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Wordpress theme sites

Most of us, Wordpress users like to stay up to date with the latest theme release and see what’s new. I don’t know if it’s a general feeling, but from time to time I like to take a peek at the latest Wordpress themes to see what the latest designs bring new in the layout perspective of Wordpress. I haven’t though found a resourceful site that could satisfy this need of mine, so I went on searching and I compiled a list of my favorite Wordpress theme sites.

1) Top Wordpress Themes

Top Wordpress themes, is a collection as the title says, of Top Wordpress themes. It has more than 100 Wordpress themes showcased.

2) Easy Wordpress themes

What I like about their collection of themes is that it’s divided into categories, like : Regular Wordpress themes, Turnkey Wordpress themes and CMS Wordpress themes.

3) WP themes FREE

This has got to be one of the largest collection of Wordpress themes available online at this point. All their themes are divided into categories, so you can find the themes you’re looking for easier.

These are the sites I check regularly, if you know more, please tell me via the comment form below the post so I can add them to the list.

AntiLeech plug-in, save your posts from being scrapped

I’m sure that by now, every one of you has had at least a nasty encounter with a content scrapper site, I know I’ve had and I can honestly say I hate those sites and the people that manage them. You put as much effort as you can into an article and they just scrape it ( to be read, take it ) and post it on their site / blog as if it was their own.

One common method to scrape your site is, if you’ve enabled your full feeds, to take it from there, if not, they’re only going to get an excerpt of that post but it’s still called stealing - so from my point of view, it’s a big no no.

AntiLeech keeps your posts safe from the scripts of sploggers and scrappers. AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site and sends it only to them. When they steal this content, it appears online just like normal, except now you’ve turned the tables on them and have provided them with useless content.

Source : BlogPerfume

You can continue reading about this plug-in and download it, here : AntiLeech, death to the sploggers plugin

The best plugin for new bloggers

Most upstarting bloggers are very confused when starting their first blog and don’t have the slightest clue on what they should do first. Installing all sorts of plugins, can ultimately lead to a blog crash caused by the incompatibilities between all the plugins you’ve installed. Instead of having 10 or more plugins do various jobs, why not have one that does all of them ? The plugin I’m talking about is used to handle most common operations new bloggers have to deal with. Blog Control helps to avoid the common operations blog’s owners do when adopting a new template: add scripts from mybloglog, google analytics, adsense or other ad network. The plugin adds some automatic link modification (target, nofollow, …) and bots-blocking meta tag on specific pages.

Aggressive cache

If you want to try out an aggressive cache system, Blog Control has an implementation of a cache for Wordpress pages. It’s experimental, not to be used on high traffic volume blogs, but on those have low database resources. Usually, cache systems are used to save bandwidth and resources on the hosting server.

Head and footer code

Blog Control is a plugin that helps in controlling some behaviour of your blog. It lets you to add code in the footer and head section of a template, eg. to add code from services like : Google Sitemaps, MyBlogLog or Google Analytics without modifying the template. Get rid of all the code editing hassle.

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Tutorial : How to fix transparency issues in Wordpress

Many new themes for Wordpress are only tested in Firefox. Firefox handles things way better than IE, or older versions of other browsers ( Netscape, etc ) . One problem that most designers face with when designing a theme is the problem of transparent images. They don’t render in every browser the same way you’d expect. At this point, you may start thinking that your blog doesn’t contain any transparent images, but you’re totally wrong - that is if you’re using a Wordpress theme other than the default one. Even those little icons next to the comments and tag section are transparent.

How can you make sure they render correctly in all browsers ? It’s easy, all you have to do is…

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Top 12 Ajax Wordpress plugins you might not have heard of

AJAX stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, which is by definition a set of scripting languages used to create browser-based applications that behave more like software applications. The main advantage of AJAX is that it’s faster and visually more appealing to the public.

1) AJAX-ed Wordpress

AJAXed Wordpress (aWP), formerly known as INAP, is an extremely powerful plugin that harnesses the power of AJAX and Wordpress to improve the user experience, the administration capabilities and the design potential of any Wordpress based blog.

2) AJAX Comment posting

There are many comment-related plugins in Wordpress plugin directory. However, if you’d like to find just a simple comment-posting Ajax plugin, you won’t find any. Not only will it post your comment without refreshing the page, but it will also make sure that you’ve filled all the form fields correctly.

3) AJAX Comment reply

This plugin might be conflict with some other plugins with the same features like “QUOTER”, “THRESHOLD” and “AJAX COMMENT”. Please deactivate the others if you want to use this one.

4) AJAX Comment Sorter

How many times you been to a blog where Trackbacks/Pingbacks were interspersed with the regular comments? Or perhaps you wanted the comments to be displayed with the latest one on the top instead of the bottom. With Comment Sorter, readers can disable Trackbacks and also decide what order they would like to read the comments. As an admin, you also have the ability to assign global options to your comments that you can’t normally do in the WordPress admin panel. For example, if you want Trackbacks to not show on all of your posts, you can do that without modifying any template files. You can also change the default sort order of the comments.

5) AJAX comment edit

WP Ajax Edit Comments allows users and admins alike to edit comments on a post. Users can edit their own comments for a period specified by the admin, and admins can edit all post comments. What better way to show reader appreciation than letting the readers edit their own typos?

6) AJAX Image resizer

Vivtiger Image Resizer is for those who take a lot of screenshots and like to include them in posts. The plugin allows you to specify a maximum width and resize images based on the maximum width of your blog.

7) AJAX Plugin updater

Once it’s installed it adds a new button to the plugin update notification bar. When you click the “Update Now” button it will automatically download the update from WordPress extend and extract it to your plugins directory.

8) AJAX Live Search Pop-up

This plugin adds Spotlight like live search with an ajax popup to the default search box. It can be used as a widget or directly as a PHP call in the theme.

9) AJAX Calendar

AJAX Calendar is a plugin that will display an AJAXified WordPress calendar. This enhances the functionality of the standard calendar by:

• Allowing the asynchronous navigation of months, without updating the page
• Adding a drop-down list of post titles in each month (through the «-» button)
• Adding full caching support to reduce server load

10) AJAX post rating

Adds an AJAX rating system for your WordPress blog’s post/page.

11) AJAX Polls

Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. It now supports multiple selection of answers.

12) AJAX Email Send

Allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend.

If you’ve experimented with other AJAX-ed powered plugins that haven’t been included in this lost, please let me know via the contact form and I’ll look into them ASAP.

Wordpress 2.5 is finally here

According to Lorelle who is at WordCamp Dallas, Wordpress 2.5 has been finally released to the public. And it looks like Wordpress.org has also got a new snazzy design to match with the color scheme of their new Wordpress update. Lovely.

Wordpress 2.5 is the result of 6 months of hard work from the WP community. It features multi-file uploading, image galleries, one-click plugin installs, customizable dashboard and a cleaner look.

Here’s a teaser from the official Wordpress Blog : Wordpress 2.5, it’s a video presented by Matt Mullenweg with the new features of Wordpress 2.5.

Get your copy of the Wordpress 2.5 now, from here : Download WP 2.5

Update : Here’s a full list of changes that were made to this version, about 1300 things were improved in this version - great work guys !