Events and Entertainment WordPress Themes – December 2013

Get into the groove with these cool WordPress themes just in time for the most event-filled season of the year. Create a site for you or your clients that will surely stand out with these creative events and entertainment WordPress themes.

POLARIS – Responsive WordPress Theme

Polaris Premium WordPress Theme is an ultra responsive and modern one page WordPress Theme suitable for events or parties. This premium retina ready theme comes in 16 color styles and includes: Magnific popup, Font Awesome iconic font, parallax, easy to extend and much more. It is a great way to present your important events and activities all in one sweep.This premium theme is based on popular Twitter Bootstrap framework. This template uses the latest HTML5 and CSS3 technologies.

Clubix – Nightlife, Music & Events WordPress Theme

Clubix Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive theme designed especially for nightlife, events, and music related websites. Party goers,fans, followers, or nightlife club hoppers are always on the lookout for the latest happenings around town. A cool way to address the needs of this specific market is putting up an online calendar of events, concerts, gigs, tours, launches, and other events or nightlife activities that will keep them up to date. For music enthusiasts, Clubix has two custom post types ‘under the hood’ to help you create and upload new songs organised on albums and events. You can customize your background image and also the color of the main elements from the theme, add music players, sliders, WooCommerce, Google maps, and so much more.

Flycase – Complete Music Solution for WordPress

Flycase Premium WordPress Theme is a professional and easy-to-use Music WordPress Theme that is highly and easily customizable, ready for all devices, simple to set up, and even e-commerce ready. Specifically designed for music enthusiasts, professional or not, this theme includes all the features you need to present, promote and sell for your band or label. This edgy, modern theme has everything a fan wants and everything a music artist needs – from photo/video galleries, discography, tour dates, multiple playlists, etc. – all in one cool theme.

Amplify WordPress Theme

Amplify Premium WordPress Theme is not your typical band theme with its minimalist and clean design but still capable of managing music website requirement such as gigs, discography, and videos with ease using the AudioTheme plugin. The WordPress admin panel is transformed into your band’s ultimate management tool with an easy-to-use user interface. Add your own language and display RTL languages as intended. Upload your tracks and allow users to play clips or full songs on every page of your website with the custom audio player. It ties in directly to your AudioTheme tracks and offers an easy-to-use interface for selecting and updating tracks in the jukebox. This theme is powered by Foundation by Zurb and Sass, a powerful CSS pre-processor where you can either edit the CSS directly or use Sass to regenerate your theme CSS easily and quickly.

Applause – One-Page Responsive Music & DJ WP Theme

Applause Premium WordPress Theme is a responsive one page band & musicians theme, built using Bootstrap framework using HTML5 & CSS3. For all who love music or those who are in the music industry such as music bands, musicians, DJs, producers, labels or organizers of events and festivals, this theme is the perfect solution to organizing necessary information and media such as Events, Audio, Galleries and Videos. Applause can display each event on their own map with its location and venue, the price and availability of the tickets. It can display your latest audio tracks with awesome player and you can even add a remote link or upload your own mp3.


Tools to Help You Manage Multiple WordPress Sites

Owning more than one website is not uncommon. But how do you keep track of which ones to update and which ones to archive? What about plugin updates, backups, multi language sites, multiple locations, multiple passwords, platform or software updates? Managing multiple websites can be challenging especially if you are a WordPress professional handling several clients. Below are some of the tools you can use to manage multiple WordPress sites:

ManageWP – Manage multiple WordPress sites from a single dashboard.

  • run updates
  • backups
  • update plugins
  • optimize databases
  • run security tests
  • manage analytics
  • manage comments
  • manage SEO
  • update themes

WP Remote – Manage multiple WP sites (free and Premium versions)

  • Monitor unlimited sites for free (free)
  • Easily update WordPress Core, plugins & themes with one click (free)
  • Download a snapshot of your site (free)
  • Automatic backups to our servers, your own S3 or Dropbox (premium)
  • Automatic Plugin, Theme and Core updates (premium)
  • Daily notification emails of all available updates (premium)
  • Keep a record of site activity (premium)
  • Manage and install Plugins and Themes right from within WP Remote (premium)

WP Site Stack – create Multiple WordPress Sites from one Installation of WordPress. For people that have more than one WordPress site or for consultants that host WordPress sites for their clients. (multi sites)

  • Use one installation of WordPress to install as many sites as you’d like
  • Use the same Plugin and Theme installation on all sites
  • Allows multiple multi sites.
  • Quick & easy backups | Quick & easy updates (updating one/updates all)
  • One database (never worry about database limits)
  • Installs on virtually any hosting account (no VPS required)

qTranslate – For multilingual sites. This plugin makes creation of multilingual content as easy as working with a single language.

