1. The WordPress Help Sheet

This wonderful Help Sheet contains information for the people starting with WordPress design and development. It contains commonly used simple php snippets for template files, header files and some more useful stuff. The document was created by WPCandy along with Liquidcity. However, the download link on WPCandy wasn’t working, so I’ve uploaded it on Scribd.

2. Advance WP Help Sheet

After the simple WP Help Sheet, WPCandy released an advanced version of that cheat sheet. It’s aimed towards advanced developers and should be a helpful document for beginners as well. Again the document is not available on WPCandy – so you can download it over here.

3. WordPress Theme Development Check List

WPTOY has released the official WordPress theme development checklist as PDF and it can be downloaded from here. it covers checklists for stylesheets, browser compatibility, pages, validation of code, WordPress code & few blog elements.

4. WordPress Template Tag Reference Guide

DBS Interactive has released a template tag reference guide, which is basically a list of all the template tags found at WordPress Codex. It’s online and  can be accessed from the aforementioned link.

5. WP Plugin API & Theme Tags

Bueltge has released the WordPress plugin API & theme template tags in individual PDFs. They are commonly used tags and can be downloaded from here – the page is in German, although you can use latest version of Firefox or Chrome to translate them automatically, else use Google Translate.

6. Official WordPress Optimization Cheat Sheet

WordPress optimization cheat sheet is present on WordPress codex, that educates you about server optimization, improving performance of WordPress, offloading the server, caching and how to add multiple database servers. Overall, its a perfect guide for those who have high traffic websites.

WordPress Related Cheat Sheets

WordPress theme development needs the knowledge about CSS, Design, PHP, Javascripts and few others. WordPress is mainly used for blogs, so we thought of listing cheat sheets of those topics as well.

7. WordPress Blog Maintenance checklist

This checklist gives you the daily, weekly and monthly tasks to maintain the blog. I’m sure it’ll be very helpful for those who are unorganized and lazy enough to skip these small tasks.

8. jQuery Cheat Sheet

Jquery Cheat sheet lists commonly used functions of jQuery. It can be downloaded from here. Thanks to TripWireMagazine.

9. MySQL Cheat Sheet

Easily interact with MySQL using this cheat sheet. It listes mathematical expressions, Data types, MySQL functions in PHP etc. The sheet was released by AddedBytes and is a great reference for WordPress design and development.

10. Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet

Seomoz has done it again. Its one of my favorite resource for learning about search engine optimization. They released web developer’s seo cheat sheet and is a useful reference for those who want to make themes SEO friendly while developing them.

11. RGB Color Codes

This handy cheat sheet lists 216 web safe colors that can be used while developing the WordPress themes. Of course, this will not be used by those who design using Adobe Photoshop or dreamweaver, but will be handy for those using good ol’ notepad++.

12 WordPress CSS Cheat Sheet

WordPress CSS Cheat sheet lists the basics of CSS that’ll be helpful in development of WordPress themes.

Some Kick Ass Presentations

13. WordPress Optimization

Joost De Valk gave the presentation at A4UExpo and has uploaded the presentation used at Slideshare. He gives 40 tips in this presentation and should be helpful for developers.

14. 101 Landing Page Optimization

It’s important for every designer to know about user interface and the practical use of it. Landing pages are pretty important for any website. Every WordPress designer should be aware of optimization tips of landing pages. Oli Gardner of Unbounce has created a presentation on optimization of landing pages and uploaded it on SlideShare. It’s a must read for every designer.

15. Securing WordPress

BlogSecurity.net has created the whitepaper to secure WordPress. It’s a fantastic whitepaper to learn more about security WordPress and things one should take care of at the time of development. Secure WordPress site will mean clients will be happy from you!

Well, these are some of the cheat sheets that we liked although there are lot of such information available on the web. Here are the links where you can find them easily -

1. Search Engine’s Big Daddy! – Google result for WordPress PDFs, so its just not some cheat sheets, it’ll be lot more than that.
2. SlideShare – Awesome Presentations on WordPress
3. Scribd – Documents on WordPress
4. Cheat Sheet database – we’ll you find cheat sheets not only WordPress but on various other topics.

I hope you found this article useful. Please share the love by posting it on Facebook or Twitter or whatever service your like.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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It was the evolution of blogging that brought many significant changes in the web ecosystem and one of them is that there are far more webmasters now and hundreds of them are becoming professional webmasters every day. I personally believe that its WordPress that has contributed significantly in this space. Its user friendly, has great documentation and has awesome community around it. WordPress is fast becoming the first choice for every publisher, people are shifting on it and this increase in demand is making web design companies adopt WordPress and one of the reason why we see so many companies offering premium WordPress templates and companies offering WordPress design services.

