What Features Do Most Commercial WordPress Themes Have in Common?

WordPress users enjoy many benefits not necessarily available in other content management systems. The plethora of high quality WordPress themes that users can choose from is more than enough to dress up any website. Whatever type of website you plan to put up, most likely, there is a WordPress theme for it. Here are some of the most common features present in some of the most popular WordPress themes in the market today.

A Great Slider

An effective theme must help create a steady following for your site. It must be able to captivate casual visitors and convert theme into followers that eventually become clients and customers. A slideshow is a great tool that can deliver quick, dramatic visual impact combining the use of images with taglines, spiels, or memes to hook visitor interest. This billboard-like effect gives casual visitors something to spark their curiosity and encourage them to examine and explore your site further. The short attention span this generation has, a slider is an indispensable feature for any website. Popular plugins like Slider Revolution, Layer Slider, Nivo Slider, and Flexslider make the job a whole lot easier.

Parallax and Animation

Once you’ve gotten the attention of visitors, the challenge shifts towards keeping their interest. Perhaps you’ve attended lectures were you came in with excitement about what you could learn only to be disappointed by a boring, uncharismatic instructor whose droning voice put you to sleep. This is analogous to going through great content in boring or even hard to read content. This actually narrows your followers to those who are actually already sold to your content. If your goal is to convert more people to your product or service, the presentation of your content has to facilitate easy reading and assimilation of information. Corporate presentations are often more effective when stats are represented as animated charts and bullets. These actually help executives focus on the items that need to be considered. Having animated bullets and content sections also give focus on items you want your visitors to remember.

Flexible Layout with Drag and Drop Capability

Presenting your content is important in developing your following. While animation helps your audience focus on key points of your content, a sound content structure is still required for visitors to make sense of your site as a whole. Being able to piece together key points into a cohesive body of knowledge will drive home a stronger message to your visitors that will keep them coming for more. To do this, your content has to be organized in such a way that visitors go through important sections in a natural, stress free manner. The natural flow of content will vary according to your audience. Recognizing this, themes that have been designed and devised to respond to the needs of various audiences will bring a higher conversion in terms of subscribers and followers. A lot of themes now include drag and drop page builder features allowing you to assemble your own pages from scratch. Some themes come with ready made layouts for almost any type of site which can be tweaked to meet specific audience needs. Most, if not all, of these themes have powerful options panels and shortcode generators for maximum customization flexibility.

Mobile Friendly

Mobile is a platform that cannot be ignored. Mobile gadgets are part of today’s lifestyle because of the convenience it provides its users. As such, theme designers and developers are forced to confront the peculiarities one encounters when using a mobile device. A theme has to be responsive. This means it has to be able to adjust to give the best possible display regardless of what device you use to browse your site. Theme pages need to have the capability to reorder and resize according to tablet and smartphone displays without sacrificing the beauty of the theme on desktop. In addition to this, special navigation menus for mobile devices must be able to facilitate the interface differences on these devices from desktop. Usually, the Bootstrap framework is a theme author’s go to option to ensure optimal performance on mobile platforms.

Good SEO

No matter how great your site is in terms of content or aesthetics, it must be found by your target audience. Great themes are coded in such away that is friendly to search engines to help land your site on the first few pages of search results. This is accomplished in a number of ways: meta and links, XML sitemaps, RSS Optimization, and Breadcrumb among others. There are numerous options to ensure your site is covered by good SEO measures. Clean code, SEO optimized images and videos, and installing reliable and tested SEO plugins like SEO by Yoast, etc. are some of the many SEO practices you can integrate on your site.