  • qTranslate Services – Professional human translation with two clicks
  • One-Click-Switching between the languages
  • Language customizations without changing the .mo files – Use Quick-Tags instead for easy localization
  • Multilingual dates out of the box – Translates dates and time for you
  • Comes several languages – English, German, Simplified Chinese etc.
  • qTranslate will download .mo files automatically for you
  • One language for each URL – No mixing of multilingual content (user and SEO friendly)

LastPass – Password management tool to help you create secure logins for your accounts. Supports multiple operating systems and browsers.

xMarkPro – contains full WordPress management, allowing you to easily manage all aspects of your blogs from the one centralized administration panel. This includes mass posting to multiple blogs, drip feeds, theme & plugin installation, auto-upgrading, categories, blogroll links, widgets, users, and much more.

  • Mass Post to Blogs
  • Post Repository
  • Plugin & Theme Repository
  • Manage blogrolls, categories, users, widgets, posts, pages
  • SpinTax Integration & Thesaurus
  • Drip Feeds
  • Media Manager
  • Link Tracker
  • Authority Links

WordPress 3.8 Beta 1 Released!

Features as plugins! That’s what’s in store in the latest WordPress iteration, version 3.8, now in its first beta version with the next target release dates set – WordPress 3.8 Beta 2 on November 27, code freeze on December 5th and a final release on December 12th. This latest beta version brings together several of the features as plugins projects which include: Admin Help Improvements, Media Library Grid View, Pages & Menus Merge, Better Signups, JSON REST API, among many feature developments being worked on.

The guys over at WordPress.org even made a haiku specifically for this release:

Alphabet soup of
Plugins as features galore
The future is here.

Several items that developers (if you are one) are being asked to test include:

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

Developers are also being asked to test as many plugins and themes with admin pages against the new features including how to make the admin interface fit the MP6 aesthetic better. For those who are certified WordPress geeks, you can have fun trying to break 3.8 and finding all the bugs and loopholes you can. If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. Or, if you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on the WordPress Trac. There, you can also find a list of known bugs and everything that has been fixed so far.

You may Download WordPress 3.8 Beta 1 (zip) or use the WordPress Beta Tester plugin to grab your copy.


Portfolio WordPress Themes for December 2013

Gear up for the year-end and display your holiday photos or your best creative work with these flexible and dynamic portfolio WordPress themes for you or your clients. Check these out:

Sonnet – One Page Parallax Multipurpose Portfolio

Sonnet Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and streamlined One page Parallax Responsive Business Template built with Bootstrap 3.0.2, HTM5 & CSS3. This flat, easy to customize theme with its well-placed content blocks boasts of professional coding as its core power. Also included are Visual Composer – the most popular & powerful drag and drop layout builder for WordPress, a powerful section editor, responsive grid portfolio plugin – Megafolio, Zilla Shortcode, a Pricing Table manager among others. This premium theme supports Automated Plugin management and even includes a demo content importer which will let you build the site with dummy content in a second.

Mocha Flat Bold WordPress Portfolio Theme

Mocha Premium WordPress Theme is a unique and bold portfolio WordPress that is aesthetically clean, flat, minimalist in design ideal for any design agency, creative professional, freelance designer, photographer, or anyone in the creative industry wanting to make a good impression on clients. It’s very flexible and is powered with Bootstrap framework. This premium WordPress theme has advanced theme options with unlimited styling options, unlimited colors, 500+ Google Fonts, a Visual Shortcode manager, and tons of other features to help you fully customize your website. This premium theme is WordPress 3.6 and 3.7 compliant.

Mercury Responsive Portfolio Photography Theme

Mercury Premium WordPress Theme is a clean, minimalist parallax style portfolio theme that can be used for any portfolio, photography or business website. Features include responsive design which adapts to mobile devices (iPhone, iPad) and can be deactivated with one click in your backend, it is retina ready for ultra-sharp high resolution graphics, sticky main menu navigation, off-canvas mobile navigation, drag & drop content builder, 20 gallery templates, 6 portfolio templates, filterable portfolios, instant AJAX search, Music support for gallery pages, Password Protected Gallery Support, Image Gallery Comments Support, Fullscreen Youtube and Vimeo video support, and a whole lot more.