With that, we thought of coming up with a resourceful post that’ll help the new Web designer turned WordPress designers in making their lives easy -

Resources for Coding

WordPress Codex: What can be better than the official codex itself? The documentation itself is wonderful and that is one of the reason why developers were quick to adopt WordPress.

WP Engineer: WP Engineer has lots of posts with codes and lots of posts with tips that are surely going to help beginners. It’s a must bookmark blog for all those who want to learn coding in WordPress.

Cheat Sheets: Dainis Graveris has listed 23 extremely useful cheat sheets for programmers and WordPress designers. This is one resource that you will love to the core.

Tutorials for Developing WordPress themes: Vandelay design has posted a fantastic list of tutorials that help newbie’s in understanding WordPress theme designing.

Coda Clips: Coda is a text editor for web developers (mac only), it supports keeping small snippets for faster and quicker development. To support that, they started Coda Clips blog that features frequently used snippets and is regularly updated.

WordPress Mailing lists: WordPress official mailing list is the best place to keep yourself up to date with that is happening around WordPress and what are the new changes or requests made by the community. It’ll not only keep you up to date with the current status, it gives you the idea about what may be the next big feature of WordPress.

WordPress plugins to help WordPress Designers – We’ve featured 9 plugins for WordPress that will surely help all the beginner’s in quicker development of WordPress themes.

WordPress Theme Frameworks

A theme framework is the flexible foundation, that can be used to build WordPress themes faster and quicker, without worrying about coding various basic functionalities. Someone with prior experience in CSS would be able to quickly adapt to WordPress designing. We are listing some of the most popular theme frameworks over here.

Thematic – Thematic is a free, open-source, highly extensible, search-engine optimized WordPress Theme Framework featuring 13 widget-ready areas, grid-based layout samples, styling for popular plugins, and a whole community behind it. It’s perfect for beginner bloggers and WordPress development professionals.’’

Theme Hybrid – Hybrid is a user-friendly, search-engine optimized theme framework, featuring 15 custom page templates and 8 widget-ready areas, allowing you to create any type of site you want. Like WordPress, this theme is completely free and open source. You can use it for your client work or for a blog about your grandchildren. It is continuously being developed and has a community growing around it.

WP Framework – WP Framework was created to serve as the starting point in WordPress theme development. It accomplishes this by providing you with commonly used functions and features that modern WordPress themes should have. So when you start a brand new WordPress project, using WP Framework you’ll already have the basic functionality set so you don’t have to worry about mundane task like creating the loop, or recreating all the standard template files.

Carrington – Carrington is a CMS theme framework for WordPress from Crowd Favorite, that makes it easy to create unique looks for different categories, posts and comments just by creating custom templates.

WordPress Books for newbie WordPress designers

There are various books written for WordPress and many are yet to be published. There are some fantastic books for WordPress, although I would like to mention these books for those who seriously want to be WordPress designers.

• Rockable Press – How to be rockstar WordPress Designer is a fantastic e-book as it is focused on those who want to shift from regular web designing and want to become WordPress designers.
• Vladimir Prelovac (not an affiliate link) – Vladimir has created lots and useful and some of the most popular plugins for WordPress. He’s a great authority in WordPress plugin development. This book should be in arsenal of those who want to develop WordPress plugins.

I hope these resources will be useful for anyone who wants to be a pro WordPress Designer. If you know any more resources, then please point them to us and we’d be more than happy to include them here.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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One of the biggest factors for WordPress fame is the amount of development happening around this ever so wonderful content management system. The flexibility it gives to designers and programmers helps them generate inspirational WordPress design. If you would like to learn how to develop WordPress themes and create wonderful designs then you should head over to Small Potato’s ultimate tutorial series on how to create wordpress themes. Apart from that there are various WordPress plugins that’ll help you in WordPress design development, lets check them out -

1. Theme Switch & Preview

Nicolas Kuttler has created various small plugins, however this one is my favorite as it allows you to tweak the template online without breaking stuff for visitors. There is a widget and a shortcode to make switching WordPress design easily. The plugin gives various options and as a developer you’ll surely love them.

