audio, Galleries and Videos. Applause can display each event on their own map with its location and venue, the price and availability of the tickets. It can display your latest audio tracks with awesome player and you can even add a remote link or upload your own mp3.

Niche WordPress Themes November 2013

Searching for a WordPress theme that fits you or your client’s specific needs can often be satisfied by multi purpose WordPress themes. The seed design can often be tweaked and twiddled with to create the whatever the desired website outcome intended. However, if you find a theme that already matches the type of website you need then a lot of design time can be saved and spent on optimizing other features of the website. Here are some of the latest niche WordPress themes that you might find useful for your website needs.

Organic Market Friendly eCommerce WordPress Theme

Organic Market Premium WordPress Theme is a fun and fresh eCommerce theme ideal for online stores and shops. The delightful and eye-catching colorful design has been tailored to an organic food store, but is highly customizable and can be used for anything else. This simple and no nonsense theme features the basic website necessities but is also equipped with WooCommerce integration and includes support for all WooCommerce product management, widgets, and shortcodes so you can add all your products and set up your storefront. It also includes Royal Slider and Layer Slider Support and support for custom shortcodes for product sliders, featured product sections.

Campus Premium Multi Purpose WordPress Theme

Campus Premium Multipurpose WordPress Theme is one of the newest WordPress themes for education and business. Based on the new Super Skeleton 2 Framework with the leanest and yet the most highly functional features maximizing all that WordPress has to offer. Significant features include: a brand new streamlined and simple to use theme options panel with simple visual cues, nested inline documentation, with the option to preload built in or user uploaded (Skin Builder) skins, the entire Google Fonts library, Drag & Drop Layout Builder, rock solid, compliant SEO friendly code, and the new WordPress 3.6 Post Formats UI, a ThemeForest first.

Medico – Medical and Health WordPress Theme

Medico Premium WordPress Theme is a feature-packed medical and health styled theme that is both stylish and functional. It features several important elements such as: a working appointment form, responsive HTML5 and CSS3 design, foundation grid using predefined HTML classes, Magellan – a style agnostic plugin, Clearing – a plugin that makes it easy to create responsive lightboxes with any size image, Joyride – an extremely flexible plugin that gives users a tour of your site or app when they visit, Visual Shortcode Generator, Styles manager – 1 click style change for many major elements, Portfolio with 2/3/4 columns support, pagination support with non-animated filtering, drag&drop item sorting, and so many other great features to get create a one of a kind medical/health website.

Metric Music Band Responsive WordPress Theme

Metric Premium WordPress Theme is a retro modern theme for all who love music, such as music bands, musicians, DJs, producers, labels or organizers of events and festivals. This bold and dynamic theme features a great way to present all the necessary information relevant to those in the music business such as Events, Albums, Galleries and Videos and even a Blog. This responsive and fluid theme can be displayed on all devices from mobile phones to desktop computers (smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktops). The theme is also SEO optimized because of its highly semantic and well structured source code.

Agriculture – All in One WooCommerce WordPress Theme

Agriculture Premium WordPress Theme makes going organic look easy. This WooCommerce ready theme boasts of a simple to use custom user interface that can turn website management into a task even a child can handle. You can easily add products, arrange them into categories, schedule automatic sales periods, manage delivery and other options with ease. This premium theme is based on an extended WordPress admin panel, with many custom shortcodes and widgets that are so easy in use and customize that even WordPress beginners can handle. It includes: Layer Slider and Revolution Slider plugins, Woocommerce, Super Extended Shortcodes pack for easy content formatting and improved presentation, a powerful Form Builder Tool, customly developed by CMSMasters, lets you create an unlimited amount of forms of different types and complexity, from simple contact forms to complex questionnaires with numerous fields, radio-buttons, checkboxes and dropdowns, text areas, as well as set validation for these fields.

Booklet Personal Blogging Theme

Booklet Premium WordPress Theme is a fresh take on the way blog themes have always been done. The portfolio like homepage is fully responsive and images and layout will automatically fit the screen no matter which device you are using. Inspired by popular e-readers, Booklet is a sleek version of your online diary. Some of the best features into this personal WordPress theme include the ability to change the background color and font color from black to white, change the size of the font and even read in fullscreen mode. Overall, a great way to add that personal touch to stories you want to share to the digital world.

