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10 Incredible Magazine Style WordPress Themes Under $80

Chase — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 20:58:48 +0000

Now days there are so many well designed magazine style themes for WordPress. And you can save so much money purchasing one and making a few customizations, as opposed to having a designer create one from scratch for you. Listed here are 10 very slick Magazine Style themes for WordPress that are under $75. A majority of these I have actually already purchased personally, for some other web projects that I am doing. I am having great experiences with all of them.

BusyBee theme from WooThemes

Eventina theme from WPZoom.com

Magnet theme from WPZoom.com

Massive News theme from Press75.com

Mortar theme from WooThemes

Open Air theme from WooThemes

Slurpie theme from Blogohblog.com

Visual theme from Theme Forest

WebPress theme from Blogohblog.com

Yamidoo theme from WPZoom.com

Using WordPress As a Lightweight CRM

Chase — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 20:50:47 +0000

Many people including me have no need for most of the functionality CRM’s like SugarCRM and vTiger CRM offer. These big CRM’s are slow to load, and difficult to understand how to use. That’s why for the past 2 years I have been in desperate for a lightweight, easy to use, true Open Source CRM application.

What If WordPress Could Be a CRM?

WordPress is one of the most ideal open source projects in the history of the web. It’s licensed under the GPL and it’s community is full of people truly dedicated to contributing code and advancing the app. It’s lightweight, easy to use, and simple to customize by adding additional functionality. What if this could be a CRM?

The Open Source WP-CRM Slick Theme for WordPress

This theme is a free theme for WordPress that turns a WordPress CMS into a simple, easy to use CRM or customer relationship manager. It was developed by SlipFire and then re-skinned by me. I must say that most of the credit goes to SlipFire for putting this theme together, as well as the instructions for putting it together. I just made it look better. Here is a screenshot of what it looks like. Here is also a link to the demo.

The homepage lists your most recently added contacts. Just like your blog would list your most recent blog posts. Categories are Ã¢â‚¬Å“CompaniesÃ¢â‚¬Â and your contacts are assigned to them. You can also add tags to each contact like Ã¢â‚¬Å“web designerÃ¢â‚¬Â or Ã¢â‚¬Å“big jerkÃ¢â‚¬Â.

The Add Contact page utilizes the TDO Mini Forms plugin for WordPress which allows you to create the fields necessary for your contact. You can see in this screenshot a preview of what the Add Contact page looks like.

Once added, the contact’s page looks like this. The right sidebar lists all of his contact and other detailed information. Then the Comment Form in WordPress is utilized to add Ã¢â‚¬Å“NotesÃ¢â‚¬Â to the contacts history such as Ã¢â‚¬Å“had a meeting with Billy today…it went terrible! The guy is a complete jerk. He’s no longer my friendÃ¢â‚¬Â

Get Your WordPress CRM Started!

** Download the WP-CRM Slick theme here.

** Follow the detailed installation instructions from SlipFire here.

** Be sure to check the Ã¢â‚¬Å“Members Only?Ã¢â‚¬Â option under Settings >> Members Only in your admin panel to password protect your entire WordPress CRM.

I have released the WP-CRM Slick theme under the GPL so feel free to contribute to it. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated to help make this theme better. Enjoy!

Why You Should Be Ignoring Most WordPress Themes

Chase — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:47:15 +0000

It seems like everywhere you go on the web, there’s a Free WordPress Theme to be downloaded. Every kind of theme that you can think of has been created. From simple minimalistic type themes to high image/high style themes. From 2 & 3 colum layouts, to the new popular Magazine style layouts. They can all be found. But with the exception of a rare few, most of these free themes are garbage! Don’t worry this is not some premium theme commercialized message. Keep on reading!

The Benefits of WordPress Theme Frameworks

When you download one of the typical free themes, you are forced to make tons of changes & customizations over the time you are using that theme. In which case you have to ask yourself, was this really worth it? And what about the free theme you downloaded? Was it coded properly? Is it secure? Is it Search Engine Friendly? Does it work in all major browsers? These are important questions you should be asking before downloading and activating a free wordpress theme. This is where Wordpress Theme Frameworks come into play. They provide the following benefits.