2. Maintenance Mode

WordPress design development should be done in such a way or locally [how to install WordPress locally] that it shouldn’t impact the development, however there are times when the site can look weird, while enabling the new theme on live environment. This is where, Maintenance Mode plugin comes in handy. It allows you to create a custom message that’ll be displayed to your visitors while you get to access the blog as normal.

3. User Switching

This is a fantastic plugin that lets you easily switch between the multiple users. In the past there have been few of our clients who allowed various low level user accounts and didn’t want them to see various settings in the dashboard, this is where this plugin can come handy. It allows you to quickly switch between users with the click of a button. It’s up to date and supports older and new versions alike.

4. Get the image

Get the image is a plugin that grabs images for you. You can grab the image and display it around the post using custom fields, WP’s post image feature or you can even extract it from the post itself. If you are playing around with post images, then this plugin can surely help you in easing the task. You can go through its implementation and frequently asked questions over here.

5. Query Posts

This plugin is like a dream come true for those, who aren’t loved by PHP. This plugin creates a widget that lets you display the posts the way you want. This is the widget that keeps users out of the code and gives them the ability to display items on their site how they want. It supports categories, tags, custom taxonomies, author, date, time- and a lot more.

6. NextGEN Gallery

I personally feel that this plugin should become part of WordPress Core. Not only this plugin is a complete CMS in itself for images, it has its own plugins too! I would say that this should become your must install plugin for WordPress, no matter if you are using it for WordPress design development or using it personally! It’s just too good to be true! This plugin powers our WordPress Design Portfolio.

7. YD Network-wide Options

YD Network-wide options plugin lets you easily replicate blog or plugin settings across the network of blogs on WordPress 3.0. It maintains backward compatibility with WordPress MU and is constantly updated by the author. This is a fantastic feature as it allows you to easily maintain the settings and update them regularly across the whole network install in WordPress 3.x.

8. Members

Just like User Switching, members is one plugin that lets you manage the member roles in WordPress. This plugin lets you manage the scope of roles. You can give and take features from roles, create new roles etc. This ensure that members will get only those privileges that you want them to have. A must have plugin if you want to use WordPress as CMS.

9. Custom Post Type UI

Custom Post Type UI plugin gives you easy to use interface for maintaining custom post types and taxonomies. WordPress 3.0 features better support for Custom post types and taxonomies and this plugin improves the interface tremendously. It’s a fantastic plugin and must be in every WordPress designer’s arsenal.

I hope you find these nine plugins useful enough for WordPress design and development. We’ll continue featuring these kind of plugins and various other tips. Please share the posts on Twitter, Facebook or any other social network using the buttons on the left.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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These design galleries and blog posts are great for the designers and if you are planning to get your WordPress designed then you should check out these resources to

WordPress Design Inspiration Galleries

1. We Love WP

We love WP is probably the best and most up to date gallery. It’s fantastic to see some good work constantly featuring in this web gallery for WordPress designs. One of the best part is that they’ve categorized the designs nicely thus making it easy to navigate industry specific designs. Guess what! They’ve featured us on their website as well :)

2. WP Candy

WP Candy has a WordPress design gallery. It hasn’t been updated since some time however; it remains one of my favorite destinations for WordPress design inspiration. WPCandy not only features the awesome wordpress designs, it also has great tips in its blog.

3. CMS Designs

CMS Designs is an inspirational showcase and gallery website with collected and submitted well designed blogs and websites powered by popular Open Source content management systems like WordPress. CMS Design features some good examples. It is updated slowly but regularly. There are some designs that are treat to watch. http://wordpress.cmsdesigns.org/

4. WordPress Showcase

What can be better than the official directory of designs that rock! Team Automattic selects some of the coolest websites/blogs running on WordPress. It’s a great inspiration resource for WordPress designs as well as programming.

5. WP Garden

It’s a nice little directory run by Sadish Bala, a WordPress fan. I was personally not impressed by WP Garden’s own design but it certainly features some really nice WordPress designs across various categories. http://wpgarden.com/

6. WP Float

WP Float has a good collection of WordPress Designs that give inspiration. They’ve even kept their tag line as WordPress inspiration. They’ve got pretty long list of various categories and have got loads of sites in each of them. Overall it’s a fantastic resource to get design inspiration.

Blog Lists that feature great WordPress Designs

7. Hongkiat – 100 nice and beautiful blog designs

Hongkiat has listed some of the best blog designs across the internet in a blog post. 100 blog designs in a row is definitely an art work, all of the designs are inspiring and mostly are on WordPress. Even if they are not, what can’t be made in WordPess?