Upward: Experimental Portfolio & Blog

Upward Premium WordPress Theme is a unique experimental responsive, retina-ready WordPress theme using pseudo-elements to create a distinct presentation style on original browsers (Firefox and Chrome) unlike any other theme. Usually, non-original browsers (like Safari for Windows) do not support anti-aliasing of pseudo-elements. Also, not all browsers support CSS3 animation completely, thus some part of animation isn’t available in IE8-9, Safari and Opera. Other than that, this premium theme includes important features like: light and dark skins, post/page options, powerful visual shortcodes, unlimited sidebars, unlimited fonts, and so much more.

Nervaq – Responsive One Page WordPress Theme

Nervaq Premium WordPress Theme is a fully responsive Ajax-powered, parallax one page portfolio template with a modern, clean and minimalistic design ideal for creative agencies, designers, freelance creatives, and those in the creative industry. This premium theme is highly optimized for both mobile and desktop platforms, it uses lazy-loading of images assets and compression of all required scripts. Other features include: Drag and drop gallery management, localization ready, and is built on a full OOP , modular, load-on-demand, WordPress framework.

Grido: Responsive and Multipurpose Grid Portfolio

Grido Premium WordPress Theme is a minimalistic theme ideal for creative professionals that love flat and clean design. Its stunning design and layout capabilities with excellent color (ten preset) and typographic choices will give your portfolio the attention that it deserves. This premium responsive theme is highly customizable using the dedicated control panel and is a highly flexible and widgetized theme, packed with WordPress features such as post-formats, page templates, custom widgets, shortcodes, including important features specifically designed for it. It is also Themelovin plugins compatible: Themelovin Dribbble, Themelovin Portfolio, Themelovin Shortcodes, Themelovin Team, Themelovin TwitterIt.

Dirty Saloon – A Rugged One Page WordPress Theme

Dirty Saloon Premium WordPress Theme is a Cowboy Western-inspired premium responsive Theme that will surely make you hold your horses. This unique, flexible, and freshly designed theme features innovative AJAX loading of Posts and Portfolio items which can be turned on and off on demand with one click in Page Builder. It features a premium Aqua Page Builder for easy creation of new pages for your site.The theme also comes with a Revolution Slider, a convenient Administration panel, and many more.


Weekly WordPress News Roundup


Weekly WordPress News Roundup


Creative WordPress Themes – November 2013

Are you working on a project and in need of a WordPress theme to match your client’s needs? Here are some of the latest creative and interesting WordPress themes to inspire you:

Attitude: Multimedia Portfolio for Media Artists

Attitude Premium WordPress Theme is a multimedia portfolio and blog theme specifically designed for media artists. This theme comes with 3 main media formats: audio – to share your creative sounds with the world, video – for producers, directors, and video designers to publish and share video, and gallery portfolio formats – for architects, interior & landscape designers, photographers and others who have few or many pictures for each project. Notable features are: fully compatible with high-resolution screens like a laptops with Retina-display, two color schemes – Light and Dark, custom slugs, portfolio migration from other themes, custom styles, motion typo, and demo XML to get started.

Swiss – Premium WordPress Theme

Swiss Premium WordPress Theme is an ultra minimal yet elegantly styled WordPress theme based on the Swiss design principles for layout, colors, and typography. Its European design flavor featuring big, bold typographic elements applies itself well to an agency, blog or portfolio website. This theme comes with 3 different homepage options, 2 blog styles, 3 filterable portfolio presentation options, a team members page, and many other features that will surely make your design company stand out. It also comes with a free Cr3ativ Shortcodes plugin you can use to easily add fully responsive elements such as google maps, alert boxes, columns, buttons (with or without icons) choose colors for buttons, pull quotes and so much more.

Pix – Responsive Multi-Purpose WordPress Theme

ePix Premium WordPress Theme is a feature-packed theme suitable to the demands of creative professionals like photographers, design agencies, creative freelancers, and the like. It is loaded with unique features like: the Fullscreen gallery, Stunning Galleries, advanced live Skin Editor, Visual Page Builder, Gallery Media Manager, Parallax, etc. It also includes other features such as: fully responsive, retina ready, advanced theme options, full WooCommerce design integration and WPML ready, font awesome integration, advanced typography options, Custom CSS field, SEO basics built-in, Wistia Video Hosting Integration, JW Player 6.x Integration with Audio / Video, extensive documentation and detailed screencast video tutorials and top-notch custom support.