The Wedding Day Responsive Theme

The Wedding Day Premium WordPress Theme is an elegant and lovely responsive wedding theme couples are sure to fall in love with. It is suitable for users with zero programming skills as well as advanced developers. The theme is the perfect match for your wedding with predefined styles and features its very own VamTam drag & drop builder. This drag and drop tool will save you lots of time on building your pages or posts with the use of a simple interface with simple drag & drop actions. The VamTam drag & drop page builder is tightly integrated with tinymce editor and you can switch to visual or text editor at any time without losing any changes. Buyers will also receive a bonus print invitation template for free.

Atlas Directory and Listings Premium WordPress Theme

Atlas Directory & Listings WordPress Theme is a front-end online directory portal where you allow members to register, login, edit profile, submit and manage (delete/update) listings, change membership settings, and so much more from the front-end without having to log into the WordPress dashboard.
Set up an online directory portal of any type – companies, shops, restaurants, real estate, websites and so on. One of the core features of Atlas is its email notifications where every action taken on your website is notified to the site admin allowing you to have full control over what goes on in your website. This feature can be easily disabled through the theme options panel.

How To Get Started Building Your Authority Site Using WordPress

WordPress is one of the most popular and most dynamic publishing platforms today. If you are planning to build your authority site from scratch, get the foundations right by building on solid ground. If you are wondering about the basic things you need to do to get started on your authority site check out the items listed below to help you out. This checklist can be a helpful guide for beginners and serve as a handy reminder to experienced WordPress users as well.

  • Secure your domain name. Choose your name wisely. Check how it will appear in the url as some words read differently without spacing in between. You don’t want to be stuck with a name you will regret. (eg. Top Ten Bands Hits.com might mean something else when the words are all squished together.)

  • Get a webhost like Bluehost.com to host your website’s content. Take note of features like unlimited domains, bandwidth, downtime, etc.

  • Install and configure WordPress as your publishing platform. Some web hosts include WordPress in their website packages and offer free installation. Take advantage of these features.

  • Choose a WordPress theme and install. There are tons of WordPress themes available, some free. Choose a premium theme over a free one as this is generally more stable and the developer/author usually offers and provides customer support for theme installation, issues and bugs.

  • Install basic plugins like Akismet, Google Analytics, WP SEO, etc. to beef up your site.

  • Set up pages for important standard information such as: About Us, Terms of Use or Terms of Service, Contact Us, and Privacy Policy. These add credibility to your website.

  • Add and integrate social networking links like Facebook (business page), Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Linkedin, etc. into your website. These networks help promote your content and will generate traffic for you if optimized properly.

  • Fill your site with fresh content based on the keyword research you’ve been working on (read more about this in our previous article: Building your Authority Site using the Google Keyword Planner Tool).

These are just some of the practical steps you can do as you start building your authority site using WordPress. If you have more tips and techniques, please share by leaving a comment. We’d love to hear from you.

30 Different Content Slider Plug-ins for WordPress

When looking at websites, slideshows and carousels are the best way to present images and this is usually achieved using jQuery. To have jQuery slider galleries or other image presentation on your web page you have to code or download a jQuery slider plug-in and integrate it. Those sliders give effective looks and are very attractive to users.

Here you can see 30 Different content slider plug-in for WordPress. Hope these plug-ins help you…Enjoy!!!

(more…)

25 Excellent WordPress Tumblog Themes

Tumblr is a popular micro blogging platform where people can make small posts, share links and images with others, reblog the posts of others, etc. It is a platform that sort of combines the features of a blog with social networking.
(more…)

GPL Licensing and WordPress for Normal People

The average WordPress user probably starts off with a simple and very basic desire to set up his/her own website. There are many platforms out there but the platform that most users end up with or choose to use is WordPress. These users either attempt to set up their own website on their own and learn as they go while others hire someone to do it for them. Not many are familiar with the legal or technical aspects surrounding the use of this software but it does not remove the responsibility of finding out the software’s terms, conditions, and proper use. Let’s familiarize ourselves with some of these technical terms. Some of these terms are quoted verbatim to remain true to its original intent.

What is WordPress anyway?

WordPress is a free and open source publishing software and content management system (CMS) with a focus on ease of use, speed and a great user experience. “WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPL.