We spent weeks going through hundreds and hundreds of blogs in the blogosphere, looking for blogs with nice and interesting design. We marked down those with great interface, graphically beautiful, unique personalities and styles. Here we bring you – 100 Nice and Beautiful Blog Design.

8. SixRevisions – 45 beautiful and creative WordPress Designs

Jacob Gube from Six Revisions has done a fantastic job by listing some of the greatest designs made that are running on WordPress. It is truly an amazing resource for WordPress creative design inspiration. Well not just that he even lists 25 outstanding WordPress designs in another post and that is also a true gem.

WordPress provides designers utmost control over a theme – resulting in unprecented flexibility in the layout and design direction he or she can take. WordPress – in the title – is inside parentheses because the designs you’ll see below are wonderful designs despite of the publishing platform they use (which just so happens to be WordPress).

9. Instant Shift – 55 excellent WordPress site design for design inspiration

Daniel Adams has listed some unique and beautiful looking WordPress site design. The collection in that list is fresh and inspirational. It’s a link that should be in stored in your bookmarks. I’m sure you’ll find it as one of the best source for inspiration at all the times.

Anders Ross has also created a similar list that features 70 brilliant WordPress design for inspiration. It’s another wonderful resource that you must check out.

In this designs showcase we trying to present you exemplary design trends, new practices, creative ideas and designer’s skills. There are so many different WordPress designs out there that it’s always hard to decide which one to select. We spent last few weeks to compile this list of highly beautiful, creative and most importantly inspirational site designs over web which might help you to get inspired with their work.

10. Blog Design Studio – 35 Best WordPress Design Websites

Our last post was a super hit where we’d listed 35 websites that are using WordPress, WordPress MU or BuddyPress for running fantastic designs and use WordPress as CMS instead of just a blog software.  We listed only those websites that had fantastic design and great programming.

Popularity of WordPress is clear in its own way, however it becomes crystal clear when we see small businesses, professionals or even big corporations are giving preference to WordPress over other CMSes. WordPress as a CMS has evolved and is used to build beautiful and professional websites.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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1. h Mag

h MAG is a high end luxury magazine for the Hoboken market. They print 15,000 copies that are placed in every room at The W Hotel, delivered to every doorstep in town, distributed to over 100 retail establishments and handed out at the Path and Ferry stops. h Mag uses BuddyPress & WordPress MU to publish variety of content and is a highly interactive site and design.

2. Creative Ad Awards

Creative Ad Award is a fantastic advertising archive, serving advertising fans with high quality ads. They provide world’s most sophisticated, creative and fresh ads. Creative Ad Awards has highly customized WordPress to achieve this kind of design.

3. Kodingen

Kodingen is a cloud development environment, code editor, hosting service, database administration program, and collaboration platform. It includes web-based access to file systems and web-based FTP and SVN. This whole application has been developed as a BuddyPress plugin. It’s a fantastic presentation of what can be achieved by combining power of WordPress, Programming and Design.

4. Clouds 365 Project

Clouds 365 is a project by Kelly Delay, who decided to upload image of the clouds everyday on that website. The site has run successfully for 1 yr and now Kelly has decided to start the next year. Clouds 365 project got really popular and has some nice following. It’s a fresh new design and an excellent example of running a photo blog using WordPress.

5. DinDins Foods

DinDins Food is a New York city based company that produces organic toddler food in Manhattan. DinDins uses WordPress and Shopp plugin to power this e-commerce portal. The site wears a fresh design and goes with the theme of “Green”.

6. WSJ Magazine

Wall Street Journal is one of the most reputed media houses and they’ve selected WordPress as CMS for their website. WSJ’s skin is pretty neat and is a wonderful example of magazine theme applied on WordPress to achieve this result. The site is heavily customized to give it the look of an online magazine.

7. GigaOM Pro

GigaOM Pro is a WordPress/BuddyPress-powered premium research membership site, focused on four verticals: Mobile, Green IT, Infrastructure, and the Connected Consumer. A network of independent analysts provide in-depth research papers and research notes, which subscribers can view on the site or download as PDF documents. It’s a wonderful combo of BuddyPress features and a professional design.

8. My Telegraph

My Telegraph is the social networking part of The Daily Telegraph, one of the leading newspapers in The UK. It’s powered by WordPress and BuddyPress. Website’s features and design compliments The Daily Telegraph’s website design. This shows the power of WordPress as CMS.

9. IBN Live

IBN Live is one of the most popular websites in India, It’s powered by WordPress and has used various plugins to empower this very famous website. IBN Live is CNN-IBN’s venture with a clean and online newspaper like quality design.

