Photography WordPress Themes Roundup for April 2013

Here are a few of our current picks for awesome photography themes for 2013:

Modelish

Modelish is a unique modern HTML5+LESS fully responsive WordPress theme for presenting artwork or photography. This full-width photography/portfolio styled theme is also versatile enough to be used for any type of business as well. The stylish, yet clean and professional design is optimized with mobile first techniques and retina display support. Add some style and modern flair to your website with its customizable system that makes it easy to adapt to your favorite colors, fonts and style preferences.

Keres Full Screen Photography Theme

Keres is a cool fullscreen responsive WordPress theme built for a photography or portfolio website. It comes with many cool features like multiple slideshows (fullscreen Slideshow, Ken Burns Slideshow), a unique Image Flow Gallery, Skin manager, fullscreen Contact Map, fullscreen Youtube and Vimeo Video. This theme includes customizable elements (color, font, background image) with 50+ advanced shortcodes and a Shortcode Generator support to create the portfolio style you really want.

Photojax Minimalist Ajax Photography Portfolio

Photojax is a clean and minimal, grid styled WordPress photography theme. This sleek and modern theme features two color skins, beautiful galleries using the premium Royal Slider plugin ($20 value), an audio player, and a minimal blog (all you’ll need for a great photography portfolio). Although designed for photographers it can be a great theme for graphic designers, architects, and anyone else with an image based portfolio.

Sniper Premium Photography

Sniper is a sleek and powerful premium responsive + liquid WordPress theme built for photographers, creative agencies or portfolio website. All elements of this theme are liquid which makes it ideal for smartphone and mobile devices. This modern WordPress theme’s dynamic navigation system makes it fun and interesting to explore your website – from dropdown menus to toggled pages, everything is full of surprises.

Smarald

Smarald is an incredibly unique, highly interactive, retina ready, responsive WordPress Portfolio theme, suitable for all sorts of creatives, agencies and even blogs. Whether you want to showcase your work in a beautiful way, share your articles with your readers, or just to have a great interactive website for your agency, this premium theme is the perfect solution for you.

Is Your WordPress Site Vulnerable to Attack?

WordPress site owners Alert!

From Cloudflare.com (April 11, 2013)

There is currently a significant attack being launched at a large number of WordPress blogs across the Internet. The attacker is brute force attacking the WordPress administrative portals, using the username “admin” and trying thousands of passwords. It appears a botnet is being used to launch the attack and more than tens of thousands of unique IP addresses have been recorded attempting to hack WordPress installs.

One of the concerns of an attack like this is that the attacker is using a relatively weak botnet of home PCs in order to build a much larger botnet of beefy servers in preparation for a future attack. These larger machines can cause much more damage in DDoS attacks because the servers have large network connections and are capable of generating significant amounts of traffic. This is a similar tactic that was used to build the so-called itsoknoproblembro/Brobot botnet which, in the Fall of 2012, was behind the large attacks on US financial institutions.

Matt Mullenweg confirms this on his blog:

Right now there’s a botnet going around all of the WordPresses it can find trying to login with the “admin” username and a bunch of common passwords, and it has turned into a news story (especially from companies that sell “solutions” to the problem).

Preparation is the best thing to do even before disaster strikes. Below are some important reminders to keep your site secure. If you are doing these things religiously and regularly then you should be good. Otherwise, it’s time to beef things up.

  • Backup, backup, backup. Conduct regular backups of your site. It’s always a good thing.
  • Change your user name. Use a strong password. If you are still using “admin” as your login, you need to change it right away.
  • Install WordPress plugins that limit the number of login attempts from the same IP address or network
  • Subscribe to a Security Service like Sucuri (Read our post about Sucuri) or Cloudflare (free).
  • Update your WordPress version.

Web Design Tools for WordPress 2013

Learning is a never-ending journey. There’s always room to grow, things to improve, and ways to make things better, more efficient, and more effective. Here are some (premium and free) web design tools that can help WordPress authors and developers reduce work time, increase productivity and improve work quality:

Sail.js (Free)

Sails.js makes it easy to build custom, enterprise-grade Node.js apps. It is designed to resemble the MVC architecture from frameworks like Ruby on Rails, but with support for the more modern, data-oriented style of web app development. It’s especially good for building real time features like chat, it automatically builds a RESTful JSON API, and it supports HTTP and WebSockets. The Sails framework was developed by Mike McNeil with the support of Balderdash.

Backbone.js (Free)

Backbone.js gives structure to web applications by providing models with key-value binding and custom events, collections with a rich API of enumerable functions,views with declarative event handling, and connects it all to your existing API over a RESTful JSON interface.