Porcelain – Responsive Multi-Purpose Theme

Porcelain Premium WordPress Theme is a clean and dynamic, fully responsive, parallax WordPress theme suited for all types of website needs. It comes with some awesome features, such as custom headers and custom background sections and it is the perfect canvas for your creative ideas. The combination of responsive design and parallax animations creates a high impact and impressive home page that looks great on all kinds of devices. Features include: an extensive admin panel, packed with various options so you can easily modify stylings, colors, fonts, layouts, etc., a flexible AJAX gallery with jQuery animations and effects, the gallery also provides an AJAX pagination and category filter for a better items organisation, content slider, Nivo slider, masonry layout support, and so much more.

OneUp – One Page Parallax Retina WordPress Theme

OneUp Premium WordPress Theme is a fully responsive HTML5 Retina enabled One Page WordPress Theme suitable for any kind of creative or business use. Built upon the responsive Twitter Bootstrap framework, the theme is highly optimized for both mobile and desktop platforms. This premium theme utilizes lazy-loading of images and compression of all required scripts, to ensure a fast-loading and awesome looking website. Features include: advanced page builder, layered slide builder, drag ‘n drop galleries, custom thumbnail cropping, WPML compatible, 4 slider engines, and many other great features to create a high visual impact website.

Gothica – A one Page WordPress Theme in Goth Style

Gothica Premium Responsive WordPress Theme is a bold and striking one page theme with a modern gothic flair. This premium theme features innovative AJAX loading of Posts and Portfolio items (can be turned on or off on demand with one click in Page Builder), premium Aqua Page Builder, Revolution Slider, responsive design, unlimited homepage templates, CSS3 features and animations, 5 Post Templates (Standard, video, link, gallery, audio), Team Page, and so much more.

Tao: Retina & Responsive WordPress Portfolio Theme

Tao Premium WordPress theme is unique and incredibly easy to use WordPress portfolio theme that’s quick to setup and easy to customize. This premium handcrafted theme is perfect for showcasing your work with a creative twist. Check out the unique folding effect of the grid boxes. Other features include: fully retina & responsive, semantic and clean HTML5, coded with graceful degradation and SEO in mind, focus on user-experience, usability, and beautiful typography, WordPress 3.0+ ready (featured images, custom post types, custom menus), unbranded theme options, localisation support, widget enabled, diversified portfolio, etc.


WordPress and Web Design Events 2013 – 2014

Keep yourself up to date with the latest trends and technology on WordPress and web design with these upcoming events and conferences. Plan your schedules and book early.

Event: Industry 2014 – An Event for Web Professionals
Date: 22 – 23 April 2014
Venue: Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK
Topic(s): Managing design in organisations, Metrics, Assumptions and Design, User Experience, CSS, Business, ‘Big Projects’, HTML/JS and Mobile Web and Web Performance

Event: Port80 Handheld Mashup
Date: 27 – 28 Nov 2013
Venue: Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, Wales
Topic(s): Big Ideas for Small Devices

Event: Port80 2014
Date: 16 May 2014
Venue: TBA
Topic(s): TBA

Event: 2014 SXS Interactive Festival Week
Date: 6 – 16 March 2013
Venue: Austin Convention Center, Austin, Texas
Topic(s): Health, privacy, hacking and design, nonprofits, fashion, space exploration and gaming — and everything in between

Event: The Business of Web Design
Date: 18 July 2014
Venue: Cardiff, Wales
Topic(s): Art of web design freelancing and running your own web design show

Event: Le Web’13 Paris
Date: 9 -12 December 2013
Venue: 50 Avenue du President Wilson 93200 La Plaine Saint Denis
Topic(s): Mobile, hardware, social, etc. and their potential trajectories, Technology

Event: International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
Date: 24 -27 February 2014
Venue: Haifa, Israel
Topic(s): Annual meeting of the intelligent interfaces community and serves as the principal international forum for reporting outstanding research and development on intelligent user interfaces

Event: The Next Web Europe 2014
Date: 24 – 25 April 2014
Venue: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Topic(s): Internet and Technology

Event: An Event Apart
Date: 9 – 11 December 2013
Venue: The Palace Hotel, San Francisco CA
Topic(s): Web design, typography, mobile web, CSS