10. Solo Practice University

Solo Practice University is a WordPress/BuddyPress-powered premium membership site, focused on building an educational and professional networking community for lawyers and law students. The theme is made in such a way that each blog acts as a classroom and using BuddyPress, they host group lectures for Law students. To be honest, this is one of the most beautiful and clean looking law sites that I’ve ever come across.

11. Better Codes

Bettercodes.org’s mission is to empower and engage software developers to share their ideas and thoughts. Connect them with like-minded people and allow collaboration between them. It’s a well-designed combo of WordPress & BuddyPress that is helping “Bettercodes” to grow at a good rate.

12. Ride Oregon

Ride Oregon is the official site for Travel Oregon’s (the Oregon Tourism Commission) focus on cycling-related travel and tourism in the state. Ride Oregon integrated WordPress Mu and BuddyPress to showcase cycling events, mountain biking trails, road rides happening in the state. It’s a fantastic website design and will attract your attention as soon as you’ll visit their homepage.

13. Irrational Games

Irrational Games is an award winning video game developer located in Boston, MA. The company has released games such as BioShock and Swat 4. Irrational games has an extensive and powerful community and it is powered by combo of WordPress mu & BuddyPress with a wonderful website design that enhances the overall experience.

14. Official Gazette

Official Gazette of the Republic of the Philippines is a blog that is edited at the president’s office and is one of the most visible blog from the government of Philippines. The blog provides news about the country and the government. It’s powered by WordPress with a nice and clean website design.

15. URB Magazine

URB is a monthly American magazine devoted to electronic music, hip hop and urban lifestyle and culture. The magazine was founded in 1990 and the website is equally popular. The website is an awesome example of how WordPress can power such busy and beautiful websites with ease. The site gets more than 10,000 visitors/day, has more than 9000 posts and some 40+ contributors.

16. Watermelon Ministries

Watermelon Ministries is a non-profit organization that provides creative services to other non-profit ministries and missionaries around the world. The site boasts a very beautiful website design that conveys the message of being creative! It’s powered by WordPress and even features a shopping cart running with WordPress.

17. Justin Guarini

Justin Guarini is American Idol season one runner up who is also TV Guide Network’s resident hosts. In addition to seeing him on the red carpet for TV Guide during Award Season covering The Oscars, The Grammys, The Emmys and more, Justin also hosts their movie premiere and junket specials. The site is powered by WordPress, it features blog, the website and a forum – we would have loved it even more if it used bbPress to power the forums, but then we can’t take the credit away from this nicely designed website running on WordPress.

18. Kim Kardashian

Kim Kardashian got popular after the launch of E! Entertainment reality series “Keeping up with the Kardashians.” Kim also banked on the controversy created with the launch of her sex tape with Ray J, a famous singer in America. Even Kim’s beauty got spellbound with WordPress’s features and this amazing website design.

19. Atlantic Southeast Airlines

Atlantic Southeast Airlines, Inc. was founded in 1979 in Atlanta, Ga., by three determined entrepreneurs who dreamed of safely connecting small communities to the Atlanta metropolis. Atlantic Southeast Airlines features and nice and clean looking website design that is powered by WordPress and is an example of the few airline companies using WordPress to power their website.

20. UPS Racing

UPS Racing website is powered by a completely customized WordPress theme that features behind the scenes video, photo galleries, blog posts, twitter updates, games, and promotions for the team. The site also features a custom administration module that allow editors to update promotional content on nearly every page, making it a great example of showcasing the power of WordPress.

21. HeyPapaLegend Studios

HeyPapaLegend Studios are specialists in composition, sound design and recording with a refreshing blend of youth & experience for the ad industry. They’ve used WordPress as CMS to power their beautiful looking website that comprises of flash, audio, videos and AJAX to showcase their work.

22. MySpace Developer Center

Who doesn’t know MySpace? It’s the same social network that you left to join your friend’s at Facebook. Anyhow, the site is powered by WordPress and features a trendy and young website design. We love the fact that the site is beautifully designed although there are slight issues in the website’s coding. Is anyone hearing us at MySpace? Probably they’ll do so when some interested developer will listen to us.

23. The Streamy Awards

As the first and most prestigious awards devoted to honoring excellence in web television, the Streamy Awards identify and celebrate the pioneers laying the groundwork for a new and dynamic entertainment medium. The website features bright colors and a nice looking website design powered by WordPress.

