Top 5 BuddyPress Themes April 2014

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

WordPress Themes for Photographers – March 2014

Creating an online portfolio is no longer a challenge nowadays. There are hundreds of options for displaying photographs available to photographers today that give you that expensive professional look. Here are some of the latest WordPress photography themes you can use to show off your prized images:

PhotoReactive – Fullscreen Studio for WordPress

PhotoReactive Premium WordPress Theme is a full screen studio theme for WordPress that photographers will love. This premium theme gives photographers tons of creative options for them to showcase images and other multimedia content both on the homepage and also in the portfolio pages. Full screen slideshows options include touch swipe capability, captions (with or without), photo wall, YouTube and Vimeo videos, static image, and the popular Kenburns slideshow (with or without audio). This theme is also equipped with Ajax & normal portfolio showcases, WooCommerce functionality to help you set up your own photography shop and it is also WPML ready (includes .po .mo language files.)

Devendo Photography WordPress Theme

Devendo Premium WordPress Theme is a flat and modern portfolio theme suitable for photographers. This premium theme is built with Bootstrap 3, is 100% responsive and is also available in four color schemes that can be changed in the theme’s options panel. Key features include: smart overlay search function, integrated social sharing, responsive mega menus with Bootstrap grid inside dropdowns, full screen portfolio with direction aware hover effects, smooth scrolling AJAX-powered horizontal blog, among others.

Fidelity – Premium Photography WordPress Theme

Fidelity Premium WordPress Theme is a modern photography theme with a future-oriented design targeted primarily for photographers but can also be used by design agencies, architecture bureaus, etc. This premium theme takes a full advantage of the latest CSS3 hardware-accelerated transitions (with a fallback to jQuery animations) giving users incredible performance on diverse platforms like desktops, tablet PCs and smartphones. Some of the unique features include: the ability to set up narrow or full width page in a few clicks, the ability to show EXIF data in the portfolio posts, and the horizontal masonry style blog layout that gives you that high end magazine feel. You can also display unlimited slideshows and videos for your background.

The Gentleman – Photography & Portfolio Theme

The Gentleman WordPress Theme is a fully responsive multipurpose theme perfect for any photographer, designer, agency, or any business looking to show off their work. There are multiple homepage layouts, tons of portfolio styles to choose from, and a lot of other features allowing you to build your perfect photography/portfolio website. This theme includes features like: Price tables, team members, multiple blog layouts, preset flat and pattern styles, a powerful theme options panel, multiple sliders including the popular Revolution Slider, multiple portfolio options including the Magnific Responsive Lightbox, and so much more.

Camilla – Horizontal Fullscreen Photography Theme

Camilla Premium WordPress Theme is a modern, minimal, full screen horizontal canvas ideal for displaying your photographs the way you intended them to be seen. This theme’s minimalistic design shifts the focus to your work with the use of distraction-free full screen video-ready galleries . Some of this theme’s modern features include: one-page layout, horizontal scroll, vertical scroll sections in horizontal layout, and it is optimized for mobile devices with its swipe navigation feature for smartphones and tablets, etc.

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.

Five Drag and Drop WordPress Plugins To Try

The drag and drop feature has become one of the most popular features in WordPress themes lately. We remember how everyone clamored for responsive themes and multiple slider options. Now it’s all about drag and drop. Below are some of the available drag and drop plugins in the marketplace today.

Visual Composer

Visual Composer for WordPress is a popular drag and drop page builder plugin that will save you tons of time working on the site content. Take full control over your WordPress site. Add columns, rows and choose from 40+ predefined elements divided in logic groups with single click, by using intuitive and handy UI. Then simply use your mouse to drag elements around to re-arrange them. You can also use your creativity and skills to extend Visual Composer with unique elements by using the developer API. Outstanding features include: intuitive drag and drop interface, object oriented code, template system, responsive grid, custom post types, WordPress user access support, 40+ built in content blocks, and so many other features. Create totally unique websites with no programming knowledge required with Visual Composer.

Aqua Page Builder

Aqua Page Builder is a powerful WordPress plugin that allows you to create an unlimited number of template variations for use in your WordPress themes. It follows the same user interface used by the Menus & Widgets admin pages – making you feel right at home with the UI. Similar to the Widgets &amps Menus, Aqua Page Builder features the drag and drop interaction to build its templates.This free open source plugin blends seamlessly with the WordPress admin interface making it familiar and easy for users to get used to it. Aqua Page Builder was also designed to reside on a completely independent page, instead of cluttering the post editor. The idea was to offer the freedom to build content outside of the editor, and use it anywhere they like at all. The “template” doesn’t have to be a complete page at all, it can be part of a page that can be re-used on a unlimited amount of pages/post they like.

Themify Builder

The Themify drag & drop Builder for WordPress helps you build any page layouts with a live, frontend preview. Layouts are completely responsive, and what you see is what you get. Easily create complex grid layouts by dragging and dropping on Builder’s intuitive user interface. Content can include static text, images, videos, sliders, galleries, tabs, maps, etc. or dynamic content, such as posts, menus, and even sidebars + widgets. It works on desktop, tablet, and mobile. The Builder comes with any Themify theme as part of the Themify framework. You can also purchase the Themify Builder plugin to use in a non-Themify WordPress theme.

Elegant Themes Builder

The Elegant Themes Builder is a plugin that provides some incredible tools for structuring the content on your page. These tools were previously only available in our Convertible theme, but now they have been added to a new plugin that will work with any theme. The plugin creates a visual drag-and-drop canvas where you can add, arrange and re-size advanced elements on your page. This builder appears below the normal text editor when you create a post or page, creating a unique canvas for each. The builder allows to you quickly create columns, sliders, tabs, buttons, toggles, boxes and so much more. This plugin will work with any theme, not just Elegant Themes but is can be purchased if you are an Elegant Themes member.

Page Layout Builder

Page Layout Builder plugin is a Drag and Drop Page Builder – Layout Builder – Content Builder for WordPress. Building custom WordPress page layout using Page Layout Builder is as easy as dragging-and-dropping. No need to learn HTML or find a coder/designer to change a page layout, modify sidebars, etc. You can directly use more than 3000+ widgets from wordpress.org to place anywhere inside your page content. Modules like sliders, galleries, images, drop-down menu, progress bar, timeline, testimonials, message box, warning box, notification box, loop for custom post type, post loop with various templates, sub-pages, heading, regular html etc. are currently under development. This plugin is available in the WordPress plugin repository.

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.

WordPress News Roundup 2013 – The Year That Was

Here are some of the top WordPress stories that made 2013 one of the most exciting years in WordPress history:

  • The release of the Twenty Thirteen default WordPress theme. The 2013 theme for WordPress takes us back to the blog, featuring a full range of post formats, each displayed beautifully in their own unique way.
  • The release of the Twenty Fourteen WordPress theme. This default theme lets you create a responsive magazine website with a sleek, modern design, feature your favorite homepage content in either a grid or a slider, use the three widget areas to customize your website, and change your content’s layout with a full-width page template and a contributor page to show off your authors.
  • Automattic acquires Cloudup, a company founded to easily share videos, photos, music, links, and docs.

The release of the last few WordPress versions, particularly 3.8, marks the beginning of a new era using the plugin-first development process. The ongoing commitment of the WordPress community to come up with better and more responsive software raises the bar and expectations for a more exciting new year ahead.

Hello world. Hello 2014!

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!