Nothing Much is a free WordPress theme especially made for WPShout readers! It's a super minimalist, single column, simple WordPress theme that's the first to join WPShout's new Theme House. Image-less and only two files small, Nothing Much loads in a flash and would look great in use on a personal blog.
(read more) Ever since I and Alex Cragg launched our WordPress theme store earlier this year, it's been chugging along nicely. We still only offer the one theme, ShiftNews, but we've been quietly updating it. Just last Friday we pushed out an update that adds in support for a couple of the new 3.0 functions. Yesterday we also introduced a rather interesting new pricing plan which makes ShiftNews available for a fantastically low $29.95!
(read more) It's surprisingly easy to build a neat little featured content area in WordPress, using a custom query to grab a couple of posts from a selected category, tag or even custom field. In this post we'll find out how to build a simple featured content area for your blog, rather like the one I recently added to WPShout.
(read more) We all know that WordPress 3.0 is coming and there are a whole plethora of new features, but actually adding them to themes? I had to do that today in an update to WPShift's ShiftNews. Trouble was I wanted to ensure the theme remained compatible with 2.9 and below, which meant I needed some good ol' conditionals. In this post we'll find out how to make backwards compatible 3.0 functions.
(read more) We've all heard it before: people don't read, they scan. But yet, we never really try and do anything about it. Or at least we never do anything effective about it. Sure, things like bold and italics do help, but they don't solve the underlying problem that people don't read. Which is a problem for people like me. It takes a good couple of hours to write a WPShout post so I'd like to think it's appreciated. Turns out I'm wrong; in this post we'll find out how.
(read more) I'll let you into a little secret. WordPress is a CMS. Arguably it's a simple one, but it's still a CMS; I'm currently writing my content and using WordPress as a system to manage my content. WordPress needn't just manage content for my blog though. With pages and page templates you've got a quick and easy way of making a killer content management system.
(read more) Just a quick note to let you know that my first article on SmashingMagazine has been published. It's all about custom fields. Specifically, Extending WordPress With Custom Fields, a great little topic. In the post I go through just about everything I can think of that's awesome to do with custom fields. One of the topics, setting a different background with each post is something I'll expand on here on Shout at a later date.
(read more) Backing up your blog is something you'll probably only start doing once you've lost everything. That's probably not the best idea. In this post we'll look at the various options available -- the plugins, services and manual ways of backing up your blog.
(read more) Drop caps are a really simple way of making your posts just that bit more interesting. They're easy to do too - in this post we'll find out how we can use a mixture of CSS3 and plugins in order to spark up posts with minimum effort.
(read more) Well this is exciting! WPShout is now sporting look number three. The third incarnation of the site is quite a bit different from the last.
(read more) In this month's .net magazine (known as Practical Web Design in the US) there was an interesting article where an ethical hacker showed how he would break into your site -- and what you can do to stop him. In this post we'll look past "X Plugins To Save Your Blog" and see what effective steps you can take to stop a real life hacker.
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I don't want to join most other blogs in publishing a useless list of features that will be coming to WordPress 3.o. Instead, I thought I'd do it a bit differently. Recently I interviewed Adii, Nathan Rice, Alex Cragg, Cory Miller and Ian Stewart. In that post I asked "what in 3.0 are you looking forward to working with?" today's post will have a look at what 3.0 means for themes.
(read more) I've recently being developing a new design for my first ever WordPress powered site, Nometet.com. The design is looking a bit shabby at the moment, that's the kind way of putting it! I digress though. The new design is what I'd call advanced WordPress. It's got things like a background that is automatically resized (ie the background-image), a choice of three post templates, a fancy review section which holds the score and things like blockquotes that change depending on which category you're in.
(read more) In post images and captions aren't usually a very exciting affair. Most themes don't offer any support for captions and those that do don't do anything exciting with them. In this post we'll explore how to automatically spruce up your images, videos and captions the easy way.
(read more) Of late commercial frameworks have started appearing everywhere. This post will try and make sense of it all, comparing Frugal, Headway, Builder, Genesis and Elemental. That's all the commercial frameworks I could think of bar Thesis, who didn't reply to me emails. This is an unbiased, unaffiliated look at what your options are if you want something to build more WordPress sites off.
(read more) For the recent (first) design of my personal site I added in some Tumblr style functionality. In this post we'll look at how WordPress can be used to create a Tumblog.
(read more) After the astounding success of the Why WordPress series which ran last year, this week I'll be asking five WordPress Wizards about what's next for themes, WordPress and frameworks in what is a slightly more focused discussion than last time!
(read more) After the astounding success of the Why WordPress series which ran last year, this week I'll be asking five WordPress Wizards about what's next for themes, WordPress and frameworks in what is a slightly more focused discussion than last time! Today, Cory Miller from iThemes is in the hot seat.
(read more) After the astounding success of the Why WordPress series which ran last year, this week I’ll be asking five WordPress Wizards about what’s next for themes, WordPress and frameworks in slightly more focused discussion than last time! The series continues today with Alex Cragg, co-founder of WPShift which enticingly has "made a theme that lets you build your own layout just by dragging and dropping."
(read more) After the astounding success of the Why WordPress series which ran last year, this week I’ll be asking five WordPress Wizards about what’s next for themes, WordPress and frameworks in what is a slightly more focused discussion than last time! The series continues today with Nathan Rice, developer at StudioPress and largely responsible for the recent release of Genesis.
(read more) After the astounding success of the Why WordPress series which ran last year, this week I'll be asking five WordPress Wizards about what's next for themes, WordPress and frameworks in what is a slightly more focused discussion than last time!
(read more) Converting HTML to WordPress has just got easier with this post 'case study' looking at a real world example of the DesignInformer redesign.
(read more) The basics of WordPress theme design looks at the fundamental knowledge you need to start creating your own WordPress themes from scratch.
(read more) The WordPress 2.7 Cookbook and WordPress 2.8 Theme Design are reviewed, following on from the look at Digging into WordPress and Rockstar WordPress Designer.
(read more) Speeding up WordPress has just got easier; using PHP's if statements you can only load the stuff you need.
(read more) A very neat trick that allows you to apply a different stylesheet to each category (and therefore change colors), all with the power of WordPress.
(read more) After months and months of working on it, WPShift has now launched! I'm really delighted to be able to say that :) Find all the low down about the hottest WordPress theme in town!
(read more) Search engine optimisation, or SEO is the art of optimising your content so that search engines will rank it more favourably. This post is some of my thoughts on the subject.
(read more) Have you wondered how to change the layout of the WordPress plugin subscribe to comments subscription manager? There's no easy solution provided by the author of the plugin. So after looking at its core file I found out it's actually quite easy by using an extremely simple tweak. With this tutorial I'm going to show you how you can give it a nice custom design.
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