Related posts:

1. What Makes a Premium Wordpress Theme Premium? WordPress has become a hugely popular open source blogging and...
2. Blog Tips: Changing Footers in Wordpress Here's a very helpful blog tip for Wordpress blogging that...
3. Wordpress Themes For more information on Wordpress download and Wordpress Themes, we've...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

This book walks through clear, step-by-step instructions to build a custom theme for the WordPress open-source blog engine. The author provides design tips and suggestions and covers setting up the WordPress sandbox, and reviews the best practices from setting up the theme’s template structure, through coding markup, testing, and debugging, to taking it live. The last three chapters cover additional tips, tricks, and various cookbook recipes for adding popular site enhancements to WordPress theme designs using 3rd-party plugins as well as creating API hooks to add custom plugins.

Whether users are working with a pre-existing theme or creating a new one from the ground up, WordPress Theme Design will give them the know-how to effectively understand how themes work within the WordPress blog system enabling them to have full control over their site’s design and branding. Users only need to be comfortable with the basics of web development and this book will take care of the rest.

What you will learn from this book

Set up a basic workflow and development environment for WordPress theme design
Create detailed designs and code them up
Enhance your sites by choosing the right color schemes and graphics
Debug and validate your theme using W3C’s XHTML and CSS validation tools
Customize and tweak your theme’s layout
Set up dynamic drop-down menus, AJAX/dynamic and interactive forms
Download and install useful plug-ins and widgetize your theme
Improve post and page content using jQuery and ThickBox
Add interactivity to your themes using Flash
Includes a reference guide to WordPress 2.0’s template hierarchy, markup, styles and template tags, as well as include and loop functions

Chapter 1 introduces you to the WordPress blog system and lets you know what you need to be aware of regarding the WordPress theme project you’re ready to embark on. The chapter also covers the development tools that are recommended and web skills that you’ll need to begin developing a WordPress theme.

Chapter 2 looks at the essential elements you need to consider when planning your WordPress theme design. It discusses the best tools and processes for making your theme design a reality. The author explains her own ‘Rapid Design Comping’ technique and gives some tips and tricks for developing color schemes and graphic styles for your WordPress theme. By the end of the chapter, you’ll have a working XHTML and CSS based ‘comp’ or mockup of your theme design, ready to be coded up and assembled into a fully functional WordPress theme.

Chapter 3 uses the final XHTML and CSS mockup from Chapter 2 and shows you how to add WordPress PHP template tag code to it and break it down into the template pages a theme requires. Along the way, this chapter covers the essentials of what makes a WordPress theme work. At the end of the chapter, you’ll have a basic, working WordPress theme.

Chapter 4 discusses the basic techniques of debugging and validation that you should employ throughout your theme’s development. It covers the W3C’s XHTML and CSS validation services and how to use the FireFox browser and some of its extensions as a development tool, not just another browser. This chapter also covers troubleshooting some of the most common reasons ‘good code goes bad’, especially in IE, and best practices for fixing those problems, giving you a great-looking theme across all browsers and platforms.

Chapter 5 discuss how to properly set up your WordPress theme’s CSS style sheet so that it loads into WordPress installations correctly. It also discuss compressing your theme files into the ZIP file format and running some test installations of your theme package in WordPress’s administration panel so you can share your WordPress theme with the world.

Chapter 6 covers key information under easy-to-look-up headers that will help you with your WordPress theme development, from the two CSS class styles that WordPress itself outputs, to WordPress’s PHP template tag code, to a breakdown of “The Loop” along with WordPress functions and features you can take advantage of in your theme development. Information in this chapter is listed along with key links to bookmark to make your theme development as easy as possible.

Chapter 7 dives into taking your working, debugged, validated, and properly packaged WordPress theme from the earlier chapters, and enhancing it with dynamic menus using the SuckerFish CSS-based method and Adobe Flash media.