Properly Coded

All valid XHTML and CSS. No garbage. Often times these free wordpress themes do not fit the bill in this category. But these WordPress Theme Frameworks do, allowing you to build on top of a strong foundation as opposed to messy code and a weaker foundation.

Search Engine Friendly

This has quite a bit to do with the benefit above, but I though I would give it mention separately. Depending on the Theme you are using, you could be hurting yourself big time in your SERP’s. This has everything to do with your code being valid XHTML. Be very cautious of this!

Minimal Is The Way To Go

WordPress Theme Frameworks tend to be very what we call “Minimalistic” in nature. They are much more plain than the average wordpress theme. This of course can be customized, but the idea is something to take note of. There is power in having your wordpress blog simple. This allows you and your readers to focus on the content, not on all this image work everywhere. It also allows the blog to load faster which is never a bad thing.

Very Customizable

Speaking from someone who has customized over 300 blogs in the last couple years, WordPress Theme Frameworks are much less of a hassle to customize. It’s such a cleaner approach with these frameworks and makes the effort so much more productive for the designer/developer. And no matter how much you customize a regular free theme, there’s always something about it that reminds you of the original theme you downloaded. Which upsets you of course when you are striving to have your own look and feel.

There is a fantastic list of free and commercial WordPress Theme Frameworks over at the CodeFusionLab. I of course have my favorites that I enjoy working with more than others. Here are the ones I recommend.

1. Hybrid Theme Framework

2. Thematic Theme Framework

3. Ashford Theme Framework

4. WP Framework Theme

5. The Buffet Theme Framework

All of these theme frameworks for WordPress are free. You are also free to customize them as much as you want and retain rights for your changes. To me there is no better way to theming your WordPress blog than through a WordPress Theme Framework. Have fun and good luck. Oh and in case you were wondering, this blog is getting a whole new makeover and i’m using one of these free wordpress frameworks.

The Ultimate WordPress Themes Collection!

Chase — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 16:56:13 +0000

I’m always searching through hundreds of different free & premium WordPress themes to find the right fit for my next project. Sometimes the match happens so fast it’s wonderful. However, most of the time i’m stuck searching for hours (partly because i’m very picky) for the right theme. This becomes quite the headache for me! So I decided to put together a gallery of all the best themes for WordPress as I find them. I created a website called ThemeTrends.com which displays these themes in a gallery type format.

I currently have around 28 or so themes up there that i’m featuring. All of which are currently WordPress. But I do plan on featuring several Drupal themes in the coming week so keep an eye out for those. Most of the themes I will feature will be FREE as those of course are the ones that we all use more often anyways. Check out the site and give me some feedback. I hope it helps you in your WordPress & Drupal design efforts.

The Groovy WordPress Theme

Chase — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:04:26 +0000

The new Groovy WordPress theme is one of my favorite new themes released by the designers over at WooThemes. They do such a good job at mixing quality design with functionality built into their themes. I’m honestly jealous of them and how good they are at making these things and I wish I had there skills. Here is a screenshot of the Groovy theme.

Some Cool New Features

A Home Page tabber showcasing specific categories
A Home page js scroller displaying latest image uploads
Header space for either Twitter module or ad banner
A completely widgetized sidebar with custom widgets included in the theme packaging. No third party widgets required; and
17 amazing colour schemes to choose from!

The Standard Features

Integrated Theme Options (for WordPress) to tweak the layout, colour scheme etc. for the theme;
Threaded Comments for WordPress 2.7+;
Custom Page Templates for Archives & Sitemap;
Built-in Gravatar Support for Comments; and
Integrated ad spaces, which can accomodate both image banner ads or AdSense embeds.