WordPress Slider Mania

Sliders are staples in websites nowadays. A homepage without a slideshow seems an oddity considering the media intensive content this generation craves for. For all the benefits sliders give website owners, there are indeed some sliders that really standout from the rest. Below is a listing of 5 of the most popular sliders available in the market today:

Slider Revolution

Considered the most popular plugin in the Envato marketplace, Slider Revolution is a slider definitely worth considering. This plugin features tons of unique transition effects, an image preloader, video embedding, autoplay that stops on user interaction and lots of easy to set options to create your own effects. This plugin is one of the few that offers full screen slideshows, it is also noted for enabling almost any type of content that can be put in a slideshow, and, it is quite popular for its responsive feature as well. The plugin also enables easy slider creation using Visual Builder. Using its animation builder, you can conveniently drag and drop captions, and, create your own custom animation easily. Slider Revolution also allows you to integrate SEO optimization measures on your slides thus further improving your page’s performance on search engines.

Royal Slider

This slider plugin was created especially for mobile devices. What makes Royal Slider standout is its affinity toward touch screen interfaces. Create your own custom slideshows and css3 banner rotators with images, videos or HTML content in slides, allow dynamic population of data from Flickr, Instagram, Featured posts and even WooCommerce products, display vertical or horizontal thumbnails with the plugin’s photo gallery. While it doesn’t have much of fancy transition effects, Royal does guarantee a stable, accessible, high performance slider experience on any device. RoyalSlider is tested on Mac, PC, iPad 2, iPhone 4, HTC Desire, Lumia 920, Surface, Blackberry PlayBook and even on Kindle Keyboard

Layer Slider

Layer slider is most noted for its use of cutting edge technology to give you more than 200 preset 2D and 3D slide transitions to give you the smoothest slideshow experience available. At the very heart of this slider is its layered design that enables you to have 3D like slideshows. Easy to use interfaces enable you to create your slideshows in a WYSIWYG manner which include live previews, drag and drop slider builder, etc. The plugin supports responsive layouts, multiple layouts and touch screen gestures to ensure that your slideshow experience is the same regardless of device. Layer slider is SEO friendly allowing you to build semantic markup with custom attributes that search engines can index easily.

Slider PRO

This fully responsive and mobile ready slider plugin in comes with 150+ options to help you set-up your very own slideshow. The plugin allows you to dynamically load content from your content. Slider PRO also enables you to add animated or static layers into your slideshows to create 3D like slides. The plugin uses a user friendly media loader to enable easy population of content into your slideshows. Slider PRO offers 100+ transition effects which can be optimized into hundreds of possible variations.

Touch Carousel

This slider plugin was created with mobile devices in mind. Touch carousel enables touch navigation on iOS, Android and Blackberry devices. Over 20 settings are available to control speed, layout and slideshow. Touch carousel allows you to slide any post type including WooCommerce and Jigoshop content. You can select content based on taxonomy, popularity or date.

5 Most Popular Page Builder Plugins Roundup

Drag and drop customizations via Page Builder plugins are quite popular because of the ease it provides in creating multiple layout configurations without messing with code. There are several page builders available in the WordPress market today. Here are some of the most popular ones:

Visual Composer

Visual Composer is #1 Best Selling drag and drop frontend and backend page builder with 70k+ websites already powered. This plugin offers drag and drop page building with an intuitive user interface. What makes Visual Composer convenient is its front end page building capabilities. Visual Composer allows you to choose from 40+ different page elements or use custom shortcodes. The plugin also allows you to design your pages in a responsive way. The developers offer lifetime updates free of charge and has lots of tutorials available to help you use the plugin. The capabilities of Visual Composer may also be extended with premium add ons like Templatera or Easy Tables. You will be able to take full control over your WordPress site, build any layout you can imagine with no programming knowledge required.

Live Composer

Live Composer is a front-end WordPress page builder plugin with 28+ modules packed with functionality and styling options that allow countless variations to be made easily and without any coding. Live Composer offers front end drag and drop page building capabilities to your themes. It is designed to turn any theme into a feature packed beast. Live Composer comes with 28+ modules with easy customize options for each. Each module can be adjusted for device specific options making sure your pages look great on tablets, smartphones and desktops/laptops. You also have the option to create your own modules for specific functionality. Live Composer comes with special post types like Projects, Galleries, Downloads, Testimonials, Staff and Partners and transferring what you do on one page to another is easy with Live Composer’s Templates system.

