Early Morning Child Theme

This elegant design was inspired by the colors of the early morning. It’s light, elegant and pleasantly surprising.

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Early Morning Child Theme for Thematic

Multilingual Wordpress – WPML Plugin Review

multilingual

Photo by derSven ¶

One of the hardest things to do with Wordpress is creating a multilingual blog / website that is easy to maintain and develop.

My interest on the subject comes from the need of my customers for easy to maintain multilingual websites. This way they can extend their services to new markets.

I’ve had this discussion in the past, with a description of various plugins and methods to develop a multilingual Wordpress blog / site.

In that article I’ve talked about the theory behind multilingual web-developement and mostly about the multilingual Wordpress and four ways of implementing it:

  1. The “Two-Tree” concept ( we use “language” categories )
  2. Automated translation (using google languages or babelfish)
  3. Manual translation using plugins ( I could only find one really good plugin that can do that so we’ll look into that)
  4. Semi-automated payed translation. (this is rather an ingenious concept and I believe the people who created the service will have a lot to gain from it)

Today we’ll talk about a new and really interesting Wordpress multilingual plugin: WPML.

The interesting thing about this multilingual plugin is the way it organizes the information. It’s completely different from qTranslate (that I presented in the previous multilingual blog post). Instead of using language tags (that separates the content in different languages), MPLM links one post in English to another post that will represent it’s translation in Spanish for example. This way you get to translate everything in a very clean way.

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By Cristian | Posted in Recomended Reading, Wordpress | Tagged , , , , | 22 Comments

Members: WordPress Plugin by Justin Tadlock

Justin Tadlock has done it again. This time he released to the Wordpress community a user, role, and content management plugin called Members.

Its purpose is to make WordPress a more powerful CMS by giving you fine-grain control over the users of your site.

So what dose this plugin do:

  • Edit Roles: Edit your user roles and their capabilities.
  • New Roles: Create new roles for use on your site.
  • Content Permissions: Adds a meta box on your write post/page editor that allows you to restrict content to specific roles.
  • Widgets: Adds a login form widget and user-listing widget that you can use in any widget area on your site.
  • Shortcodes: Creates shortcodes that you can use to restrict or allow access to certain parts of your posts and pages (or any other shortcode-capable area).
  • Template Tags: New functions for use within your WordPress theme for various things.
  • Private Blog: Allows you to create a private blog that can only be accessed by users that are logged in (redirects them to the login page).

I personally can’t wait for future developments of this plugin. It takes Wordpress one step closer to full user management without having to code it your self :)

By Cristian | Posted in CMS, Wordpress | Tagged , , | 11 Comments

Early Morning Child Theme

This elegant Wordpress theme was inspired by the colors of the early morning as I see them from my window. It’s light, elegant and pleasantly surprising.

This theme doesn’t scream at you, instead it takes a step back and lets the user read. Please don’t spoil it by putting ads on it!

Early Morning - A refreshing child theme for Thematic

Early Morning - A refreshing child theme for Thematic

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By Cristian | Posted in Recomended Reading, Thematic, Theme Design, Wordpress | Tagged , , , , | 82 Comments

How To Create a WordPress Theme – a tutorial series by Ian Stewart

Have you ever wanted to create your own Wordpress theme? If yes then you must know of all the tutorials out there. The problem is that most of them are incomplete. But not any more!

Ian Stewart from ThemeShaper released, what I consider, the best step-by-step tutorial series for those who want to learn how to build their own Wordpress theme from scratch.

In only 11 individual lessons this WordPress Themes Tutorial is going to show you how to build a powerful, up-to-date, WordPress Theme from scratch. As we go along I’ll explain what’s happening including (for better or worse) my thinking on certain techniques and why I’m choosing one path over another.

Here’s the list of features your finished theme will have:

  • All the search-engine optimization you’ll really need
  • Including google-supported Microformat markup
  • Valid and logical semantic markup structure than can be used to create ANY layout
  • Smart default CSS layouts
  • Dynamic Body, post and comment classes
  • Separated trackbacks and threaded comments
  • 2 widget areas coded to disappear when they’re empty
  • And all the typical WordPress stuff you expect from a theme

If you’re still not convinced… well…you should still read them. Here are all the links to the tutorials!

  1. Introduction
  2. Theme Development Tools
  3. Creating a Theme HTML Structure
  4. Template and Directory Structure
  5. The Header Template
  6. The Index Template
  7. The Single Post, Post Attachment, & 404 Templates
  8. The Comments Template
  9. The Search Template & The Page Template
  10. The Archive, Author, Category & Tags Template
  11. The Sidebar Template
  12. Reset-Rebuild Theme CSS & Define Your Layouts
By Cristian | Posted in General | 1 Comment

Wordpress Wallpaper Pack

Do you love Wordpress? Is the answer is yes then you’ll going to dig this! It’s a the ultimate prof that Wordpress is among us for half a century!

Don’t believe me? Check out this Wordpress wallpaper pack! It’s hippy, nippy, trippy stuff! Oh… and did I mention it’s cool?

colage

It’s well flavored and available in 1280×800, 1680×1050, 1440×900, 1280×1024, 1920×1200, 1024×768.

Download Wordpress Wallpaper Pack Version 0.1

By Cristian | Posted in Wordpress | Tagged | 4 Comments

Add “Featured Posts” to your Thematic child theme

Featured Posts for Thematic

Featured Posts for Thematic

Featured posts are common in Wordpress magazine themes. They let you promote hot topics and bring your best articles right in front of your users.

First thing we need to do is create a thematic child theme. This way we won’t make direct changes to Thematic.

The featured posts will be inserted on the home page before the rest of the articles. We’ll display the latest 3 posts which are tagged ‘featured’.

preview thematic child theme

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By Cristian | Posted in Thematic, Wordpress | Tagged , , , | 23 Comments

Wordpress as a social platform

Wordpress as a social platform

Wordpress as a social platform

WordPress started in 2003. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on hundreds of thousands of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day. But you already knew that!

By itself this blogging tool used to be just that: a way to put your thoughts out there, so anyone with a internet connection could read it. But Wordpress is not just about blogging, at least not anymore. While still limited in terms of “out of the box” functionality compared with other CMS out there, Wordpress managed to shine thought it’s plugins and themes.

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By Cristian | Posted in Recomended Reading, Wordpress | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

Street Wordpress Theme

Street is something that was created from a spark of inspiration, something that I felt should look like this. This wasn’t thought out nor planed.

It uses the beautiful Vegur Free Font for the headings and main menu, implemented by Cufon (text replacement technique). I’ve spent a great deal of time searching for the perfect free font for this theme, but I think I found the right combination.

While this child theme is just a skin for Thematic, because this exact reason is also functional. You have access to all 13 Widget Areas Thematic uses, the semantically correct HTML that is great for SEO, can use a page template that spans the entire width of the page without the sidebars and even you can upload your own logo or header image from the “Street Theme Options”.

preview thematic child theme Download Street Child Theme for Thematic Version 0.1

street_theme

An elegant Child Theme for Thematic

I hope you’ll enjoy using this theme as much I enjoyed creating it!

In order to install it you have to download the Thematic Theme (from which this child theme inherits all of the functionality), upload both themes (Street and Thematic) to your server in the themes folder AND THEN ACTIVATE the Street theme.

By Cristian | Posted in Thematic, Theme Design | Tagged , , , , | 57 Comments

  • Featured Theme

    Smarter Wordpress Theme

    Smarter is a Wordpress theme for small and medium sized companies. It's meant to build a presentation site in a minimum amount of time without touching a single line of code.

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