I absolutely love this theme! I’m thinking of using it for the next WordPress blog I put together that involves lots of photography and images. It presents the images in such a classy way and gives your blog a really high end look. The Groovy theme is only $150 for the developer license. With it you get the PSD files as well as the rights to use it as many times over as you need! Definitely one of the best $150 you’ll spend in web design.

7 Amazing & Flexible Free WordPress Themes

Chase — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 03:49:23 +0000

In my opinion, a great free wordpress theme is one that contains both quality of design and functionality. There are tons of blog posts out there about “50 free wordpress themes” or something like that. I’m sure you have read your share. But honestly many of those free WordPress themes are junk, and you probably will never use them.

In this post I wanted to show off 8 particular free WordPress themes that I feel are great both in design and in functionality. Because of their greatness in these two areas, these themes all share one thing in common. They are flexible! You can actually install these themes on your WordPress blog and adapt them to your style and blogs message. Exactly what every free WordPress theme should do!

1. Shades of Blue from Brian Gardner

2. Typebased from WooThemes

3. Agregado from Darren Hoyt

4. Dailypress from Blogohblog.com

5. Theseus by ThemeShaper

6. The Wind Cries Mary from Grab A Theme

7. Colourise from Best WordPress Themes

What Are My Thoughts on Premium WordPress Plugins?

Chase — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:17:45 +0000

I’m finding more and more of these every week. Premium plugins at a price for the open source WordPress content management system!Ã‚Â What are my thoughts on this? Do I like or dislike the fact that people other than the WordPress people themselves are making money off an open source project? I’ve put alot of thought into it lately. Because I don’t have a problem at all with Premium WordPress Themes, as long as they are original. The problem comes from people who steal open source themes, make a few minor changes, then sell those themes at a cost.

The same thing could be happening with WordPress plugins! For example, I came across this premium plugin recently, it’s called AutoBlogged and it’s a paid plugin that gives you feed aggregation capabilities. It has a lot of cool additional features on top of it as well. But what’s the difference between it and the free plugin WP-O-Matic? Well a quick glance at the two homepages will tell you some minor feature differences between the two. But overall they are pretty much the same.

Now i’m not accusing AutoBlogged of copying or stealing it’s code from WP-O-Matic. But i’m not saying it’s entirely not likely either. And it’s also likely that there are instances of this code hijacking of WordPress plugins all over the web. If it’s happening with WordPress Themes, chances are it’s happening with Plugins as well.

This is What Turned Me Away From Joomla!

What turned me away from Joomla, was that every time I would look for a “Component” for my Joomla cms I would run into “Paid Components” and I could never find a good quality component for free. This made no sense to me since Joomla itself was free.

Overall I must say that I do not like premium WordPress plugins. I think they dampen the spirit of open source and the great community that exists around WordPress! SOS. Software as a service. Go sell your services of WordPress skills. Don’t sell us cheap little plugins and bind us to proprietary software tactics. The only reason WordPress is around today is because it’s Open Source! Just remember that!

Clean CSS for Images in WordPress Posts

Chase — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:03:31 +0000

In the past, I have had many WordPress users complain to me about how there images are displaying within their blog posts. What has typically happened is that the user has downloaded some free or sometimes premium theme, and even though they use the Image Wizard in their admin interface correctly to align images or give padding to images, the images still don’t seem to dispaly how they ask them to from the backend. Ã‚Â This is typically a problem with your main CSS file for your theme. There is some basic CSS that your images need to have in your style.css file so that you can control the rest of the display from the backend.

First Things First!

From your WordPress Theme folder, open the style.css file in a text-editor. Important! Save a back up copy somewhere before you do any edits! Now, do a search for img. Hopefully, all your image selectors will be grouped together. If not, find them all and cut and paste them into one group to make this process easier.