Awesome Builder

Awesome Builder is a WordPress Drag & Drop Page Builder and shortcodes generator that offers the best solution you need to build a modern web page in the easiest way ever. This plugin widgetizes your pages allowing you to drag and drop your widgets into any section of the page. No need to create new modules. You can use existing widgets on your website. You can also use 25+ widgets included with the plugin but it will work with any widget you have. The plugin also enables a responsive layout for your pages. Awesome builder supports animation for each widget you add. Awesome Builder supports full width, background color image and video support.

Parallax One Page Builder

Parallax One Page Builder enables you to create your own one page website in just a few minutes. With this plugin you can create unlimited landing page with more features options and unlimited sections each with parallax effects as you enable. The plugin also comes with gallery and portfolio capabilities included. The first section gives you 7 slide gallery you can use with images, color or YouTube video. Each section there after can have an image, color or YouTube video as background. Plugin employs custom SEO for improving your sites web search results.

Drag and Drop Shortcodes

Drag and Drop Shortcodes is a great WP plugin with intuitive drag&drop interface and lot of elements to choose from, like: Accordions, Stats Counter, Knobs, Alert Boxes, Animation Box, Price Boxes, Progress Bar, QR Code, Service Boxes, Tabs, Team Member, Map, PayPal Buttons, Member Only Content, Tooltip, YouTube, Vimeo and self hosted HTML5 video. Drag and Drop shortcodes offer convenient page building capabilities using a highly intuitive backend interface. The plugin comes with a lot of page elements including Video, Stats Counters, Progress Charts, etc. Draggable sections and column allows you to present content as you see fit. Animation options, parallax and video backgrounds help you enliven your content even on the most boring default themes. What makes this plugin even more special is that it allows you to create your own modules with shortcodes.

WordPress Music Themes April 2014

Music fan sites are a great way to bring together people who have a common interest in a specific musician, a music genre, bands, etc. If you are thinking of putting up a website for that type of audience, here are some of the latest music themes you can check out:

Dubstep – Premium Music WordPress Theme

Dubstep is a WordPress theme for bands, musicians, DJs, clubs and everyone involved in the music or entertainment business. This theme supports every post type that a music & entertainment theme would need such as: intuitive Events Management (ability to set date, time, venue, location, and map coordinates; provision for normal and recurring events, tickets support); Discography Management (ability to share your music with fans using either self hosted audio files using the powerful soundManager2 or embedded sounds from SoundCloud); Artists Management (display an infinite number of favorite artists, colleagues, or band members (their albums, tracks, or playlists) and categorize them easily; Media Management (share videos either self-hosted or from services like Youtube, Vimeo etc. and create endless interactive custom photo galleries from your events using templates or sliders).

SoundBlast – Music Band WordPress Theme

Sound Blast Premium WordPress Theme is a WooCommerce ready theme especially designed for bands and music websites. This easy to modify theme features include: Album + Track Management (options include Now Playing, Download, Play Only, and Buy Now), Slider Management, Event Management, Gallery Management, Sidebar Management, Powerful Theme Options + Page Builder, 2 pre-made color variations.

MusicVent – Premium Music & Event WordPress Theme

MUSICVENT Premium WordPress Theme is a modern, responsive, and a well-thought out HTML5 WordPress Theme for Music & Event related Personalities/Studios. The theme’s clean Lines & minimal design approach truly highlights the artist(s) and the work(s) showcased. Its unique design and streamlined navigation makes it easy for fans, music aficionados, potential producers, talent scouts, etc., to go through the website get the information needed and take the necessary action after. The 6 built-in page templates (Albums, Artists, Events, Gallery, Bloglist, Contact) are organized and give you or users everything that is needed. Transition and animation effects like black and white photos display their full colors when hovered over. It also includes 2 homepage layout options (fullscreen image slider and fullscreen video background) to choose from according to the audience you are targeting.

