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Specialty: Clean Business WordPress Theme

The main purpose of a business theme is to create awareness, generate interest, and convert casual visitors to engaged followers/clients/customers. For a business theme to be effective, it has to have the following elements:

Great SEO capabilities.
Great design recall.
Readable, well organized text and multimedia content.
Effective interactive feedback system.

WP Business Bundle just released Specialty, a responsive premium WordPress theme designed to present your business or your company in a clear and concise manner. Overall, the theme is clean, modern and generous with whitespace. It has a great, sizeable slider that can really grab attention of casual visitors. Visitors are given control over slider transitions which gives each slide the appropriate airtime based on visitor preference.

Content is definitely readable on this theme. Font size and spacing between text boxes are great, giving visitors an uncluttered, relaxed reading experience. Images are displayed in a clean, well organized portfolio grid style which can also be sorted according to category. There’s also the option to use a jQuery masonry layout for those who want that Pinterest look. Thumbnails are slightly bigger that typical portfolio pages giving visitors a better overview of the work. Pages containing detailed narratives include large images of the work. This theme can also handle video and it includes a large section where you can showcase a special video or image right on the homepage.

Specialty does have a responsive design giving visitors the chance to appreciate the site’s content on smartphones and tablets. Specialty includes a basic contact form, custom post types, an easy to use custom panel, and just the right amount of widgets and features to get your site up and running without much fuss.

More Features:

Import/Export Functionality for Theme Options
Seven Pre-Defined Color Schemes
Breadcrumb Navigation
Adjustable Footer Widget Area (1-4 Columns)
Custom Post Types: Slider | Portfolio |Testimonial
Engaging Portfolio Layout with jQuery Masonry
HTML5 Markup | CSS3 Effects

Specialty Premium WordPress Theme is part of a bundle of themes and business-tailored plugins at WP Business Bundle available starting from $79. This theme includes documentation, future updates. For an additional $9 per month, you also get the PSD files, XML files, and access to the theme’s support forum.

Join WP Business Bundle Now

Let’s Write Some WordPress Poetry

If you have been following this basic WordPress journey, you would have learned some very basic info about WordPress, HTML, CSS, PHP, tags, html templates, css stylesheets, and a whole lot more. It’s about time to put that basic info to the test and write something “poetic” or at least attempt to. The key word here being “attempt”.

Our attempt is to write something very simple and easy. We will assume that you already have your own domain name and that you have WordPress installed and running on your site. If you’ve never coded a WordPress theme before or your brain freezes at the sight of all the gobbledygook and unintelligible mishmash of hyphens, brackets, parentheses, asterisks, colons and semicolons, and so much more, this might help you. For the experts out there, pardon the language, because this might turn out to be too barbaric for your code sensibilities. Sounds scary already.

We now know that HTML and PHP are two distinct “web” languages and that WordPress is written using PHP. WordPress Themes are basically plain HTML templates, with WordPress specific PHP tags integrated into specific areas where needed.

Just like the old snail mail letter where you have the date, the heading, the greeting or salutation, the body of the letter, the closing, and the signature, the basic components of a typical WordPress theme consists of:

the Header
the Menu (navigation)
the Sidebars
the Content Column and
the Footer

And just like the traditional snail mail letter where you need to write on real paper, you will need a text editor to write your code. Those are the basics.

In a previous article, we wrote that one of the fastest ways to learn a language is through immersion. We will attempt to apply this immersion technique in this exercise and hopefully we can learn to understand, then “speak” and “write” WordPress code as we go along. In this little experiment, we shall choose a theme, (Twenty Eleven, in this case), analyze it, try to dissect it and break it down, and then ry to create our own version, super simplified of course, based on our understanding of how it works. We will be working backwards instead of coding from scratch.

Let’s take a look at what Twenty Eleven’s Main Index Template (index.php) contains and let’s dissect. (The code below is taken from an existing website. Some of the tags have been color coded only for the purpose of this discussion).

Note that the items highlighted in red refer to the basic components of a WordPress Theme. If we strip it down to these basics, eliminate the rest of the code (strings, integers, and variables) and leave just the basic, we can actually begin to write simple code that looks like this:

(The Header)
<?php get_header(); ?>

(The Menu)
<?php if ( have_posts() ) : ?>
<?php twentyeleven_content_nav( 'nav-above' ); ?>

(The Content)
<?php /* Start the Loop */ ?>
<?php while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<?php get_template_part( 'content', get_post_format() ); ?>

(The Sidebar)
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

(The Footer)
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Of course we might be breaking a few syntax rules here and there but we’ve managed to write some sort of broken WordPress poetry. Haiku-like perhaps but nevertheless, it IS code. Till next!

