‘Tis The Season To Be Jolly With These Christmas WordPress Plugins

It’s the most wonderful time of the year indeed and what better way to spread the holiday cheer than to give your visitors a taste of Christmas on your website with these fun and cheery Christmas WordPress plugins.

Advent Calendar

Advent Calendar is a simple calendar plugin to show off a list of 24 days before Christmas. Each day can be viewed automatically once published. A preview of the featured image for that day is also displayed with a link to the actual page.

WP Super Snow

WP Super Snow is an awesome, customizable, and very lightweight free Christmas snow falling plugin that uses jQuery and CSS3. Create your own winter scene and add falling snow flakes to your website. You can also customize these snow flakes using various configuration options in your WordPress Dashboard.

Snow Storm

Snow Storm is a simple and festive Christmas plugin that displays falling snow flakes on the front page of your WordPress website. Give your visitors a glimpse of winter wonderland and let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

Christmas Countdown Clock

Christmas Countdown Clock is a countdown plugin that displays days and hours until Christmas day. Select from a range of designs, sizes, background colours, pictures, and animations to build up excitement for the big day.

Christmas Snow – Snow Fall WordPress Plugin

Christmas Snow will turn your WordPress site into a snowy WordPress site – a great marketing move especially if you are targeting the Christmas Season Sales. This plugin has around 25 different types of snow flakes to choose from. You can create multiple types of snow flakes, control the number, speed, rotation speed, snow flake size, wind direction, and opt enable or disable for mobile devices.

Christmas Animation – Pro WordPress Plugin

Christmas Animation – Pro WordPress Plugin can be used to add fun, quirky animation Effects to welcome your visitors. You get 30 Christmas images to create multiple animations you can show on posts or pages. You can control image speed, size, rotation speed, and the slide in and slide out effects.

Have fun with these plugins and give your visitors something to smile about this Christmas.

WordPress 3.8 Beta 1 Released!

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:

  • The new admin design, especially the responsive aspect of it. Try it out on different devices and browsers, see how it goes, especially the more complex pages like widgets or seldom-looked-at-places like Press This. Color schemes, which you can change on your profile, have also been spruced up.
  • The dashboard homepage has been refreshed, poke and prod it.
  • Choosing themes under Appearance is completely different, try to break it however possible.
  • A new default theme, Twenty Fourteen.
  • Over 250 issues have been closed already.

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.

Running Out of Content? Content Curation Might Be Your Answer

Have you ever gone down a supermarket aisle and just labored at the thought of choosing which cereal box to choose from the dozens and dozens of flavors right before you? Or what about a candy store? A bag shop? A book store? Having so many choices can be pretty overwhelming.

Imagine the Internet is as wide and as deep as the Pacific Ocean – filled with letters, words, images, music, videos, games, information, spam, bacon, and everything else you can think of. All this content begging for you attention and yet you don’t know where to start, which to choose. So many choices. In the end, you end up with nothing. What if someone filtered out all the stuff irrelevant to you and presented you with the best of the content you are interested in and then served it to you on a silver platter? Convenient, don’t you think? This process of sorting through the vast majority of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful way is called Content Curation. (Neil Patel, Kiss Metrics)

What is Content Curation?

Content curation is hand selecting content created by other sources and sharing them with your community. Best done when whoever is curating adds their own explanation for sharing, reaction or opinions.
– C.C. Chapman author of Amazing Things Will Happen and co-author of Content Rules.

According to Michael Kolowich of KnowledgeVision,

Content curation is a way to view the world through an expert’s eyes. A great curator selects from a great many sources, is clear on mission and scope, is consistent on selection criteria (“most thoughtful”, “most original”, “funniest”, “latest”), adds value with indexing and/or commentary, gives credit where credit is due, and shares generously with his/her sources.

“… Content curation also pulls from many sources. However, instead of automatically posting every piece of content pulled in there is a manual filtering and sorting process that takes place in order to select only the most valuable pieces of content for a given audience. Curation also involves adding helpful annotation that frames the information already provided from the original source in such a way as to add additional value and/or understanding.” – (source: Nathan Weller, ManageWP)

We know that the name of the game today is delivering high quality relevant content on a regular basis. Google demands this. Google rewards this. Unfortunately, the reality is, your content creativity well can sometimes run dry. And when that happens what do you do? Many websites turn to content curation. Is it a valid option?

At SXSW 2013, WordPress CEO Matt Mullenweg stated that content curation along with long form content would be one of the key areas of focus for his company in the future.

Of course there will always be detractors and those who will argue against it in favor of original content creation and this is normal. However, websites will benefit when content curation is layered with content creation – adding a different dimension and variety to the usual fare being dished out.