What does free and open source mean?

Open source doesn’t just mean that you can view the source code — it has political and philosophical implications as well. Open source, or “Free Software”, means you are free to modify and redistribute the source code under certain conditions. Free doesn’t refer to the price, it refers to freedom. The difference between the two meanings of free is often characterized as “Free as in speech vs. free as in beer.” The GPL is free as in speech.

“Free software” does not mean “noncommercial”. A free program must be available for commercial use, commercial development, and commercial distribution. Commercial development of free software is no longer unusual; such free commercial software is very important. You may have paid money to get copies of free software, or you may have obtained copies at no charge. But regardless of how you got your copies, you always have the freedom to copy and change the software, even to sell copies.

GPL or General Public License according to WordPress terms and conditions:

The GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software – to make sure the software is free for all its users. This General Public License applies to most of the Free Software Foundation’s software & to any other program whose authors commit to using it.

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for this service if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs; and that you know you can do these things.

To protect your rights, we need to make restrictions that forbid anyone to deny you these rights or to ask you to surrender the rights. These restrictions translate to certain responsibilities for you if you distribute copies of the software, or if you modify it. For example, if you distribute copies of such a program, whether gratis or for a fee, you must give the recipients all the rights that you have. You must make sure that they, too, receive or can get the source code. And you must show them these terms so they know their rights.

The reasons for WordPress releasing under the GPL are both practical and idealistic. WordPress was born of the very freedom mentioned earlier. The predecessor to the WordPress project, b2/cafelog, was also an open source project.
(source: WordPress.org/gpl)

What does this mean to the average Joe?

According the GNU.org and its Free Software Definition, you have the freedom:

to run the software for any purpose or any kind of job
to study how the software works, change it and improve it
to redistribute copies in a manner that does not conflict with central freedoms
to redistribute copies of your modified version to benefit the whole community

Split Licenses, the GPL, the Marketplace and the WordPress Foundation

The GPL and WordPress conflict is not new. There have been several occasions before when conflicts of interest have risen between theme providers (ex. Chris Pearson and Matt Mullenweg) and the WordPress Foundation’s interpretation of how the GPL license is applied. The most recent debacle involving Jake Caputo, ThemeForest, and WordPress (resulting in Caputo’s banning from speaking at WordCamps) surfaced earlier this year. Envato and WordPress have been at odds because of the alleged violations of the GPL by the former. Envato claims to be GPL compliant while at the same time been implementing dual-license or split licensing particularly on WordPress themes and plugin. What’s wrong with that?

Here’s a simple analogy to illustrate this.

Choosing a publishing platform is like choosing a car brand. You have several choices: Chevy, Cadillac, a Benz, or a Toyota. Whichever you choose, the technology to create it, the patents, the materials used, and all the basic components like the framework, the engine, the wheels, and everything that makes it run to take you anywhere you want are already built into its system, subject to the manufacturer’s warranty. When it transfers to you, the car manufacturers have no control with what you do with it – use it for business, donate, repaint, etc.

As far as publishing platforms are concerned, you have WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla as the vehicle of your content. In the case of WordPress, the HTML code, the PHP and everything under hood that makes it run are built in and are 100% GPL. When it is transferred to your possession, free or otherwise, you have the freedom to modify, change, sell, copy, distribute, and do whatever you want under the GPL license provided that it retains all those freedoms that you enjoyed when you first got it.

The conflict between Envato and WordPress arose because of the licensing policies of the former, that were not, in the eyes of WordPress, GPL compliant. As far as WordPress is concerned, if your theme is “riding” on the WordPress framework and cannot run independently apart from it, then it inherits and is subject to all the GPL attributes as well.

On the other hand, Envato’s split license states that:

Envato’s marketplace license for themes or plugins sold on the marketplaces covers all the components of these items, except for the specific components covered by the GPL. This is why it’s called a split license: because different license terms can cover individual components that make up a single item.
The PHP component and integrated HTML are covered by the GPL. The rest of the components created by the author (such as the CSS, images, graphics, design, photos, etc) are covered by the marketplace license.

As explained earlier, our license also allows for specific components of an item, which inherit the GPL from the platform they’re built for, to be licensed under the GPL. Using this split license complies with the GPL’s requirements, while still providing protection of the author’s copyright on assets they’ve created.