24. The Walk to Washington D.C.

The Walk to Washington is a initiative to gather 1,000,000 signatures on their petition for greater access, research and treatment for dealing with depression. It’s a beautifully designed website with great blend of colors and lighting used in the background. The site is a great example to showcase the power of WordPress as CMS for event based websites.

25. LA Marathon

The LA Marathon uses WordPress to power majority of its website, including static content, a forum powered by bbPress, videos, photos, and more. It’s a community that inspires athletes to connects them with each others. LA Marathon boasts nearly 20,000 participants and 1 million spectators and is one of the biggest organized road races in the world.

26. Harvard Gazette Online

The Harvard Gazette is Harvard’s official newspaper, highlighting faculty research, administrative staff, students, and events. Harvard is world’s most renowned institute for higher learning and its a no wonder that it’s part of this list. They decided to use WordPress to power this beautiful with easy to navigate website and that itself proves the ability and reach of WordPress.

27. Joint Use

Joint Use is an initiative to increase opportunity for children and adults to be more physically active. They encourage the shared use of gymnasiums, athletic fields and playgrounds by schools, private organizations etc. This helps in reducing the cost. The site is powered by WordPress and bbPress powers their forums. The website design is white and has used images to give the extra flair.

28. PerqWorks

Perqworks.com is Time off management application that manages leaves for your organization. Its powered by extensively customized WordPress for not just the front-end of the website but it integrates with the Perq Application. It’s a great display of what WordPress is capable of as CMS and not just for maintaining quality designed websites.

29. Kimberly Caldwell

Kimberly Caldwell is an american singer who came 7th in American Idol’s second season. She currently hosts various shows on Tv Guide Network. The celebrity decided to use WordPress to power their website that will also feature her debut album which is currently work in progress.

30. Leeds City College

Leeds City College was formed with the merger of Leeds College of Technology, Leeds Thomas Danby and Park Lane College Leeds & Keighley merged to form one of the largest and most influential colleges in UK. It’s using WordPress to create a course catalog that contains more than 2,000 courses and also uses WordPress to power its primary website.

31. Dot Kite

Dot Kite offers professional design services in many different areas. From furniture to consumer electronics, from packaging solutions to graphics and brand identity. They use WordPress to power their website and its not only nicely designed website, it uses javascript effects to make it visually more appealing.

32. Creative Spaces

Creative Spaces is a website that helps you to find suitable and affordable space to develop, exhibit or perform your work. Not only the concept is amazing, its the site’s design that steals your heart and attention instantly. It’s a fantastic display of website design & features combo running on WordPress.

33. Golf Royalty

Golf Royalty is popular irish website for golfers. It features innovative and dynamic reviews of Irish Golf Courses, Interactive Irish Golf Maps and the latest news & reviews. It’s a well designed, content rich website that uses WordPress to easily manage and display its content.

34. The Ford Story

The Ford Story is a website powered by WordPress integrated with various social media websites. The focus of the website is to connect with the customers and be open about the happenings around the ford cars & trucks. Ford is a fortune 500 company and they’ve used WordPress as CMS for this website and it means a lot for WordPress.  The Ford Story’s website design is one of my favorites as it’s a blend of great colors and uses javascripts to add various effects on the webpage.

35. 101 Holidays

101 Holidays is a unique selection of some of the world’s greatest travel experiences. Each of the holidays on this website has been carefully researched, and individually chosen by two of Britain’s leading travel writers, David Wickers and Mark Hodson. Launched in January 2009, 101 Holidays was named as one of the year’s 10 Hot Websites by The Times Magazine. 101 Holidays uses WordPress to display the content in a fantastically easy to use navigation and filters the destinations depending on the choices made by the user.

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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Matt Mullenweg - The Super Hero!

If it weren’t for Matt Mullenweg creating WordPress, I would not have been here writing at this blog and you all wouldn’t have been reading this article. At the age of 19, he invented the core of WordPress, and later when he turned 24, quit his job at CNET to fully focus on developing WordPress – a blogging platform. He is also the founder of Automattic, the business behind WordPress as well as famous spam fighter, Akismet.

Read this amazing piece at Skidzopedia – 17 people who changed the internet. Although, I would surely love to include the name of Max Levchin, Paypal’s founder; Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, Skype’s founders. I’m sure there must be more people on that list, still I would say that the list is pretty neat. I’m happy that people realize Matt’s hard work & contribution to the internet as he definitely deserves these kinda titles! What Say?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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1400 subscribers! Yipieee!

