In an attempt to make widget testing faster and more enjoyable, we’ve put together a new plugin called the Monster Widget which consolidates all 13 core widgets into a single widget! The Monster Widget installs just like any other plugin and creates a widget that can be used just like any other widget.

This is the latest tool that we’ve created to optimize our theme development and review routine. We hope that you enjoy it!

Download the Monster Widget on WordPress.org

http://shoptalkshow.com/episodes/016-with-ian-stewart/

Like last year, 2012 has been and is going to be another great year for WordPress themes. Huzzah!

Delicacy
Culinary WordPress Theme created with food blogs in mind.
Author: alex27

Esquire
An elegant and bold theme featuring multiple, visually distinct, Post Formats.
Author: Automattic

Hatch
Hatch is a simple photography and portfolio WordPress theme. Optimized for mobile browsing.
Author: Griden

Origin
Minimalistic, mobile-optimized theme with responsive layout.
Author: Griden

Oxygen
Minimalistic, mobile-optimized magazine theme with responsive layout.
Author: Griden

Patchwork
The perfect theme for quilters, sewers and crafters. Comes in three color styles.
Author: sixhours

Rumput Hijau
Beautiful, clean and seo optimized theme focused on typography.
Author: satrya

Scrappy
A fresh, feminine, scrapbook-style theme.
Author: sixhours

Sundance
A brand new free video theme brought to you by the team here at Automattic.
Author: Automattic

Vintage Camera
An illustrated microblogging theme for the vintage camera enthusiast in five vintage styles/color schemes.
Author: sixhours

— BONUS —

Dusk To Dawn
Oh, I almost forgot this . A theme I worked on — Dusk To Dawn — a successor of two beloved classics, Dusk and Solipsus. It was a challenging task but I’m pleased with the outcome.
Author: Automattic

WordPress Query Comprehensive Reference

Which helpful, recent resources do you use for information about WordPress’ query? I prefer to hit the Codex (WP_Query and query_posts) and also just dig directly into wp-includes/query.php.

Fun fact of the day: about 37% of WordPress downloads are for non-English, localized versions.

So as a plugin or theme author, you should be thinking of localization and internationalization (L10N and I18N) as pretty much a fact of life by this point.

An excellent post from Otto on improvements to make and pitfalls to look out for when performing i18n on your WordPress theme.

Thanks to all web fonts, nowadays we have much more choices for fonts in our WordPress themes. You might have checked if your theme looks good with Lorem Ipusum text but I’m afraid that’s not good enough. Lorem Ipusum text doesn’t have all digits, punctuations, and symbols from the Basic Latin character set. A WordPress theme should support at least all the Basic Latin characters, and this is only assuming your theme will be used for English language. This seems to be basic but often it’s overlooked.

Here is an example.

This is the character map of the popular free font ChunkFive.

Oh, no! Not many characters are supported in this font.*

Similar looking font, Beval‘s character map.

This is more like it!*

If you want to support other languages, Spanish for example, you need to check the Latin-1 Supplement too. I’m not going to be able to give you all examples in here but you get the idea. Don’t forget to check the character map before you decide the web font you use in your WordPress theme.

*Both character maps are taken from FontSquirrel.com (Feb 26th, 2010)

The first thing you want to do is copy the _s directory and change the name to something else. Like, say, megatherium.

Then you’ll need to do a three-step find and replace with your favorite text editor on the _s name in all the templates.

1. Search for _s inside single quotations to capture the text domain.
2. Search for _s_ for to capture all the function names
3. Search for _s with a space before it to replace all the occurrences of it in comments. (You’d replace this with the capitalized version of your theme name.)

or …

Search for:’_s’
Replace with:’megatherium’
Search for:_s_
Replace with:megatherium_
Search for: _s (note the space before the name)
Replace with: Megatherium

Then, update the stylesheet header in style.css and the links in footer.php with your own information. Next, update or delete this readme — or anything else, really. That’s it! From this point on _s is yours to do with what you will. There’s no extra theming system for you to learn, just templates, scripts, and a stylesheet for you to hack.

Make sure you poke around and look at everything though. There’s always going to be something you want to change. Which is great! I recommend forking _s on GitHub and let others take advantage of your workflow. The more we share the better we all get.

And let us know how you’re using _s. We love seeing the sites you’re building with our themes and it’d be great to hear what you’re changing in our starter theme. We might even bring those changes back into the main project!

For my cravings, I generally partake in the following (most common at the top):

• I find out by word of mouth, from my colleagues at work.
• Via Twitter, from the theme designers and theme shops I follow closely.
• By way of the Extend free themes directory RSS feed (I then go preview each one immediately).
• Reading reviews on sites like WPCandy, WPTavern, Smashing Magazine, or Weblog Tools Collection.
• By checking the Commercial listing on Extend often, to discover theme shops, from time to time.
• Rarely, I will use visual theme sorting services like the Theme Finder or ThemeSorter.

And in case your answers are different, where would you send someone to look for great WordPress themes who is not a theme junkie? Your family, friends, clients, a non-WordPress expert who asks your advice.

The Weekly Theme Show is a new podcast from WPCandy that should be required listening for all WordPress theme designers and developers. Both because it involves WordPress themes and, more importantly, because it’s not from developers for developers, like most of the other podcast offerings out there in the WordPress community. It’s like a breath of fresh air.

This show will discuss WordPress themes, weekly, from a user’s perspective (and not a developer’s).

It’s exciting to see something that is user-focused, and this looks to be an engaging and interesting conversation about WordPress themes from a much different angle.