Extra Strength Responsive Grids (Free)

Extra Strength Responsive Grids are percentage-based, for smooth, non-snappy width adjustments that enable you to take total control of your layout. ESRG deploys meaningful class names such as grid-half and grid-quarter to make life easier. ESRG is also SASS-enabled.

Easel Design without a Designer (From Free – $99 Subscription)

Easel is an in-browser, high-fidelity web design tool that lets you mockup, share and implement your ideas with ease. This WYSIWYG web design tool aims to make web design and development easier for teams who want to quickly get their ideas online without having to hire a designer. The app is a great resource for people who don’t have any coding experience but know what they want visually.

Responsive Nav (Free)

Responsive Nav is a tiny JavaScript plugin which weighs only 1.7 KB minified and Gzip’ed, and helps you to create a toggled navigation for small screens. It uses touch events and CSS3 transitions for the best possible performance. It also contains a “clever” workaround that makes it possible to transition from height: 0 to height: auto, which isn’t normally possible with CSS3 transitions.

WordPress Themes 2014? What Does the Future Hold?

Did you know that there are approximately 8 months and 2 weeks till January 2014? What?! 2014 already? You might think that’s still too far away but in reality, big businesses usually have 2-year, 3-year, and 5-year plans already pencilled in place. It’s not unusual for them to think beyond today and they probably already have activities and processes scheduled even beyond that time frame.

So what’s our fearless forecast for 2014? Is it too early to tell? Let’s take a few “wild” but calculated guesses on what we think is to come.

Mobile – The Handheld and Portable Desktop

This forecast is not new and developments in the past 2 years or so have all been pointing to this direction. Smartphones, tablets, androids, iOs devices are more and more in stiff competition with each other as people rely more and more on their devices to get everything done. As this trend continues, WordPress theme authors and developers need to think of ways, as early as now, not just adapt to the move but perhaps innovate something revolutionary that will inspire a fresh way of doing things. The move towards drag, drop, click one button, one size fits all types of themes is great but could always be better – more personalized, easier to customize and brand, and perhaps an easy to maneuver app-like admin panel – especially on a tiny 3.5” inch display using a tiny unwieldy touch keyboard.

Retina Display

Manufacturers of LCD, LED, HD and all the other display devices are probably well into production already filled with orders for the Christmas season and early next year and we bet that retina display is high up in one of their specs somewhere. What to do? WordPress authors and developers need to update, create, and optimize themes in anticipation of that. Apple is already set to require retina display in their iOS apps which means all current apps need to be updated and all future apps need to be designed with this in mind. Android phones are probably not too far behind. Mobile versions of WordPress themes need to anticipate this as well.

User Friendly Analytics

As Google continues to purge the SERPS from “spammy” and over “optimized” websites, perhaps more simple and built-in tools to help provide the average WordPress user the statistics needed to analyze and improve key aspects of his or her website. There are numerous plugins that add functionalities like performance and analytics to determine site speed, word frequencies, user interactivity, analytics and all those wonderful tools but it would be nice to have all these capabilities, in simple user friendly format, already built into the theme to reduce risks of compatibility issues.

Design

Simple and minimalistic designs will continue on till the next year with designs becoming more and more intuitive eliminating a lot of code fear and analysis on the part of the user. Features will still be consumer driven but will eventually be trimmed down to the essentials as more and more WordPress users become more educated and less “awed” by multiple sliders and 1000+ ways to change colors and backgrounds.

More Social

Social networking through Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and other similar websites have made it so simple for people to connect with each other. WordPress themes need features like these that make it as simple and as easy for the website owner to encourage more user interactivity within his website and his other social media networks. The flow from website to social networks needs to be seamless and streamlined to encourage more interconnectivity, engagement, and exchange. It’s part of the high quality ranking site Google equation.

Of course, nothing is carved in stone and anything can happen between now and then. These are fearless or fearful forecasts, you might say. It does help to understand how businesses move – whether they are aggressive or conservative in their strategies, and to keep abreast of what is going on in the whole web design industry in general. That way, your efforts as a WordPress professional will be more strategic and more deliberate.

WordPress 3.6 Beta 1 Now Available

WordPress enthusiasts can start playing with the latest beta version (3.6. Beta 1) recently released. This new version is recommended to be run only on a test site and not in actual sites just yet. WordPress 3.5 was released a few months back and this new version has been in the development stage for the past 3 months. WordPress plugin or theme developers, authors, and host providers should start testing this new version before the official and stable version is released to make sure existing plugins and themes are compatible.

Here’s a summary of what’s new in WordPress 3.6:

Post Formats: Post Formats now have their own UI, and theme authors have access to templating functions to access the structured data.

Twenty Thirteen: We’re shipping this year’s default theme in our first release of the year. Twenty Thirteen is an opinionated, color-rich, blog-centric theme that makes full use of the new Post Formats support.