I would be honest, its been some time since I checked our subscriber base and the core reason was that Feedburner had been acting stupid, although I know that its been hovering around 1400 since some time. It’s helpful that I have the rough idea, however its difficult to digest that a service, owned by Google has been failing to provide good and dependable results. Many bloggers aren’t happy, some have accepted the service as it still gives a rough idea although on the other side some have shown a decline in interest as in current scenario there are other ways through which visitors can subscribe to their content. These days, most of the bloggers are  focusing towards either email marketing or towards increasing the twitter or facebook fans.

What are the alternatives?

Feedburner has been a great service and one of the only service that gives you the stats, helps you make money through Adsense and doesn’t charge a single dime. They offer so many features that others have failed to offer till date, however its the inconsistency in the service that made Jean & Samir Bhardwaj to look for alteratives. These are some of the alternatives that I liked -

• Feedblitz – This is definitely second most popular service. Feedblitz is very stable and has got good reviews lately. It is popularly praised for its email newsletter service and looks like a pretty good alternative to Feedburner. It comes at a price although, it shouldn’t be an issue for professional bloggers if they are still interested in RSS stats.
• WP FeedStats – This is a free WordPress plugin that displays the RSS subscription stats of your blog. The plugin displays the hits all the versions of the feed, be it RSS2, RSS or ATOM. The plugin looks decent I haven’t checked it personally, however, if we go by Samir’s judgement then it shouldn’t be a bad alternative to those looking for a free solution.
• Aweber & MailChimp – These two email subscription delivery services have gained a major chunk of market share as more and more bloggers have realized that email subscription is still best suited for marketing and advertisement for subscription. These email subscription tools offer great features and are at par with rss subscription services.

It’s pretty strange to see that there are hardly any decent alternatives to feedburner and probably one of the reason, why Google isn’t putting the heart and soul towards the service as much they’ve been doing for various other properties. And one of the reasons we don’t see many alternatives is because services like Facebook and Twitter have acted as a source of stats as well as good amount of traffic. What are your thoughts about the same? Do you think if feeds are relevant anymore or not?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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Zurb, a well-known company in the silicon valley that has worked with some of the top companies like Facebook, Ebay, Yahoo is behind Notable, an app that they built for internal use. Notable is a web-based application and great for designers and agencies who work from remote locations.

Notable - Easy collaboration for designers

The application works on Firefox, iPhone and of course, the browser-based functionality is available for all the platforms. You can clip any page on the browser and add notes on specific areas that you want to point out for the feedback. Once the feedback is uploaded on their servers, it can be discussed by team members using the comment form. All of this is part of the visual section, however since it’s focused towards the web agencies and freelancers, Zurb has taken care of the code and one of the best feature is that you can point out on the search engine optimization of the page as well!

Notable's Workspace

I was mostly impressed by Notable’s simplicity, its user interface is simple and without complex features that may confuse people. Its got the most important features packed for collaboration and notification, it allows you to restrict the collaborators to let them add notes or just view it.

Overall, I was fairly impressed with the application as it delivered all the features that we were looking in such an app. Notable certainly saves time as the feedback ends up being more contextual, visually accurate as it forces feedback givers to be specific. I would certainly suggest this app to all the freelancers who are into web designing as they’d find this app irresistible!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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WordPress For Windows

Microsoft has always been criticized for not adhering to Open standards and not being active in Open-source community. However, it looks like Microsoft has tried a fair bit of things to ensure that their products work well with popular web applications. I personally believe that Microsoft’s web servers aren’t good enough for PHP/MySQL driven websites and moreover, the security concern is one of the biggest factors to avoid Microsoft Windows. When Linux servers aren’t safe then no doubt, it’ll be a bigger pain to manage Windows Servers for security.

Security is another topic, coming back to the point of Microsoft & WordPress, I was a bit surprised to see how Microsoft has bundled WordPress in Web Platform Installer along with various other popular web applications like Drupal, Joomla etc. Check out the list of application in the gallery. Although, I was happy to see that Microsoft has made this move, this should give confidence to those who find working with Linux web servers and web applications a bit difficult.

Microsoft & WordPress technologies shake hands!

1. WordPress on SQL Server : With the help of IIS 7, SQL Server Express and WordPress on SQL Server distribution, its possible to run WordPress easily on Windows Vista, Windows 7 etc. It’s not the simplest way to install it, however this great guide by Zach Skyles Ownes should take you home.