Curation tools, websites, and plugins are readily available and have made it simple and easy for anyone to curate content and distribute it within seconds. If you are interested in integrating content curation into your WordPress site, check out one of the more popular ones, Primal for WordPress to help you get started in the right direction in no time.

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.

Useful WordPress Widgets For Your Website

Not sure which widgets to add to your website? Widgets are handy tools or content that make it easy to customize the content of your sidebar(s). You can add, arrange, and remove them from the sidebar(s) of your blog according to your design and function preferences. Here are some useful and popular widgets to beef up the overall functionality of your WordPress theme.

Sidebar and Widget Manager

This powerful widget manager allows you to have full control over your WordPress theme pages, layouts, and content and turn them into widgetized, responsive layouts. With its easy to use grid manager, this tool allows you to drop and drag widgets into any part of the page. You can replace existing sidebars with custom ones, add a sidebar in a page template file, manage vertical and horizontal widget alignment, and so much more. This widget supports other popular widgets such as WooCommerce, WPML, BuddyPress and BBpress. Designed to fit into the core WordPress design, the Sidebar and Widget Manager requires easy administration with minimal fuss.

Taxonomies Filter Widget

Taxonomies Filter Widget is a robust but powerful WordPress plugin that creates a widget which acts as a filter for your categories, tags, taxonomies and numerical custom fields. Visitors will then be able to do faceted searches on your site to filter posts and pages by taxonomies and numerical custom fields, using drop-downs, checkboxes, radio buttons, multi select and range sliders. While built especially for sites with a variety of categories, custom taxonomies and custom posts (eg: shops, directories, tutorials, job boards or listings), this plugin will also do a great job at filtering the WordPress posts and pages by categories, tags and even post format. Search can be done using dropdowns, checkboxes, radio buttons, multi-select and range sliders. Hierarchical navigation is also possible, allowing readers to drill down to specific information.

Popular Posts Bar Widget

This two-in-one widget allows you to show trending posts by comments or views according to a custom time interval, in say, the last 7 days. What makes this Popular Posts Widget unlike the rest is that it displays your most popular posts in a bar format. You can customize the number of posts to be shown or set a time lapse filter to show only those related to a specific time frame. The graphic display engages the curiosity of visitors thus encouraging them to check out the most popular posts in your site. The widget also gives out information on how many visitors have checked out your posts which can prove valuable to you as a provider of content.

Twitter Ultimate WordPress Plugin

Twitter Ultimate is a user friendly, highly customizable WordPress plugin you can use to display real time twitter feed based on the search word / username / list entered. You can: display tweets from usernames or tweets mentioning a word, display tweets from multiple queries or usernames, control number of tweets to be shown in the feed, control speed of incoming tweets, embed the widget directly on your pages or posts, etc. This gives you real time, live feedback for a specific post or page.

Hello Ajax Tabs

“Hello ajax tabs” is a WordPress plugin, which can be used for creating tabs element from any widgets you have. This plugin comes with 16 predefined styles and 23 animation effects, ajax support, multi tabs support, easing support, vertical tabs support, menu width and height adjustment controls for vertical tabs, fixed height support, other useful features to ensure you can create the tabs you need.

Dropbox Frontend Slider

The Dropbox Frontend Slider widget allows you to display dropbox images directly on your website. You can display these images either using the flexslider without effects or create your own effects. You can also choose between various frontend image sizes, choose the direct URL from Dropbox where the images are located, add or edit your dropbox images and immediately see the changes coming up on the frontend, etc.

WordPress eCommerce Opportunities for WordPress Professionals for 2014

The Internet has significantly changed and reshaped the workforce profile in the last few years. It has opened up opportunities for work outside of the traditional 9 to 5 setup and the lure of “work from home” or “work anywhere” is irresistible. Because of this, more and more people are opting to liberate themselves from the office cubicle and pursue non traditional work opportunities because of the flexible work hours and the income potential it presents – most of which can be found online.

The global economic landscape is flat in the sense that anyone in the world, regardless of location or educational attainment, can become the next big business online. The challenge for most businesses is how to take their bricks and mortar mentality into the world of bricks and clicks.These people need experts who can help them build their dream business – online. For WordPress professionals, the opportunities to service this sector cannot be ignored.

According to comScore,

The comScore report found that retail e-commerce sales produced over $50 billion dollars last quarter. The study found that e-commerce sales have seen double-digit growth for 10 consecutive quarters. While growth this quarter was strong, comScore found that it was slightly down from the previous two quarters.

“The first quarter of 2013 was fairly strong for online retailers, with total e-commerce sales surpassing $50 billion for only the second time on record,” said comScore Chairman Gian Fulgoni.
“While the year-over-year growth rate of 13 percent remained healthy, it was a point or two below that of the preceding quarters.”