Audio/Video: You can embed audio and video files into your posts without relying on a plugin or a third party media hosting service.

Autosave: Posts are now autosaved locally. If your browser crashes, your computer dies, or the server goes offline as you’re saving, you won’t lose the your post.

Post Locking: See when someone is currently editing a post, and kick them out of it if they fall asleep at the keyboard.

Nav Menus: Nav menus have been simplified with an accordion-based UI, and a separate tab for bulk-assigning menus to locations.

Revisions: The all-new revisions UI features avatars, a slider that “scrubs” through history, and two-slider range comparisons.

Here’s a treat for the absolutely curious, the demo version of Twenty Thirteen! If you would like to participate, become a contributor, be a bug hunter, or a theme fixer, you are more than welcome to provide feedback to those awesome WordPress dev guys. Time to play!

How To Improve Performance On Your WordPress Site

Great content is at the mercy of site speed. No matter how wonderful your content is, taking more than 4 seconds to load can mean significant loss of traffic and loss of potential income for your website. Why? People hate slow websites. The slower it takes for your page to load, the faster people leave it. Patience is not a virtue when it comes to the internet. That is why site speed is important.

Google is obsessed with site speed and has incorporated it as one of the signals for determining search rankings. In a previous article on determining a website’s quality score , we learned that user experience is now a major element and part of the equation in determining and improving your site’s ranking. A fast site creates satisfied users, improves user experience, and improves overall site quality and performance.

If your website is taking longer to load than necessary, it’s time to take stock and audit the elements causing the delay. Here’s a checklist of some of the things you need to consider as you work on improving your site’s performance:

  • Use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to load heavy scripts and images and to lighten the load on your server.
  • Optimize caching – Browser caching stores cached versions of static resources. This speeds up page speed tremendously and reduces server lag.
  • Remove/Reduce/Compress large images, videos, and other content. Resize and optimize images for web use. Specify image dimensions and use the right image format.
  • Minify JavaScript and remove unused CSS files. Reduce HTTP loading requests for CSS style sheets, scripts, images, and HTML
  • Remove/Reduce/Deactivate unnecessary or unused widgets or plugins. Plugins and widgets are bandwidth thieves. Try deactivating all of your plugins to test your speed. Activate a widget or a plugin one at a time to see which one is the speed culprit.
  • Check the loading time of your ads or affiliate codes to see how they affect page speed.
  • Check your WordPress theme for compatibility issues with your WordPress version or your browsers.
  • Choose a good web host or switch to a better one with a proven uptime track record if necessary.

Here are some of the tools you can use to help you analyze your site’s performance:

Page Speed

Page Speed evaluates performance from the client point of view, typically measured as the page load time. This is the lapsed time between the moment a user requests a new page and the moment the page is fully rendered by the browser.

Yahoo! YSlow

Firefox/Firebug Add-on that analyzes web pages and suggests ways to improve their performance, based on a set of rules for high performance web pages.

Google Analytics Plugin by Yoast

Google Analytics for WordPress plugin allows you to track your blog easily and with lots of metadata: views per author & category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and page views.

Pingdom Website Speed Test

Pingdom offers cost-effective and reliable server, network and website monitoring. They use a global network of servers to monitor customers’ sites 24/7, all year long. The service includes statistics for uptime and response time, and can send out alerts via SMS, email, and more.

W3 Total Cache

W3 Total Cache is designed to improve user experience and page speed of your site by increasing server performance, reducing the download times and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration.

In conclusion, as far as website essentials go, the adage “less is more” is best. Sticking to only what’s necessary and throwing away what is not needed will help your website float to the top. The faster your website loads, the better your site performs and the experience your users have will be more pleasant, favorable, and hopefully more memorable, making them want to come back for more.

Easy and Consistent WordPress Backup Helpers

You know you should but you sometimes don’t. And just when you are about to, something goes wrong and it’s already a little too late. It gets a little more complicated when you are handling more than one website, maintaining several eCommerce sites, or handling sites with years and years of content. You could rely on your webhost to do it for you, but, that’s a little too risky for comfort. It’s what every website owner, webmaster, web host should do. Backup. Consistently. Why?

If these statements sound familiar,

“My site got hacked.”
“I accidentally deleted some code and it wiped out all my data.”
“I changed my theme and it messed up all my content.”
“I activated a plugin but it wasn’t compatible and it corrupted a whole bunch of my files.”

you know that you could have avoided the consequences of procrastination if you had kept a backup file before implementing any changes. On a larger scale, systems can shut down, natural disasters can hit, web hosting companies can go bankrupt or close shop. Without your own personal backup system, you could lose themes, plugins, content, images, widgets, customization and a whole lot more. It just makes sense to be ready all the time.