RockOn – Multipurpose Music WP Theme

RockOn! Premium WordPress Theme is a WooCommerce ready multipurpose music theme for singers, artists, music bands or musical events created using Twitter Bootstrap, with a responsive design which makes it a perfect fit for all devices. This theme includes features such as: Event Management using one of the best event management plugins – WP Event Manager, 100% responsive 3D Layer Slider, Sidebar Managerusing CrunchPress “CP” framework, WooCommerce Shop Catalog Grid OR Full Layout also Masonry (Filterable), and so many other features.

NOISE – Onepage DJs & Band WordPress Theme

NOISE Premium WordPress Theme is a cool, creative and modern theme perfect for musicians, DJs, bands and other music related professionals or businesses. Built with smooth and sleek CSS3 and AJAX animations including a unique spectrum analyzer to help you visualize music automatically on every single track. You can easily manage and display your artists, albums, audios, images, videos, events dates and sell your items (tickets etc.), allow users to rate music, and share instantly on their social networks. It also comes with 2 different players (SimplePlayer widget and Extended Player) to give users control over every single track played.

Music Club – Music/Band/Club/Party WordPress Theme

Music Club Premium WordPress Theme is the best WordPress theme for music, club, party, radio station, bands or even entertainment magazine. It comes with great features for music such as: a floating music player at the bottom of the page, a traditional boxed player for those who prefer something familiar, an Event post type that come with a ticket button with 5 tickets status, a Music Album feature which when clicked, automatically fetches all songs in an album to the floating player. Other outstanding features include a Page Builder, Revolution Slider, GoodLayers Importer, and other great music tools, to help you build a power music website users will truly enjoy.

Web Design Trends WordPress Users Need To Know

WordPress is the most popular content management system existing today fetching 21.8% of the world’s total internet usage and capturing 60.3% of the market share as per W3tech’s latest market report. It comes as no surprise that the majority of the general web design trends predicted for 2014 are already common features available and/or integrated in most if not all WordPress themes being sold in the marketplace today. It makes you wonder whether WordPress is only a trend follower or it is actually THE trend setter to watch.

WordPress core developers, theme and plugin developers and authors, and the WordPress community in general are some of the most passionate people on the planet. With only ten years tucked into its belt, WordPress has emerged as one the most dynamic and cutting edge platforms today primarily because of the commitment of its community.

In a recent business article on eCommerce design trends for 2014, it lists trends that WordPress users already consider as familiar features. The trend list includes:

  • flat design
  • responsive design
  • less sliders
  • more user friendly navigation
  • more creative use of web fonts

These trends have actually appeared in most WordPress themes as common features in the last year or so. Even Forbes magazine, lists similar web design trends in an article that came out early this year. Although Forbes also adds “storytelling design” characterized by concise, compelling copy coupled with strong imagery as one of the significant web trends that will emerge in 2014. Guess what? A wonderful new WordPress plugin – Aesop Story Engine – in relation to the “storytelling” trend has already been generating a lot of interest lately.

For those who have been following the development path of the latest WordPress version that is to be released (April 16), there are several new features in WordPress 3.9 that could set off new “trends” in the web design world. WordPress 3.9 emphasizes more user friendly features and improved multimedia handling capabilities. A few of these significant features that are worth noting are listed below:

  • New features like live widget previews
  • a new theme installer
  • UI refinements when editing images and when working with media in the editor including the return of some of the advanced display settings for images.
  • audio and video playlists
  • new gallery support
  • The formatting function that turns straight quotes into smart quotes (among other things) underwent some changes to drastically speed it up.

More detailed features can be viewed on the WordPress core development website.

Having said all that, it is interesting to note that the thrust towards being more multimedia savvy while at the same time being more and more user friendly could be a significant WordPress feature that could set off a general web design trend. With WordPress gaining more and more influence over the whole internet population, it is possible that whatever developers, coders, designers, authors, etc. come up with to improve WordPress products and services could eventually be the standard that the web design community will use.