According to the report, sales growth was down one percentage point on a quarter-over-quarter basis. E-commerce sales growth was also reported to be down two percentage points since Q3 2012. Fulgoni surmised that the slowdown was caused by payroll tax increases, which took effect in 2013.

ComScore’s report found that digital content and subscriptions, apparel, sport/fitness, consumer electronics, and consumer-packaged goods saw the greatest amount of e-commerce sales growth this quarter. The report shows that all categories saw over 20 percent growth year-over-year.

Here are a few key strategies WordPress professionals can use on how to take advantage of the booming WordPress eCommerce business opportunities:

Think Local, Sell Global. – think of businesses and services in your local area that have the potential to go global

  • local retail stores in your community that can sell globally – eg. books, accessories, jewelry, hobby stores, food, specialty shops
  • personal and professional services – consultants, freelancers, financial advisers, coaching services, tutorials, accountants, DIY-ers
  • NGOs, events, charitable institutions, fundraisers, non profit organizations
  • niche businesses – realtors, travel agents, auto dealers
  • small to medium scale businesses

Master the eCommerce process and understand how each step functions. WordPress professionals need to be well-versed on how the standard eCommerce process works:

  • shopping cart – should be simple enough for the customer (eg. WooCommerce, easy digital downloads, gravity forms, etc.)
  • payment gateway
  • merchant account
  • merchant’s bank account

Study your client’s needs and specifications and how you can integrate, merge, or streamline their current business practices and processes to their website. Don’t be afraid to ask questions and provide suggestions on how to modify or improve how transactions are processed.

Price yourself right. – Building an eCommerce site is more than just choosing an eCommerce supported WordPress theme, adding a plugin, and hitting the publish button. Consider the scope and the size of the whole project, the after installation support, and any additional web admin and system maintenance support you might be asked to provide before giving a price quote.

One of the highlights of the comScore Q1 2013 report says that,

E-commerce accounted for 10.6 percent of discretionary dollars spent, the highest share on record.

There is no turning back to business as usual. eCommerce is here to stay and it’s momentum is on the rise and WordPress professionals have every opportunity to take advantage of it.

Take it Nice and Easy With These Business and Leisure WordPress Themes

Good food and exotic travel destinations – the stuff that we plan for and dream about. Trying out new dining places and taking on new travel adventures will always be a favorite activity to do after work or during vacations. The good news is your restaurant or your boutique hotel need not be so obscure anymore with the help of the internet. Creating your own website not only to advertise your business but also to process business transactions has never been more convenient. If you are in the food or travel industry, check out these awesome WordPress themes to showcase your gourmet creations or your luxurious travel and tour packages:

Tour Package – WordPress Travel/Tour Theme

Tour Package Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and organized premium theme especially designed for those in the travel industry. This theme is equipped with a custom package post type that allows you to feature different travel and tour packages your customers can easily browse and choose from. This theme also comes with a booking form (Contact form 7 required) and a package filtering system to help customers find packages by location, price, available dates, etc. Tour Package also includes Page Builder, Layer Slider, Drag and Drop manager, WPML Support, WooCommerce support and many other features. It includes several page templates like gallery, sitemap, portfolio, pricing, etc. It is responsive, retina ready, and SEO optimized as well.

Iron Bull Restaurant WordPress Theme

Show off your gastronomic delights and mouth watering dishes with Iron Bull Premium WordPress Theme – a responsive WordPress restaurant theme that will surely make your visitors hungry for more. This bold and modern theme is the perfect theme to showcase your signature dishes and unique cuisine to stand out from the rest. You can customize this interactive theme anyway you like or choose from two predefined schemes (Sunfire or Victory Blue) to get started right away. Features included are: google maps, a sticky navigation with scrollspy, menus that have prices and calorie counts, food menu treatment, page templates (careers, polaroid inspired image gallery), and so much more. This premium WordPress theme is also available in HTML version.

Royal Gold WordPress Theme

Give your visitors that luxurious experience on your website with Royal Gold WordPress Theme – a unique WordPress theme especially designed for luxury hotels, exclusive resorts, posh restaurants, and spa/beauty centers. This premium theme features the easyReservations plugin, Contact Form 7, and Responsive Lightbox plugin to give your clientele the comfort and convenience of booking or making an online reservation with you. This mobile first premium theme is capable of optimizing bandwidth for smaller screens. This theme also features the 360º Panoramic viewer plugin which is quite useful for showcasing a panoramic view of rooms and accommodations.