Here are some highly recommended backup options for your peace of mind:

myRepono WordPress Backup Plugin

myRepono WordPress Backup Plugin is an easy-to-install WordPress plugin which automates the myRepono API setup process, enabling you to setup automated WordPress backups in a matter of minutes. myRepono is an online website backup service which enables you to securely backup your WordPress web site files and mySQL database tables using an online and web-based management system. The myRepono online website backup service allows you to automate the process of backing up your entire WordPress website and database, including all post, comments and user data, and your WordPress PHP, template and plugin files.

WordPress Backup to Dropbox

WordPress Backup to Dropbox is a free plugin that keeps your website backed up to Dropbox regularly. The plugin’s simple interface lets you setup your backup cycle in minutes giving you peace of mind that your precious blog posts, media files and template changes are backed up. Simply choose a day, time, & frequency for your backup to be performed. In order to use the plugin you will need a Dropbox account.

BackWPup

BackWPup is a free plugin that creates flexible, scheduled WordPress backups to any location. The backup files can be used to save your whole installation including /wp-content/ and push them to an external Backup Service, if you don’t want to save the backups on the same server. With the single backup .zip file you are able to restore an installation. You can also purchase the pro version that has additional backup features.

VaultPress

VaultPress provides realtime, continuous backup and synchronization of every post, comment, media file, revision and dash­board setting across at least two separate cloud services in addition to the Automattic grid, ensuring no loss of content. Using WordPress hooks to receive alerts when information changes on your site, VaultPress immediately syncs all of your changes with their servers.

Snapshot

Make a quick and easy backup of all of your content, without fiddling with the server or signing up for an expensive backup solution, restore backups with one easy click, t backup all your regular WordPress stuff (posts, pages, comments, taxonomies etc.) and also every table of your database, for every plugin and theme you have with Snapshot, a premium plugin from WPMU Dev. With Snapshot you can create as many ‘Time Machine’ snapshots of your entire database (or individual tables) as you want, automatically schedule backups, save to Dropbox, Amazon S3 or by SFTP, and so much more.

The time, money and effort you exert in backing up your files is nothing compared to the price of losing all your website content, files, traffic and income, and the effort to recover (if possible) all of them. In this case, an ounce of prevention is indeed better than a pound of cure.

GPL Licensing and WordPress for Normal People

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

What is WordPress anyway?

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

What does free and open source mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does this mean to the average Joe?

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

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

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

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

Here’s a simple analogy to illustrate this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update as of February 2013

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

Useful Articles to Read:

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

Using a WordPress Page as Your Home Page

This has been tested to work in WordPress 2.X and above. This article was last updated in March, 2013.

Welcome to WordPress Wednesday! Each week we’ll be answering as many of your questions about the blogging platform WordPress as possible. If you have questions you’d like answered that aren’t covered here, feel free to drop them in the comment form below. Covering topics such as themes, plugins, popular tutorials, current WordPress promotion codes, and more – be sure to jump in with your questions and comments.

QUESTION: I’d like to use something other than my recent posts as my home page. Is that possible within WordPress?

It’s not only possible it’s relatively easy. The first step is to create a page to serve as your new home page. For the purpose of this example, we’ll call it “My New Home Page.”

  1. In your WP control panel, select the Pages tab.
  2. Click on Add New.
  3. Give the page a title – something like, “HOMEPAGE”
  4. Create the content for your home page just as you would a blog post.
  5. Click the Publish button.

While you’re still in the Write Page subpanel, create a second page:

  1. Title this one “RECENT POSTS” (or whatever you want to call the page that your recent posts appear on).
  2. You don’t need to have any Page Content for this one.
  3. Click the Publish button.

Now you’re ready tell WP to use your new page as the home page:

  1. In the Settings panel on the left navigation select Reading.
  2. At the top of the Reading Options subpanel you’ll see:
    How To Set Page As Homepage In WordPress - Step 1
  3. To change the front page to your new home page, select “A static page” for Front page displays.
  4. Select “HOMEPAGE” from the Front page drop down menu.
  5. Finally, be sure to tell WP which page to use to display your recent posts. From the Posts page menu select the “Recent Posts” page you created earlier. As you can see in the picture below, our posts page has not been set yet.
    How To Set Page As Homepage In WordPress - Step 2
  6. Click Save Changes.

View your site. “HOMEPAGE” should now be your home page. You also do not need to put the title in all caps. This was simply done for our example.

Note: Any Page content you have entered for the page you designate as your Posts page will be overwritten by the listing of your recent posts. The content will still be there, it simply won’t show while you have that particular page set as the Post page.

See also the WordPress Codex page: Reading Options Subpanel

If you have a question you’d like me to address or (better yet) if you have a WordPress tip, trick or tutorial you’d like to share let us know!

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