Who knows what WordPress will be like in the next 10 years. The innovations succeeding WordPress iterations will bring and the vast influence it will have in relation to the entire Internet population, mobile, tablet or what not together with the hardcore commitment of its core community will definitely create an impact on the way the world wide web looks and functions. Whatever it is, anything that goes on in WordPress is definitely going to be exciting and worth watching.

Moving to WordPress?

Many website owners start off as casual bloggers, typically on a free platform, and usually not expecting any life-changing thing to happen to their websites. However, life in cyber space is full of surprises and no one can really predict which site will be the next big thing. Some, are fortunate enough to find their match audience and experience reasonable success. This could mean that the free platform might not be enough to contain and sustain the increased volume of traffic and content. Migrating to a more robust and dynamic platform could be the solution.

But what about all the historical content that’s been created? Or what about a test or a private staging site you use for you or a client? If you are moving from a free platform, another WordPress site or any other platform and migrating to a self-hosted WordPresswebsite, here are some tools to help you make the transition as less hairy as possible.

All-in-One WP Migration

All-in-One WP Migration allows you to export your database, media files, plugins, and themes. You can apply unlimited find and replace operations on your database and the plugin will also fix any serialization problems that occur during find/replace operations. It is also the first plugin to offer true mobile experience on WordPress versions 3.3 and up. Features include: multisite compatible, works on Windows OS and IIS.

WP Migrate DB

WP Migrate DB exports your database as a MySQL data dump (much like phpMyAdmin), does a find and replace on URLs and file paths, then allows you to save it to your computer. It is perfect for developers who need to update their local install with fresh data from the production site, or copy their locally developed site to a staging or production server. It also takes into account serialized data (both arrays and objects) and updates the string length values. You can select the tables you want to migrate, pull production db down and replace local db, push local db up and replace production / staging db, enjoy unlimited find & replaces (free is limited to 2), Multisite support, Video walk throughs and how-tos.

WordPress Duplicator

WordPress Duplicator gives WordPress administrators the ability to migrate, copy or clone a site from one location to another. The plugin also serves as a simple backup utility. The Duplicator supports both serialized and base64 serialized string replacement. This tool is great for pulling a production site down onto your local machine for testing and validation. It also works great for developing locally and then pushing up to a production server for a first time site release. Requires above average technical knowledge and not recommended for WordPress beginners.

WordPress Move

WordPress Move is a migration assistant for WordPress that is capable of changing the domain name in use and/or migrating your installation to another server either as is or based on your choices. You can use WordPress Move to transfer your database or create backups of your installation.

Site Push

SitePush is a WordPress plugin that allows you to have multiple versions of your WordPress site, so you can edit, develop, test without any risk to your main, live site. It’s great for developers, designers and editors or anyone who wants to be able to test changes to a site before it is visible to the world. You can easily easily move content between sites, test new themes and plugins – all in a private staging site, and you can also test and easily push new code on to a live site.

Must Have Features in Choosing a WordPress Theme for your Website

WordPress theme trends come and go. Some popular features a while back have faded away while others went mainstream and have become basic and essential features integral to a WordPress theme. A lot of the WordPress themes in the marketplace today are feature-packed and sometimes it gets overwhelming to choose the perfect one. Website owners need to be able to sort through long menu of features, pull out those that are relevant to their own specific website needs and goals, just to make sure they don’t get an over bloated and slow-loading website. Here are some basic features to look for in selecting a WordPress theme to fit your website needs.

Flexibility and Ease of Use

User experience is a key factor in web design. WordPress themes must be flexible enough to adapt to the user’s needs and provide way for customization to be simple and easy. A popular feature nowadays is the drag and drop feature where layouts can be configured and reconfigured by simply dragging and dropping elements into specific areas. WordPress themes that include this feature already have a fan base as it makes customization convenient and friendly even for WordPress beginners.