2. SilverLight Gallery Plugin – Microsoft has been trying hard to make SilverLight popular among developers and end users. This plugin can surely help them achieve this goal. If this plugin gets adopted by bloggers, then the end users will have to install SilverLight in order to ensure that they can view the image gallery on their browsers.

3. SilverLight Bing Maps – This plugin integrates SilverLight & Bing Maps with WordPress. This plugin lets bloggers to put their location with interactive maps like Google Maps on their blog.

4. Windows Azure Storage for WordPress – This plugin lets WordPress users to store their media files and static files on Windows Azure platform whose more popular alternatives are Amazon Web Services or Rackspace Cloud Files.

Why is Microsoft doing this?

The first question that comes in mind that why is Microsoft trying to make its technologies work with WordPress, Drupal or other PHP/MySQL driven web applications. Well, Zach has already answered this question -

I’m a PHP-bred Technical Evangelist at Microsoft, and I love the fact that PHP now runs great on Windows, SQL Server, Windows Azure and SQL Azure.  It’s exciting to see how Microsoft technology can light up WordPress, whether it’s through Silverlight image gallery plugins, Bing Maps integration or future opportunities with technologies like our information service, Dallas.

Business sense says that Microsoft is using these popular web applications to make its existing or new technologies popular amongst end users, bloggers and developers. However, the interesting part will be to see that how many bloggers & developers [the ones not sold to Microsoft's technology] will be keen in adopting these? I personally welcome this move by Microsoft, although practically I doubt that I would use any of these technologies as I’m already comfortable with the setup that I currently have. What do you think about this move from Microsoft?

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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Google Font Directory

Not long ago, I wrote a post about how one can utilize font web services like Typekit & Fontmeup to improve the typography of the webpages. Although, in order to utilize the actual power of these services one needs to shell out money from their pockets. Well, in order to fight the issues of improving the typography of the web pages, Google has come up with Google Font Directory. This is made possible with the help of CSS3 that allows web designers to use fonts that are stored on the web.

Prior to this, we were using WP Cufón, a WordPress plugin that lets you use the Cufon technique to display various fonts on the web page with the help of javascript. If you are interested in knowing the working behind Cufon then check out this link. However, with the launch of Google Font API, one can easily use the fonts available in the Google Font Directory. Thanks to Adrian, who has created WP Google Fonts, a WordPress plugin already using the Font API. We are currently running this plugin to improve the headings [h1, h2, h3....] of our posts and pages.

WordPress 3.0 RC1 is out! Expect the final version soon

WordPress 3.0 - The Ultimate One!

Last week, WordPress 3.0 RC1 was released. RC1 is supposed to be almost the final product where the bugs are generally not available. You can take version RC1 as the last step towards releasing the stable version. Well, it stable enough that it may get released as the final version, however with more than 20 million people using WordPress, it is a possibility that there may be more bugs that can be reported. We’ve already discussed about the upcoming and much awaited features like Custom Menus, improved custom post types, merger of WordPress MU as mult-site in WordPress 3.0, so I wonder if its necessary to talk about it again?

Although, If you are testing the RC and come across a bug, you can:

• Report it on the wp-testers mailing list
• Join the dev chat and tell us live at irc.freenode.net #wordpress-dev
• File a bug ticket on the WordPress Trac.

Happy BirthDay WordPress!

Cake with WordPress Logo

On 27th May, WordPress turned 7! I’ve been late in wishing WordPress a happy birthday! Although, I did read somewhere – Its Better to be late than never! And I’m still wondering that what would be the apt gift for this occasion, may be you can suggest me something!

Its been 7 years and WordPress has grown from  b2/cafelog fork into a powerful CMS that is competing with the likes of Drupal, Joomla and other established content management systems. I’m sure writing this blog post would have been nostalgic for Matt. He shared that there are more than 1500 developers who are actively contributing in the development of WordPress and I must say that its an achievement! Motivating people to contribute together and to build a master piece like WordPress is really a commendable job and they all deserve millions of thanks from every WordPress user.

I remember that how I liked Blogger over WordPress in its early days, however as it was embraced by developers and I learnt new stuff, I realized that if I want to be a professional blogger, then it has to be WordPress and nothing else! Aha! not only for Matt, its kinda nostalgic for me too :)

I would like to once again wish Matt, team Automattic, those 1500 developers, plugin developers, theme developers [;)], those who use WordPress, those who spread the word about WordPress, in fact anyone who loves WordPress for making this a success!

© mayank for Blog Design Studio, 2010. | Permalink

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