Borders

You’ll need to decide if you want a border around your images and, if you do, what size, color, and type it should be. For no border, you would use the following:
img {border:0}

Padding and Image Width

Let’s clean up one more thing to make the image in your content work better with the rest of the styles we will use. We want to clear all the padding around the images within your content and make sure that the whole width of the image shows up rather than just a part of it. If it isn’t in your style sheet, add the following:
p img { padding: 0; max-width: 100%; }

Image Left, Right, and Center

When an image sits on the sides of your text, it helps to have space between the text and the image so the words aren’t right up against the edge. As some browsers treat the margins and padding differently, the following styles will accommodate most browser’s “space requirements” so the image doesn’t overlap the text or any lists that appear inline with the image.
img.right { padding: 4px; margin: 0 0 2px 7px; display: inline; } img.left { padding: 4px; margin: 0 7px 2px 0; display: inline; }

The declaration of display:inline keeps the image inline with the text that you placed it with.

Now, it is time to add the float declaration to the images. BUT WAIT. Why should we waste our left and right floats on just images? Why not use them on anything that we want to sit on the right or left of the page and have the text float around it? You can do that, you know. But that’s for another tutorial. We’re not going to waste this, so if it isn’t there in your style sheet already, add the following:
.right { float: right; } .left { float: left; }

Note: The Default/Kubrick Theme uses this technique but names the classes alignleft and alignright. Using left and right seems easier to remember and use, but either name sets may be used to make this work.

If you follow these instructions your WordPress Theme will will function correctly when it comes to inputing images inside your blog posts and pages. If your images are not behaving correctly, chances are there are some flaws in your style.css file and these instructions will fix your problems.

Premium WordPress Themes and Open Source

Chase — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 11:58:53 +0000

Do we have a conflict here? Potentially a big one yes. An interesting article written by Ashley Morgan over at Upstart Blogger reveals some interesting tactics that Premium WordPress Theme providers are doing. The issue is over themes that have been created open source, that have been manipulated and turned into a proprietary product. Let me quote an important piece of the article so that you can fully understand the issue here…

Ã‚Â

Enter the premium WordPress theme. An ingenious way for certain WordPress designers to make money, sometimes lots of money, from selling WordPress themes to anyone willing to pay. Those who decided to fork out the cash are rewarded with a WordPress theme that is very often not much different to the thousands of high quality WordPress themes, often referred to as free premium themes. In addition to this the customer sometimes gets support from the theme author.

These premium themes come with a sting in the tail. A license is added that attempts to prevent anyone from modifying the code in order to release it freely to the community, putting a thin, and almost certainly unenforceable, legal road block in the way of future development.

Any attempt to develop the code contained in a premium WordPress theme with a view to releasing it into the community is branded as plagiarism by the person who sold the theme.

But what if that premium theme already contained code that had been developed from another theme, or many themes, as is extremely likely given the organic nature of WordPress theme development?

Very interesting issue. Ã‚Â My opinion would be that if the theme is created completely from scratch by the designer/developer, than it would be okay to make proprietary. But no way is it okay if the premium theme is piggy backing off an open source theme created at the hands of someone else’s time and energy to promote open source. If that is happening, than it needs to stop and we all need to report these type of issues. Ã‚Â Does anyone know of a particular case where this is happening? I have not inspected this thouroughly enough, but am interested to know if any of you have found anything.

Welcome Back WordPress Themes Directory!

Chase — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 03:08:04 +0000

In case you didn’t know, let me be the one to tell you. The Official WordPress Themes Directory is back live again and updated with all new free themes for your wordpress “crazies” like me. No more searching those random affiliate ad heavy websites for new themes. The official theme directory for WordPress should be pretty well updated with everything from here on.

Tip: RSS Subscribe to the Newest Themes

A simple little tip that will help you stay up to date on all the latest new themes that come in through the directory. When you go to the themes directory, click on the “Newest Themes” link located on the right hand side of the page. You will notice now you have an option to subscribe to this page via RSS. That way, you can see all the new themes right as they are coming in and stay ahead of everyone else on the goods!

Contribute Through Voting

Help the community know which themes are the best by using the 5 star voting system and voting each theme you come across. This will help everyone as a WordPress community sift through the bad and the good. This will only take you not even a second as you are browsing the different themes, so just do it and help the rest of us out!