Chapter 8 continues showing you how to enhance your WordPress theme by looking at the most popular methods for leveraging AJAX techniques in WordPress using plugins and widgets. It also gives you a complete background on AJAX and when it’s best to use those techniques or skip them. The chapter also reviews some cool JavaScript toolkits, libraries, and scripts you can use to simply make your WordPress theme appear ‘Ajaxy’.

Chapter 9 reviews the main tips from the previous chapters and covers some key tips for easily implementing today’s coolest CSS tricks into your theme as well as a few final SEO tips that you’ll probably run into once you really start putting content into your WordPress site.

For more details on the book please visit http://www.packtpub.com/wordpress-theme-design/book.

Related posts:

1. Wordpress Themes For more information on Wordpress download and Wordpress Themes, we've...
2. What Makes a Premium Wordpress Theme Premium? WordPress has become a hugely popular open source blogging and...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Since late 2007 however an increasing number of WordPress theme developers have been offering premium WordPress themes – themes which are offered for a fixed price. These premium WordPress themes are usually sold for between $50 to $250. Originally only a small number of talented and well-known WordPress theme designers created paid premium WordPress themes which were well designed, highly functional, top-quality themes that transformed a WordPress installation from a simple blog into a powerful content management system. However as the premium WordPress theme business concept spread, more and more WordPress theme designers have hopped on the bandwagon trying to cash on the new trend filling up their portfolio with premium (paid) wordpress themes.

However with greater variety and numbers of paid premium WordPress themes also comes varying levels of quality. So what specifically makes a premium WordPress theme premium? Some characteristics that should set a premium wordpress theme apart from a free theme are listed below:

Quality and Unique Design

Premium WordPress themes should be just that – Premium. They should look better and be of a much higher quality and unique design than compared to those available for free.

Wordpress Theme Features

While all themes are different, in general premium WordPress themes should have more “Features” than their free counterparts. What that means depends on the theme in question. However some features may include: “Featured Posts” areas, Multiple layout options for the home page, drop down menus, multiple customs templates for pages, custom field options, print style sheets etc.

Theme Customization Options and Fexibility

People want options, so Premium WordPress themes should be customisable. Buying a premium theme will set you apart from the crowd significantly, but since other people will still be using the same theme, premium themes should be able to be easily customized further, whether it be for the layout, colours, images, or all of the above.

Theme Live Preview or Demo

There should be a live demo or preview of the theme so you can test it and check it out before buying. If there is no live preview or demo that should be a warning sign. You should ask why don’t they want you to test the theme first? All reputable premium theme sellers will have a live demo full of content for you to test. Explore the live demo thoroughly, testing all pages to see that the theme works properly and there are no errors or mistakes.

Full Wordpress Theme Support

If you’re buying a premium WordPress theme it should also come with a certain degree of support from the designer. The level of support can vary however and will range from personalised individual support from the designer, to the provision of forums or blog comment sections for asking questions and obtaining support from the designer and other people who have purchased the theme.

Theme Supporting Documentation

Premium WordPress themes should come with an instruction manual or document. This should explain how to upload and install the theme and how to manage any of the options that are built into the theme.

Free Wordpress Theme Updates

Wordpress is continually being updated and improved and a premium WordPress theme developer should be offering you free updates of the theme when required.

Well Coded Theme and Error Free

There should be no coding errors, misspellings, X images, etc in a premium WordPress theme. The theme has cross browser compatible and been tested to work properly on all the major browsers, plus the theme should have clean and valid code and adhere to strict XHTML and CSS standards.

Related posts:

1. Can I install a different Wordpress theme to a Wordpress hosted blog? I would like to start a free Wordpress blog on...
2. Wordpress Themes For more information on Wordpress download and Wordpress Themes, we've...
3. Blog Tips: Changing Footers in Wordpress Here's a very helpful blog tip for Wordpress blogging that...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

The weakness that the hackers have found is the WordPress Blog. Many may have never considered a blog to be worthy of a hacker’s attention, yet with the way that advertising and marketing dollar potential have soared, that’s what sets a hacker off on their hunt for a victim.

