Top WordPress Plugins February 2014

Dynamic Featured Image

Dynamic Featured Image gives you multiple featured image (post thumbnail) functionality that enables you to have multiple featured images within a post or page. This is especially helpful when you use other plugins, post thumbnails or sliders that use featured images. Why be limited to just one featured image alone when you have the option to add more.

Google Analytics Dashboard for WP

Google Analytics Dashboard for WP will display Google Analytics data and statistics inside your WordPress Blog. This plugin displays detailed analytics info and statistics about: number of visits, number of visitors, bounce rates, organic searches, pages per visit directly on your Admin Dashboard. Authorized users can also view statistics like Views, UniqueViews and top searches, on frontend, at the end of each article. The analytics data is collected in a fast and secure manner because Google Analytics Dashboard uses OAuth2 protocol and Google Analytics API. Its real-time feature displays real-time visitors, real-time sources and per page real-time traffic details

Shareaholic

Shareaholic is an extremely useful tool to get readers to actually discover and submit your articles to numerous social bookmarking sites. This plugin adds an attractive social bookmarking menu and related content widget to your posts, pages, index, or any combination of the three for easy sharing. You can increase pageviews and engagement by highlighting relevant content from across your site to your readers who would not otherwise encounter them. Shareaholic reports all of your important actionable social media metrics including popular pages on your website, referral channels, and who are making referrals and spreading your webpages on the internet on your behalf bringing you back more traffic and new visitors.

Google Drive WP Media

This plugin turns Google Drive into your upload files hosting storage where you can upload and get direct access to your Google Drive so you can manage, upload, and share your files remotely from your WordPress blog. You also have the option to auto insert your Google Drive files into your WordPress Media Library, attach your Google Drive files to your posts, upload your files from your WordPress Administration to Google Drive, or create folders to store your files.

Ebyline Payments

Ebyline Payments is a plugin that allows editors to pay blog contributors easily and safely, all within the WordPress Admin. This plugin is easy to install and setup. You can make payments via credit card to contributors directly in the WordPress interface. Contributors receive payments via PayPal. This plugin is totally tax compliant and the system generates 1099s for each freelancer you pay.

Thank Me Later

Thank Me Later sends ‘thank you’ emails to your commenters. Simply write a message saying thanks and it will be emailed after a time of your choice — 5 minutes, a day, a month, whenever. Thank Me Later attracts readers back to your blog and asks them to check for replies to their comments. Other uses of the plugin include: linking to your RSS feed to get more readers; linking to your Twitter or Facebook pages to get more followers or likes; or giving a discount for purchases.

Google Pagespeed Insights for WordPress

Google Pagespeed Insights is a tool that empowers you to make decisions that increase the performance of your website. Use Google Pagespeed Insights to increase your site’s performance, your search engine ranking, and your visitors browsing experience. This plugin features advanced data visualization, tagging, filtering, and snapshot technology. Report Summaries are a powerful and exclusive feature of Google Pagespeed Insights for WordPress. Summaries display your average Page Score, largest areas for improvement across ALL reports, as well as best and lowest performing pages. You can also configure Google Pagespeed Insights for WordPress to generate Desktop reports, Mobile reports, or both.

WordPress Resource : Free Icons

The Internet is a great resource for anything and everything – for free or for a fee – especially if you are into web design. Don’t break the bank just yet if you are just dabbling into web design and it is not a professional thing for you yet. Check out these high quality design elements and incorporate them into your projects:

Metrize Icons

Metrize Icons is a free collection of 300 metro-style icons for designers and developers. The bundle also includes Metrize Font Icons and the necessary scripts for compatibility with IE7 and the complete character map. This icon set is perfect for your apps or web projects. You may use these icons for both commercial and personal projects and customize them any way you like. All Icons, WebFont and Updates are Free.

Dashicons

Dashicons is a new feature that slipped into the admin side of WordPress with the recently-released 3.8. This feature gives plugin developers a nice set of pre-made and pre-loaded icons to use. Using them in your WordPress custom post types is as simple as adding a parameter to your register_post_type() function.

Genericons

Genericons are a free, GPL, flexible vector icons for blogs embedded in a webfont and are designed to be clean and simple keeping with a generic aesthetic. It can be used for instant HiDPI or to easily change colors on the fly. It includes: Social icons(Skype, Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Pocket), New generic icons (heart, lock and print), New editing icons (code, bold, italic, image), and New interaction icons (subscribe, unsubscribe, subscribed, reply all, reply, flag), among others.

400 Hand Drawn Icons

400 Hand Drawn Icons Set has been provided by Freepik.com exclusively for the readers of Blog Oh! Blog. These are free to use in your personal and commercial projects and are provided in SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) format and can be easily used on any website.