There are valid points on both sides. Proprietary licensing violates the spirit of the GPL while on the other hand, piracy on the creative output of theme authors are also valid concerns. Conflicts arise to reveal gray areas that need to be dealt with or addressed. Striking a balance between GPL compliance and protecting the creative or intellectual output of theme authors is a tough juggling act. We believe the conversation will still continue.

Update as of February 2013

Envato did a survey about licensing among their users and published the results specifically relating to GPL. They have announced that a 100% GPL option is now available for authors on ThemeForest. Jake Caputo has also posted that he has again been invited to participate in WordCamps.

Useful Articles to Read:

Why WordPress Themes are Derivative of WordPress
WordPress, GPL, and Copyright Case Law
Matt Mullenweg – Q&A – WordPress & GPL
Themes are GPL too

30 Inspirational Non-Profit WordPress Themes 2013

Amongst all the civilized life of shopping malls and movie lexes we must not forget that there are parts in this world whose inhabitants don’t get even the basic necessities of life like food and water. Innocents get killed everyday in calamities like bomb blasts, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc. Children are out of schools as their parents cannot pay for their education. People die even from minor curable diseases merely because they didn’t have the money to see a doctor. The situation is far more serious than what I can describe in a few sentences. The statement that I wish to make is that we should care about others and should donate generously to non-profit organizations that are trying to help those in need.

Perhaps the following collection of 30 WordPress themes, designed especially for the non-profits may make a small contribution in making the world a better place.

Of course different niches have different site design requirements. A social networking site should look and behave in a completely different way than what a gaming site should look like. Special care and attention was devoted to the following templates so that they craft out into a good and clean look, which is what is required for non-profit organizations.

Some of the templates below are without charge but due to certain restrictions we can’t just giveaway everything absolutely free, although we would have loved to. Hence we have charged a nominal amount in the remaining templates. Scroll down and take a look.

(more…)

The Basic Parts of a WordPress Theme

Language consists of words that are classified into different groupings depending on their function. The English language is divided into 8 parts commonly known as: nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections. These words can be used in combination with one another to express a complete thought – a sentence. Other languages may have different classifications but generally, each language is comprised of several word classifications which when combined with each other express a specific thought.

We have been slowly laying the basic foundation to understanding WordPress these past few weeks. Last week, we learned common phrases that you hear in and around the WordPress community that you might not fully understand but have become familiar with because of common use. This week we shall be a bit more technical and try to introduce a little bit more of what goes on behind a WordPress theme, its basic parts, and how it is put together to function the way we normally see it.

A WordPress theme is quite similar to a sentence. It is a combination of several parts to express a visual representation of a design thought. Let’s take a look at these basic parts (not necessarily 8) to give us an idea of what they are and how they function.

A WordPress theme is comprised of as few or as many template files as you like. These templates are PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) source files used to generate the pages requested by visitors and are output as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). (source: codex.wordpress.org) Each of these template files can be configured to function according to a specific design.

WordPress Themes use a combination of template files, template tags, and CSS files to generate your WordPress site’s look. If you are currently a WordPress user (self-hosted or not) you can familiarize yourself by checking out the templates listed below in the backend admin panel of your site. You can look for them under Appearance>Theme>Editor. These may all seem Greek for now and and hard to understand but the goal for now is to simply observe how the codes are written in these templates. Just make sure you don’t edit them by mistake.

Below are the basic templates that you will find among the many other templates in your WordPress theme:

style.css

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a language for defining the formatting used in a Web site. This includes things like colours, background images, typefaces (fonts), margins, and indentation.

The basic principle of CSS is to allow the designer to define a style (a list of formatting details like fonts, sizes, and colours) and then apply it to one or more portions of one or more HTML pages using a selector. To every CSS style definition there are two components: the selector, which defines which tags the style will be applied to, and the attributes, which specify what the style actually does.

CSS allows you to store style presentation information (like colors and layout) separate from your HTML structure. This allows precision control of your website layout and makes your pages faster and easier to update.

index.php

index.php is a universal template, it is what any page (home, archive, single post, etc) will use if no other template is available for it. The index file controls what the homepage looks like.

For the visual learners out there, a very helpful visual resource you can check out is this infographic Anatomy of a WordPress Theme made by Yoast. More on this next week!