The hacker attacks on WordPress Blogs take the person who wants to come to a particular blog to a different site that’s full of ads, many of them obscene and many of them virus filled, which obviously does not present what was the assumed landing point blog in the best light. In fact, one hacker attack, no matter how quickly it’s spotted and dealt with, can destroy all the work that the owner of that blog has done. If it’s a blog full of content with years of archive material, a hacker’s attack will turn all of that work into worthless untrustworthy words.

The attacks launched on WordPress Blogs by hackers get even worse for the blog owners. Google, for example, when (not if) their robots detect something suspicious about a WordPress Blog will include the following in the search result for that WordPress Blog.

“This site may harm your computer.”

If a person clicks on that phrase, which appears as a link within the search result listing, they will be taken to a page that will repeat the warning of harm to their computer and suggest that they go to another site or blog that came up in their search results.

Even if a WordPress Blog owner catches the damage quickly, the time it will take to repair that blog’s reputation will be costly at a variety of levels. People will remember the warnings of computer harm no matter how strongly it’s presented that all with that WordPress Blog is well. A loss of blog traffic will mean a loss of ad revenue. In many cases this could mean the loss of advertisers since many affiliate ad programs require a specific level of traffic activity.

WordPress Blog owners make the mistake of thinking that since the warning signs that their blog has been hacked are so obvious that they’ll be able to catch the problem before it becomes a major disaster. They would have to be proactive rather than reactive and monitor their WordPress Blog every minute of every hour of every day. Just five minutes under a hacker’s control can destroy the connection that WordPress Blog had made with the thousands of people who visit it at any point.

While WordPress does the best they can with security updates, that’s still just a reactive option for the WordPress blog owner. There is a proactive step every WordPress Blog owner can take to prevent hackers from destroying the work and reputation of their WordPress Blog.

Internet developer and expert James Stein, with 15 years experience in the development of programs that assist and educate people, has created WordPress Secured. Instead of one plug-in fix after another, WordPress Secured brings total security to every WordPress Blog that anyone can learn and benefit from.

WordPress Secured teaches how to close the many open doors WordPress Blogs contain which hackers exploit. It teaches how to find a blog’s softspots and strengthen them. Users discover how to protect their important avenues of ad revenue. WordPress Secure makes the blog owner not only more secure but more smart and aware about their blog.

WordPress Secure also includes a special feature called BadBot Killer. This program stops the scanning bots that seek out a WordPress Blog’s weaknesses that are the welcome mats for computer hackers. BadBot Killer stops the hackers even before they can find the front door to a WordPress Blog.

The amount of knowledge and information required to do a WordPress Blog post-hacking repair is large and above the heads of many WordPress Blog owners. WordPress Secure is one easy and educational package that keeps the WordPress Blog owner steps ahead any hacker.

Related posts:

1. Why is Blogging Good? Blogging can be profitable especially when you consider you can...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

At my website and blogs, I’m always asked the question “Is Wordpress better than Blogger?”. The answer, of course, is “Yes”. But to really understand why, it’s important to look at both blogging platforms side-by-side and see which one you really need.

You also need to understand that there are different versions of Wordpress, the earliest now termed as “Wordpress” at Wordpress.org, and the hosted version similar to Blogger now termed “Wordpress.com” which is of course available Wordpress.com. Only the latter comes with free hosting on a sub-domain account. We’ll discuss this in Part 2.

For Part 1 of this article, we look only at the self-hosted version of Wordpress. Here’s the comparison scale:

1) Ease of Set-up And Use

Yes, it’s much easier to set-up a blog with Blogspot.com and get your own Bloggger account. You can be done in 10 minutes flat. Once you’re set-up you can start posting immediately. If you want to add a designer’s touch to your blog, there are also tons of blogger templates available for free.