20 Useful Admin Plug-ins for WordPress

Do you know what makes WordPress the number one choice amongst bloggers? Although one can list many reasons but one of the most prominent in the list will be the number of plug-ins it supports. WordPress currently runs more than 20,000 plug-ins that have been downloaded more than 30 chore times! This is both good and bad news. Good news because you will have a lot to choose from. You will almost every time find what you need. Bad news because amongst such a vast ocean of plug-ins it is easy to get lost and drowned in the information overload. To help you out we present you with 20 WordPress admin plug-ins that we feel are the best in their niche. As the name suggests these are admin plug-ins i.e. they will help the administrator of the WordPress blog to operate the blog in a better and more efficient way.

For example, let’s say that you are fed up with all the clutter of the unnecessary and superfluous windows and bars that occupy your WordPress dashboard. Try Ad minimize, listed in the first position below. This plug-in allows you to compress windows to allow more content to be substituted in its place. Obviously different people have different priorities. So with Ad minimize you can customize your WordPress’s dashboard the way you like.

Besides Ad minimize, there are 19 other useful plug-ins that, I think, you should know of. Scroll down and check them out.

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BuddyPress WordPress Themes 2013: Trends

BuddyPress has come a long way since its conceptualization in 2008. What is BuddyPress anyway?

According to WPMU.org:

“BuddyPress is a suite of plugins for WordPress that transforms into a fully functional social network platform.
When installed on WordPress Multisite it provides features that lets your members socially interact with each other within a multi-blogging platform environment. It provides all the features that allow you to build a community on your network. BuddyPress enables you to build passionate users around a specific niche.”

Buddypress.org puts it quite succinctly:

“BuddyPress is Social Networking, the WordPress way.”

The concept of turning a WordPress site into a social network is indeed radical and has not been lacking in challenges. What is amazing is that BuddyPress users of today find a plugin that fully integrates into ordinary WordPress as opposed to the few who were tinkering with WPMU a couple of years back. With its latest version, 1.6, BuddyPress is an easy to use plugin with good content management capability. You can enjoy the benefit of user generated content with the ability to moderate and control spam posts using existing infrastructure on WordPress. BuddyPress also gives you the functionality you expect from any social networking site. You can add and remove friends, create groups and much more.

With all that BuddyPress is offering now what more is store for this great plugin? The battle cry of the developers is theme integration. More and more people would like to turn their existing sites into social networking sites without discarding their existing theme capabilities. Come to think of it, if you have a great ecommerce theme, why would you want discard your eCommerce capabilities for social networking. The challenge for theme developers is to create or redesign themes that integrate the capabilities of buddypress. Social networking, in tandem with mobile devices, has made our world smaller, closer, and within reach. It is undeniable.On the other hand, BuddyPress developers also have to do their share to make the plugin more seamless. While the task doesn’t seem easy there is indeed a host of talented, highly motivated people working to reach the summit from both sides. We are looking forward with much eagerness to their success!

Portfolio WordPress Themes 2013: Trends

Portfolio themes have always been highly influenced by the technical platforms the content is viewed on. Among the different theme categories, portfolios are probably the quickest to reflect new technological capabilities available. It is just fitting to consider what’s up around the corner at the end of 2012 as far as the Internet is concerned and how this will affect portfolio themes.

The main internet trend for 2013 and 2014 is the main streaming of mobile as an internet access device. It is strongly believed that smartphones and tablets will overtake desktops as the access device of choice. A lot of the conversions are expected to happen in developing countries where 3g is still the norm. A simple observation is to check what devices internet users use to upload content. More often than not it is through a handheld device, an iPhone, Android, or smartphone. To the user, it is all about convenience and accessibility. Designers and developers need to take note of this and need to consider creating themes that can handle images and multimedia content under these constraints.

The mobile effort should be done without sacrificing an emerging and equally important 4g LTE market. Designers should be cognizant of a significant growth of mobile and desktop users subscribing to internet connections much faster than a couple of years ago. Thus the access of devices to websites must be smart enough to be able to meet the seemingly opposite needs of these market segments. In a way, it is an expansion of responsive design into the backend of the website.