Free Line Icons from Elegant Themes

This free line-style icon set from Elegant Themes ships with a total of 100 different icons and is a re-mastering and expansion on their previous Divi Icons. The new set has been re-created at a new size and line-weight, and 50 new icons have been added as well! The download package includes the vectored .AI and .SVG files, as well as 32px and 64px .PNGs.

Free eCommerce Icon Set

This set of 33 flat e-commerce icons were exclusively designed and created for Smashing Magazine by the team at Responsive. The icons are ideally suited to e-commerce projects and include many popular payment providers, including Bitcoin. The icons come in different-sized PNGs (32 × 32, 64 × 64, 128 × 128 and 256 × 256 pixels), and the set includes Photoshop and Illustrator files containing all of the icons. Released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license, freely available for private and commercial projects.

Enjoy these free graphic design resources and share your projects with us.

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.

Miscellaneous WordPress Themes January 2014

Start off the year in style with these miscellaneous WordPress themes to match your online business:

Cafeteria Responsive WordPress Theme

Cafeteria Responsive WordPress Theme is a premium theme designed for a cafeteria web site, a restaurant web site, or any other types of food service website such as bistros, bars, fast foods, bakeshops, etc. The sweet and deliciously saccharine design appeal of this theme will surely put a smile on your clients’ faces. The template is adaptive and very easy to customize sporting a semi retro style complete with parallax effects to help make your site simply irresistible.

Mercy NGO Charity & Environmental/Political Theme

Mercy Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and elegant theme, developed mainly to setup NGOs, non-profit organizations and corporate websites. It is easy to fully customize the layout, colors and style within minutes due to the superb flexibility of its framework. You can also create unique websites for other purposes like magazine, blog, creative or business. Use the color picker to create your own color scheme and make it as elegant or as high impact as you want. This theme is most suitable for small to large NGO organizations’ website. This clean and minimalist PayPal integrated theme allows you to add as many causes as you need, is translation ready with built in RTL support, and is also WooCommerce ready.

Humbleshop Minimal Easy Digital Downloads Theme

Humbleshop Premium WordPress Theme is a Bootstrap based framework theme designed for the Easy Digital Downloads Plugin. This simple and straightforward responsive theme comes with a real-time theme customizer, related product function, and is additional product image ready. It also includes scripts and plugins: Flexslider, Magnific Popup, Fitvids, Equalize, and Selectnav, to give you more customization options.

Party Night Night Club WordPress Theme

Partynight Premium WordPress Theme is a sleek and modern club and party WordPress Theme for night clubs, parties, night events etc. Its flat, clean, and tidy graphics create a classy vibe sans the usual garish and screaming designs typical of night club or events themes. Enhanced functionality allows users to easily customize the look of the theme. Main Features include: Revolution Slider, Events booking support, Table reservation support, Advanced Events organizer (tickets, event builder), WPML support, News Management, and Blog Management.

Actority WordPress Template for Casting Agencies

Actority Premium WordPress Theme is a professional responsive casting agencies’ WordPress template especially designed for those in the entertainment or theater industry. If you’re a producer looking for background talent, or a background actor looking for work, create your own online portal with Actority. This premium theme can also be for other kinds of agencies like real estate or a travel/tourist agency. This fully responsive theme includes several pages like: For Actors page, Application List page, Contact page, Portfolio page (filterable), and other additional page templates. Actority fits any screen, from the largest desktop screens, to any tablet size, down to the smallest smartphones and is very intuitive on any device.

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 Design and Development Trends 2014

What do you think WordPress has in store for the coming year?

Here are some of the ideas shared by key people in the WordPress community:

From Tomas Puig, WordCamp Chicago 2013:

  • Device fragmentation is driving the adoption of CMS technologies.
  • WordPress is going to be used as the backend to drive core business for small and large audiences
  • WordPress is the best system of record that is used by lots of people and is a pleasure to work with compared to other systems.
  • 30% of the Internet are familiar with WordPress. In the world of CMS’s, WordPress user acceptance is easy.
  • WordPress is democratizing the serving of content to native applications across all platforms. Not only is it a blogging platform alone but it is already being used and optimized as an application framework.

From Collis Ta’eed, CEO (Envato)

  • 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.
  • Incorporating motion in its various forms is another logical build on flat design. Everything is pointing to this becoming a major piece of interface design going forward.
  • WordPress will continue to dominate the open source CMS market. Its position feels unassailable thanks to a heady combination of usable software, massive community, and constantly improving product.
  • 2014 will see even more diversity in the tooling landscape from indie software development houses, SaaS companies, and the big A.

Currently powering over 21% of all websites – with 46 million downloads and thousands of WordPress themes built, bought and sold each day, the future of one of the most popular open source CMS’s existing today burns brighter than ever.

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.