Installing Wordpress however can be a major headache if you don’t know what you’re doing. Since you’re going to host it on your own account, you’ll need to download the installation files, upload them to your server, set-up a database, and run the configuration script.

However, if you know which hosting account to get, you can choose one with Cpanel included. With Cpanel, you can do a one-click installation, upgrade and removal of your Wordpress platform.

2) Customization & Advanced Use

Blogger doesn’t allow categories. You can’t sort your articles into different focuses, unless you know how to hack the platform. With Wordpress, not only can you add categories, you can also display each category differently on your main page. In fact with the correct plugins you can even turn your Wordpress into a magazine-like portal.

Publishing with Blogger can extremely furstrating. It can take forever to post articles, especially if you’re making changes to the entire website. With Wordpress, publishing is much faster, although if you load your system with all kinds of bells and whistles it can be just as frustrating.

With a Blogger account, you can get additional features like “Shout Boxes” that improve interaction on your site. You can also get pretty themes and nifty little tools that you can add to the core template files. However, that’s as far as you can go with Blogger.

With Wordpress however, the sky is the limit. As cliche as that may sound, not only can you get themes, additional “plugins” and advanced tools, you can also extend Wordpress to far beyond just a blogging platform.

The talk today is about using Wordpress as a complete, user-friendly Content Management System or CMS. Unlike complicated predecessors like PHPPostNuke, B2, Mambo or even Joomla, Wordpress is user friendly. Plus, the availability of source codes in this open-source system coupled with a strong community makes it possible to use Wordpress as an article management system, classifieds system, direct-selling site and even a paid membership site.

4) Copyrights and Ownership of Content

I started with Blogger and I won’t say that it’s bad. But after a while I started to get frustrated with Blogger, and here’s why: Google Owns Your Content

Google has the authority to shut down your account without warning if they don’t like what you’re blogging about. You don’t have absolute control over your own blog. With Wordpress, you own the domain name and the blog is hosted on your own account. You have full control over your content.

With the self-hosted version of Wordpress (not Wordpress.com), you’re free to write about anything you want, and use the software in any way you want. Yes, Blogger allows you to publish to your own domain, but they still own the database that holds your content! Don’t forget that!

5) Search Engine Optimization and Traffic

There’s this propaganda that since Google owns Blogger, they tend to favor Blogger accounts. I won’t say that this is illogical, but from my experience, there’s no such favoritism.

I’ve heard as many stories of getting indexed fast and ranking high in search engines from both Wordpress and Blogger users. As long as the content is good, the spiders will come.

When you post in Blogger, you can only “ping” a limited amount of sites, whereas with Wordpress on your own domain you can ping as many blog directories as you want, and start getting more traffic.

As a conclusion, I would say that Wordpress is only slightly ahead in terms of optimization for search engines, and building large amounts of traffic.

6) Money-Making Potential

There’s no doubt that it’s easier to get started with Google Adsense if you have a Blogger account. In fact you can now apply for Adsense from within a Blogger account. Not entirely surprising considering the fact that both are owned by the same company.

With Wordpress, it can get tricky. The default installation is not enough. You’ll need a couple of plugins and even a better theme to really maximize the Adsense potential. However, this seems to be getting easier and there’s even “Adsense revenue sharing” plugins around that allow you to share ad revenue with other contributors and writers for your blog.

When you start using Wordpress to build your Adsense websites, you’ll soon discover what I mean. It’s something you need to experience for yourself. I can tell you one thing though – when you go Wordpress, you don’t go back.

Related posts:

1. Can I install a different Wordpress theme to a Wordpress hosted blog? I would like to start a free Wordpress blog on...
2. Wordpress Video Tutorial: Why You Need a Wordpress Tutorial A Wordpress tutorial can teach how to use Wordpress in...
3. What is the best blogging platform for a podcast or a video blog? I’m an attorney in California and I’ve set up a...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.