The emergence of new display technology such as Retina would be something to consider. Designers must be able to take multimedia content generated from any device and exploit the full capabilities of these next generation displays. Again, this should also be done in tandem with expected rapid growth in low capability areas.

Social media integration can not take a back burner as people are finding more and more ways to use this technology. Developers should take notice of the capabilities of Instagram or Pinterest and figure out how to incorporate such features into their themes. Their popularity is an indicator of sorts as to what people are viewing and how they are viewing it. It would be a pity to have a very beautiful portfolio website with very little traffic and only a handful of people enjoying it. Lastly, there is still much room to develop seamless integration with different resources available on the cloud – more exploration on how this can be utilized, maximized, and integrated into the ultimate WordPress portfolio theme.

We can’t wait to see what will emerge in 2013. Exciting times up ahead!

On Becoming a WordPress Professional

How does one become a certified WordPress professional indeed? Earning your stripes as a WordPress professional does not come from a course you enroll in and study for X number of years in your regular university. Neither do you get a degree or a diploma for the numerous WordPress conferences, seminars or webinars you attend. In truth, becoming a WordPress professional is not age bound, race bound, location bound, language bound or educational background bound. One key ingredient is the willingness to learn, make mistakes, and learn all over again.

Many current WordPress professionals and practitioners did not start out as such. Perhaps some have come out from the corporate world and taken a radical sabbatical from their daily grind while others probably started out in their dorm room or garage. Maybe others began tinkering with WordPress while they were in their teens while some are going through a second wind in their careers. The Internet has this built-in democratic leveling quality where anyone can make it regardless. Since the year is about to end, maybe some of you are considering a quiet change or transition into something else – a new career path of sorts. You don’t necessarily have to be a developer or a designer to be a WordPress professional. Here are a few options for you to think of if you are considering a shift into the exciting world of WordPress:

Developer

Web development is the back-end of the website, the programming and interactions on the pages. A web developer focuses on how a site works and how the customers get things done on it. Good web developers know how to program CGI and scripts like PHP. They understand about how web forms work and can keep a site running effectively.A good web developer will have excellent programming skills and be able to use a range of programming tools. He or she will be able to provide solutions to give a website the functions required. Web developers will use a range of programming tools such as ASP, Javascript, XML and SQL. The focus is more on the backend and the functionality of the site.

Designer (Themes)

Web design determines the look and feel of a website. It covers the layout, navigation and colors of a website. Web design is more concerned with aesthetics and user experience than functions. A web designer will make a website easy to use and fit for purpose. A good web designer will have graphic design skills and a good understanding of marketing. He or she will know how to grab the attention of visitors and encourage them to explore a website. A web designer is concerned with how a site looks and how the customers interact with it. Good web designers know how to put together the principles of design to create a site that looks great. They also understand about usability and how to create a site that customers want to navigate around in.

Developer (Plugins and Widgets)

Plug-ins and widgets are a great way to enhance the functionality of your site by adding in extra features. These can be placed anywhere inside your template by function hooks. You can start creating and eventually selling stand-alone plugins that add value to existing or new themes.

Support Professional

One of the most common deficiencies in the WordPress themes marketplace is the lack of or absence of theme support. You can start a career by being part of a support team that is responsible for providing after-sales support to customers who have purchased specific themes.

Consultant/Marketing

Providing consultancy services, networking, and hooking up clients with designers and developers is another option to becoming a WordPress Professional. Many times, a lot of great designers do poorly sales-wise because of a lack of marketing skills. You can offer your services to acts as a marketing consultant to WordPress designers and developers who have little or no time to do the marketing themselves.

Blogger/ Theme Description Writer

With the explosion of WordPress themes in the marketplace, there is very little difference between one theme to the next and a lot of them look like clones. You can offer your services as a writer to create a marketing hook for designers and developers who would rather write code than a marketing spiel.

Documentation Writer

Providing appropriate and useful detailed documentation that is easy to understand even by WordPress beginners is another option. Transcribing the installation and setting up process in easy to follow steps adds value to the theme and a well written piece will mean less resources spent on support.

WordPress Trainor

If you have acquired a certain level of proficiency in WordPress and you are confident enough about what you know, you can also try going into teaching and training.

These are just a few ideas to think of as you consider starting or shifting to a career as a WordPress professional.