Savory Responsive WordPress Theme

Savory Premium WordPress Theme is a clean, responsive WordPress theme for restaurants, diners, bars, pizzerias, coffee shops, etc. This no-frills theme comes in three skin types (Modern, Rustic, Classic), 4 custom widgets, a shortcode generator, a Retail Menu Cards plugin, all bundled in a simple, straightforward designed theme. You also get everything you need like: menu, contact information, map, opening hours, daily specials and other design elements necessary in setting up your restaurant’s online home.

Sweet Cake Responsive WordPress Theme

Sweet Cake Premium WordPress Theme is a one page Responsive HTML5 CSS3 Theme for WordPress perfect for your business. The graphic is very sweet and creative – ideal for bakeries, ice cream shops, restaurants and cake designers but if you want you can change the colors to adapt the theme for all activities. In the package you will also find sweet icons in vector format. The theme has been designed using the 1200 px grid system with 12 columns.

Soho Hotel Responsive Booking WP Theme

Soho Hotel Premium WordPress Theme is an organized and easy to navigate WordPress theme designed for hotels, hostels, service apartments and any other kind of accommodation which requires a booking system. This theme includes 4 preset and ready to use colour schemes that you can choose from or you can also choose to create your own colour palette using the colour picker in the theme options panel. This premium theme also includes a fully functional booking system and room availability plugin allowing visitors to conveniently book and make reservations without the hassle of overlapped or double booking. This fully responsive and translation ready premium theme currently supports PayPal.

WordPress Websites to Inspire You

WordPress has been around for 10 years and continues to go strong as more and more people discover the many creative ways you can use it for to create the website you need and want. One of the best ways to demonstrate the many possibilities you can achieve with this free software is to see an actual WordPress website that is both beautiful and functional. Be inspired with these outstanding WordPress websites we’ve found:

WordPress is a pretty powerful tool you can use to create amazing and stunning websites with. Its tried and tested coding architecture makes it one of the most robust content management platforms out there today. The best part of it all is that it is available for free.

We hope these websites inspire you to imagine and create that dream website you’ve always wanted.

WordPress Plugins To Try This September 2013

Enhance your WordPress site with these useful plugins that will help beef up features and functions you already have:

Ajax Portfolio Grid for WordPress

Ajax Portfolio Grid plugin allows for smooth loading and reloading of pages because of its Ajax feature. Features include: flexible columns, Youtube and Vimeo support, Drag and drop support, and hardware accelerated touch swipe support among a few. This robust plugin is built around the MVC core and makes full use of HTML5, CSS3, PHP 5.2+, and jQuery 1.7 – latest technologies that allow it to render fast and lightweight results including effects that are responsive and adapt to most if not all handheld and mobile devices.

Paper Grid

Paper Grid is a lightweight and powerful content grid plugin for WordPress that allows you to showcase your team, your services and products, or any other type of content in a dynamic and interactive way. You can select images, icons, change colors and you can also easily share your team members or even content on your social networking sites. The Content Grid frontend css file is only 5 KB and the javascript file is only 2KB making it really lightweight which means your website’s loading performance will be fast.

Mobile.nav

Mobile.nav is an easy to install and easy to use mobile and responsive navigation menu plugin for WordPress that creates an awesome mobile menu for your website. It supports top level + nesting up to 3 sub levels (4 levels totally) but can expand to how many you need by copying few lines of css. This plugin uses the native WordPress built-in design language and easily integrates with the WordPress menu system and supports expanding menu tree. Mobile.nav works on iOS, Android and Windows Mobile.

Hashtag for WordPress

The Hashtag WordPress plugin uses the new auto-complete system in the WordPress editor which allows you to set up an integrated hashtag system for your website. You can easily add a hashtag (#word) in your posts based on # character and on other hashtags already existing on your site. This plugin filters all the sentences containing the hashtag and displays them with links and thumbnails to the related posts. The #hashtag word link and the #hashtag page can also be easily customized (font, border, radius, padding, margin, etc.) according to your preferences.

FormCraft WordPress Form Builder

Create your own stylized forms with FormCraft WordPress Form Builder plugin – an AJAX powered form interface that allows you to create responsive forms and add as many as 23 fields (conditional or not), add multi-columns, save form progress, generate form analytics, integrate MailChimp, Campaign Monitor and Aweber and send to auto responders, embed objects, maps and videos, upload multiple images (retina-optimized), add form validation, get all submissions in your inbox, and many other useful features.

Frontend Builder

Frontend Builder WordPress plugin allows you to design your web page using intuitive frontend and backend options and a drag & drop system that allows you to add all the content that you need regardless of the template that you are using. This plugin is an easy-to-use solution for all users regardless of their skill level whether as designers or developers. Developers will find this plugin useful because they can assign this plugin to their templates with their own shortcodes and enable their potential users to design their own web pages using their own template’s elements. Other features include: clone options, WordPress shortcodes, pre-made UI system, live preview, and tons of other options.