Responsive (On or Off feature)

The emergence of mobile platforms in internet usage makes its users a population that shouldn’t be ignored. A lot of people think that mobile might eventually displace desktop as the dominant platform for internet access. In light of this, website owners need to consider WordPress themes that are 100% responsive enabling content to be presented efficiently on smartphones, tablets, and other mobile or handheld devices. Themes that include features such as menus especially designed for mobile devices, responsive sliders, and responsive images are also a plus factor. Some also prefer that they have control over whether they want the responsive feature turned on or off which means that WordPress themes that have this option will appeal to this type of web user.

Search Engine Optimization

It would be a pity for a site with amazing content to be left to obscurity because search engines can’t find it. According to Joost de Valk, creator of the popular SEO plugin Yoast,

“Out of the box, WordPress is a pretty well optimized system, and does a far better job at allowing every single page to be indexed than every other CMS I have used. But there are a few things you should do to make it a lot easier still to work with.”

WordPress themes that are built according to best code practices and are integrated with sound SEO measures will do well as far as search engine visibility and ranking are concerned.

Multi Media Handling Capabilities

Gone are the days where people are merely content reading stuff on the web. Today’s generation of internet users seek more interactive and media heavy content. Website users tend to lean towards WordPress themes that are flexible enough to handle all types of media formats (audio, video, images, etc). Support for self-hosted videos, Youtube, Vimeo and SoundCloud, and other third party multi media content hosts is always a plus as internet users today.

Animations, Parallax, Sliders, etc.

Some people detest sliders and other visual eye candy. Some don’t even think that it helps a site at all while some consider these visual effects necessary features in a website. When people get to your site, you want to ensure that they get enough interest to go through your content. The use of all these visual effects can go from cheesy to spectacular depending on how it is presented. Today’s media bombarded user can benefit from well-thought of and creative visual presentations that feed both the eyes and the mind.

Translation or Multi Lingual Ready

WordPress already powers more than 21% of the Internet and will continue to increase even as of this writing. This means that more non-English speaking users will be thrown in the mix of users and will need themes that can be translated into their own languages and with RTL (right to left provision). This segment of WordPress users will be more attracted to themes that are easier to adapt to their local audiences.

These features listed here may or may not be on the top of your list. If you do have some suggestions, feel free to leave us a comment and tell us why you think so. We’d love to hear from you.

7 Bestselling Unusual Themes for WordPress

There are some things that are truly unique and outstanding that they can’t help but stand out and rise to the top of the heap. Here are some of the best selling WordPress themes that owe their popularity to a unique niche that they fill.

X Theme

Dubbed as Themeforest’s most popular new product, this theme presents itself as the ultimate WordPress theme. The claim’s validity is backed by real world results and real time feedback from its satisfied users who have experienced the endless customization options available to its owners. While it offers a lot to those who want to dabble into the “nuts and bolts” of the theme, X also offers strong solutions for those who just want to get something up and running on their sites in no time. The theme has 3 predefined stacks that can be easily tweaked to give newbies and non-techies a “made by a professional” look for their websites. X offers features that have set the standard and raised the bar as far as WordPress themes go. Not surprising considering the experts who have given their inputs in the development of the theme not to mention the developer’s open ears to customer feedback. It is also not surprising that many already consider this as the last WordPress theme they will ever need.

Directory

This unique theme allows you to easily set-up an online directory portal listing categorized items of any type. You can have a directory of shops, websites, companies and more. This may be accomplished conveniently with from a frontend like admin panel giving you a more user friendly set-up experience. Visitors will find Directory a convenient reference resource as it delivers information in a concise, convenient manner. Entries are displayed as pins on a google map of the locale of interest. Alternatively visitors may search from a search box or browse off a category of entries. Directory comes with a lot of ad spaces so you can cash in on the traffic your content generates. This theme is integrated with Paypal so administering payments from advertisers and listed establishments isn’t a hassle. With more than 6000 satisfied users, Directory is considered the Best selling directory portal theme on themeforest.