Event: WebVisions NYC
Date: 3 – 4 April 2014
Venue: NYIT Auditorium on Broadway
Topic(s): Explore the Future of the Web

Event: New Media Expo 2014
Date: 4 – 6 January 2014
Venue: Rio All Suite Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada
Topic(s): Blogging, Podcasting, Web TV & Video


WordPress Plugins and Widgets To Help You Manage Your Content Efficiently

Managing large volumes of content can be quite a task if not managed well especially if you are handling multiple contributors, authors, and guest authors. Here are some useful WordPress plugins to help you streamline and monitor your content activities:

Postrunner

Postrunner is a guest posting system connecting authors with site owners. This plugin facilitates the process of hooking a WordPress site into Postrunner to receive guest posts. PostRunner streamlines the guest posting process for authors and publishers who want to share content, but don’t want to deal with the normal prospecting, pitching, and negotiating traditional guest posting requires. Authors get abundant guest posting opportunities; publishers get quality content for their blog or website while maintaining total editorial control.

Really Simple Guest Post Plugin

Really Simple Guest Post Plugin allows your visitors to submit posts even without registration (as a guest author). Anyone will be able to submit post and it will be added automatically as a pending post for review, approval or rejection. Posts will be directly saved into WordPress database and will show up in Admin Dashboard as pending post with given Title, Description, Category and Tags.Moderator will be able to review and approve them as needed. Authors Name, Author url and email will be added as custom field.

Frontend Publishing

Frontend Publishing is a lightweight plugin that allows you to accept guest posts/articles without giving your members access to the sensitive WordPress control panel. It will automatically filter out all the posts that don’t meet the submission guidelines of your website. It can be a huge time saver if you have a very popular blog or article directory. You can allow members with a certain user level to publish posts instantly. All other posts are added to the ‘pending’ queue.

Custom Content Type Manager

The Custom Content Type Manager (CCTM) is a WordPress plugin that allows users to create custom content types (a.k.a. post_types) with virtually any type of custom field. This plugin allows users to create custom content types (also known as post types) and standardized custom fields for each, including dropdowns, checkboxes, and images and more. You can select multiple images, posts, or media items and store them in a single field making it easy for you to store a gallery of images or long lists of values. This plugin also lets you export and import your content definitions, making it easy to ensure a similar structure between multiple sites.

Ajax Content Filter

Ajax Post Content Filter allows you to filter your content with a drop down box. Just install the plugin, activate and open the ACF Posts located in the left side menu bar. You will need to add new ACF posts by filling up the post title and placing your content in the editor then publish it. Simply put the shortcode [ACF] in a page or post in admin. You can also put the shortcode ajax_content_filter() in your template file and you will get the simple dropdown box on your page at front side.

Fancier Author Box

Give identity to your single or multi-author WordPress website with Fancier Author Box – a WordPress plugin that allows you or your authors to connect with your audience on all levels and encourages people to read the author’s bio and engage on major social networks. You can modify display settings and color settings according to your preferences.

Editorial Calendar Plugin

The Editorial Calendar Plugin gives you an overview of your blog and when each post will be published. You can drag and drop to move posts, edit posts right in the calendar, and manage your entire blog. See all of your posts and when they’ll be posted. You can drag and drop to change your post dates, manage your drafts with our new drafts drawer, quick edit post titles, contents, and times, publish posts or manage drafts, easily see the status of your posts, manage posts from multiple authors.

Custom About Author

This plugin acknowledges authors for their post by displaying a brief biography about them at the end of their post. It is perfect if you have multiple guest bloggers on your website and they do not each have a user account. It also gives an added incentive for bloggers to write guest posts on your site. Multiple custom profiles can be created and they take preference over website user profiles. You also have the option to specify a specific profile to display for each post. Custom profiles are completely configurable, it can include links to social media (such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn & Google+) or you can specify any HTML/text you want to display. This plugin displays the author profile at the end of the post. It gives you have the option to display the author’s website user profile or a custom profile.

WP Biographia

This plugin allows you to add a customisable biography to posts, RSS feeds, pages, archives and to each post on your blog’s landing page as well as via a widget in your sidebar. It integrates out of the box with the information that can be provided in each user’s profile and supports custom post types. Display of the Biography Box can be hidden on a global or per user basis for posts, pages and custom post types as well as on a per category basis.