Popular WordPress Plugins from CodeCanyon

Plugins are becoming more and more a necessity in putting up a website. These little programs significantly augment the capabilities of themes to produce more robust and highly functional awesome websites. Here are some plugins you may find very useful for your site:

UberMenu WordPress Mega Menu Plugin

Are you tired of ordinary menus that come with your purchased themes? No worries. Ubermenu is a plugin designed to enhance existing plugin capabilities of any theme. This plugin turns your theme’s menu into flyouts or mega menus. Defining the hierarchy of menu items is as easy as dragging and dropping your options. Flyouts are easily created by ordering and indenting menu options. Mega menus can be created easily starting with a tick in the mega menu options. The rest of the steps are relatively simple. This powerful plugin is fully responsive, ensuring your menus are optimized and will look great on mobile devices.

LayerSlider WP – The WordPress Parallax Slider

If you want to do away with flat boring slideshows, Layerslider is a must-have plugin for you. With Layerslider, you can display slides made up of your images layered together for a more stunning 3d look. It’s not surprising that your slides will look like an elegant pop-up book page. Animation of each slide component may be configured and controlled to create dramatic transitions. This plugin is also responsive and SEO friendly.

Slider PRO – WordPress Premium Slider Plugin

Creative professionals constantly seek unique and interesting ways to display their creative works before an audience. These professional artists tend to be more meticulous and demanding of portfolio themes that will be used to display their portfolio on their websites. Slider PRO is an amazing plugin that gives web designers a myriad of slider options like transitions, effects, skins and so much more. This plugin can really turn ordinary sites into powerful portfolio websites for creative professionals.

JackBox – Responsive Lightbox – WordPress Plugin

Here’s another plugin for creative professionals. JackBox – Responsive Lightbox – WordPress Plugin is a neat plugin that allows you to create that lightbox effect even on mobile devices and smartphones. Portfolio or image and video rich sites can take advantage of this plugin to keep their desktop presentations consistent even in mobile format.

Foobar WordPress Notification Bars

This special plugin allows you to create notification bars on your site. You can flash reminders to visitors with a notification bar at the top of the web page to highlight important announcements or information. This can also be used as a source for additional monetization opportunities particularly for websites with themes that don’t have any space for ad widgets. FooBars also allows you to display your social media buttons so visitors can contact you in the social web.

Check out these plugins and give your website that extra edge from the rest. Visit Codecanyon for more WordPress plugins.

WordPress and PHP

In the last few weeks, we’ve learned some basic concepts on HTML5 and CSS. A simple analogy we can use as to how they work can be likened to writing a traditional letter sent via snail mail. HTML5 is like marking and dividing the content of the letter into sections like: the date, the greeting, the body, the closing, and the signature. CSS is what is used adds pizzazz to the is the way the letter is written: stylized handwriting, choice paper, and images and illustrations to enhance it. The result is a beautiful handwritten masterpiece ready to be sent and read by the reader. This week, we add on to our WordPress building blocks and learn how PHP comes into the picture.

To review, here’s how we defined PHP:

PHP (initially Personal Home Page tools)

PHP is a recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. It is a popular server-side scripting language designed specifically for integration with HTML, and is used (often in conjunction with MySQL) in Content Management Systems and other web applications. It is available on many platforms, including Windows, Unix/Linux and Mac OS X, and is open source software.

Adam Brown shared this simple and easy to understand explanation to tie it all up together:

When you view a webpage, the server (i.e. the site you are viewing) sends a bunch of HTML to your computer. Your browser (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, whatever) then turns this HTML source into the pretty stuff you see in your browser. With pure HTML, every visitor to a website will see the same thing, no matter what.

For example,

if we make an HTML page with this content:

<p>Today is December 1st, 2007<p>

…everyone who visits the site will see this:

Today is December 1st, 2007

…even if it is not December 1st, 2007.

What if you want to modify that so it always shows the current date? That’s where PHP comes in. PHP is processed by your server (i.e. by the site you are visiting). The server evaluates any PHP in the page before sending anything to your browser. So if we write this in the web page:

<p>Today is <?php echo date(‘F jS, Y’); ?></p>

Then the server will change that PHP expression into the current date, then send that as HTML to your browser, which then does its part.

Remember: The server processes PHP, but the browser processes HTML.

PHP does not get sent to the browser, only the HTML that the PHP produces.

People sometimes wonder why their theme’s index.php file looks nothing like the HTML source they see in their browser. Well, now you know why.

(source: PHP 101- Adam R. Brown. Check out his website for more easy to follow tutorials.)

Why is it important to understand PHP? Because WordPress is written using PHP and requires it for operation.

Till next!

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