Gymbase

This theme has been around for quite a while but remains a bestseller in its own right because of its special qualities. First and foremost it’s a Gym theme – unique and not like the rest. It addresses a viable niche market – the health and fitness market – where gym owners can easily create a website that can service players in this industry. Some of the useful features the theme has include: a timetable plugin included that allows members and visitors to plan the classes they will attend, Gymbase also displays the pricing for classes, features that allow updates for its members regarding upcoming classes, an easy to use admin panel equipped with a color picker to help you create your own custom look, and everything else you need to run a health and fitness website.

Academy

Designed to be a learning management solution for educational or training institutions to maximize the power and reach of the internet, Academy enables you to sell and share knowledge online. This theme gives you the platform to deliver classes and lessons to interested parties. Academy allows you to upload media content and documents as well as to encode quizzes and tests to check for your subscribers competency. You are also able to check the progress of your students, monitor the courses they take, as well as, administer payments. This theme is integrated with WooCommerce. Academy is an invaluable tool especially today, as more and more people turn to e-learning as a means of acquiring new skills and education.

Fundify

Fundify is the first WordPress theme designed for crowdfunding. This enables you to have a websites in the likes of Indiegogo and Kickstarter where parties can setup campaigns to raise funds for causes they support. Fundify allows you to setup campaigns for a fixed amount of money where supporters are only billed if the minimum target amount of the campaign is reached. Alternatively, the theme also enables flexible campaigns where whatever amount pledged is collected. Fundify also allows you to administer rewards to those who support your causes. The theme integrates with Paypal and easy digital downloads which makes it convenient for supporters to finance causes and advocacies that appeal to them.

Knowhow

With knowledge and information being an important commodity nowadays, it is not surprising to find a knowledge base theme in this list. What makes Knowhow special is that it enables you to setup your own knowledge base with ease and convenience while maintaining the privacy and control of information not available on public Wikis. You can list your content in the form of an FAQ. Knowhow also allows users to search by question or by topic which makes searching more convenient. Not your ordinary WordPress theme.

Jobify

Globalization and the internet have made the job market more competitive. Jobseekers have a need to display their resumes online so they can get the best jobs available. In a similar fashion, employers need to get the best talent available. Jobify is a job exchange solution used by top companies like dropbox to acquire the best talent globally. Employers can subscribe to your site for posting privileges. Jobseekers can post their resumes in response to job postings. This theme integrates with WooCommerce and Contact forms plugins to give you the best in payment and input management.

Are You Ready For WordPress 3.9?

Andrew Nacin, lead developer of the WordPress Web Publishing Platform, recently announced the release of the first beta of WordPress 3.9 and it is available for testing in anticipation of its release in April 2014. Here are some of the goodies added:

  • Widget Management -For those of you who have discovered the ease and beauty of the WordPress Customizer, you are in for a treat. WordPress 3.9 introduces the Widget Customizer. This new features allows you to edit, rearrange, and even add new widgets LIVE in the preview pane. This feature can be activated using the Widget Customizer plugin (still currently being developed). This plugin allows you to edit widgets and preview changes in the Theme Customizer, with a control for each widget form in sections added for each sidebar rendered in the preview. No more blind editing.
  • Updated TinyMCE – the software powering the visual editor, to the latest version. Expect cleaner markup and the new paste handling — if you paste in a block of text from Microsoft Word, for example, it will no longer come out terrible. This one is exciting.
  • Galleries now receive a live preview in the editor. Upload some photos and insert a gallery to see this in action
  • Drag-and-drop images directly onto the editor to upload them.
  • Improved editing images in post. Easier to make changes to an image (edit, crop, rotate) after you insert it into a post.
  • WP 3.8?s beautiful new theme browsing experience brought to the theme installer.
  • New audio/video playlists.

Just a few more weeks and this version will be out. If you can’t wait that long, sign up to be a tester and get a headstart from the rest. You can download the beta version for free on the WordPress dev site. Happy testing!