Plugins, themes, books, services—we review them all.
A few days ago I wrote about the release of Oxus. Oxus is a theme by Themeopoly described as being “for blogging with a focus on content and hierarchy,” which is, of course, a marketing phrase that means absolutely nothing. Since WordPress themes by definition take content and hierarchy into account, I wanted to see what set Oxus apart.
I fired up MAMP and set up a local installation of WordPress so that I could do some testing. Here is what I got.
Earlier this year when I first encountered Headway, I was so impressed by it that it became the first WordPress theme I ever bought. Needless to say, I’ve been looking forward to the release of version 2.0 all year and now it’s finally here.
Before reviewing it, I assumed that I’d find one or two features to be particularly happy about, but that I’d remain mostly indifferent towards the update. After having used Headway, Genesis and Platform Pro, I adopted the belief that there was no such thing as the “best” premium WordPress theme. Jumping from one to the other was a lateral move. They were all of the highest quality and they all attempted to solve the same problems, the only difference was their preferred method of solving them.
Using Headway today has started to erode that belief. Headway 2.0 completely exceeded my expectations. Not only was I reminded of why I bought Headway in the first place, I ended up wondering how I had been able to tolerate versions 1.5 and 1.6 all these months.
Here are some of the most notable features.
Express for WordPress is an iPhone app created by Kenobi Studios and WooThemes that allows users to post short notes, images, links and quotes directly to their Tumblr-style blogs wherever they are. It also lets you save drafts when you’re not online and moderate comments.
The app works in conjunction with the recently released WooTumblog plugin and WooThemes’ tumblog themes, like Crisp, Retreat, Cinch or Slanted. For my review, I’m using a self-hosted WordPress installation at http://curatingmadness.com with the WooTumblog plugin activated.
Analytics are a fun, useful, and sometimes dangerous game to play. Analytics provide really useful information, but if too much time is spent focused on them they can draw your attention away from other, equally important tasks.
Reinvigorate, at first glance, is extremely dangerous in that it is addictive to watch. Reinvigorate services up by-the-minute stats, even to the point where it show you who is visiting your site currently, and on what page.
Is a tool like this just for fun, or indispensable? Let’s take a closer look and see.
Is Startbox the revolutionary framework it claims to be?
Startbox, by Brian Richards, isn’t your run-of-the-mill commercial WordPress theme. Startbox is a parent theme, sometimes called a theme framework, which is designed specifically to build themes on top of.
Reviewing a theme framework is tough. It’s a different review process than reviewing a typical one-use theme. For instance, average themes are measured by their design, the number of options they offer, and how well they fit a certain genre of website. A framework theme, on the other hand, should be measured on flexibility, forethought, and how easy other themes can be built on top of it.
Smashing WordPress is a book written by Thord Daniel Hedengren, published by Wiley in partnership with Smashing Magazine, and all about WordPress development. And recently, I read and reviewed it.
Hedengren takes a nice approach to the development how-to in the book, typically diving straight into code and explaining how to get from A to B. He does such a great job exploring things like action hooks and the anatomy of a theme, though, that it makes the initial chapters covering WordPress installation basics that much more mundane. The book would have been stronger without any of the chapters on the basics of WordPress.
Microblogging is all the rage nowadays. Everyone and their cat is doing it. Literally, cats are doing it.
One of the more exciting aspects of WordPress development, Plugins and themes, is how to draw what we’re doing elsewhere on the web into our blogs so we can own them. Right now for most of us that means integration of Twitter into our WordPress sites.
Tweem is a new theme from the new WordPress theme shop called Shopping Themes. I recently received a copy of Tweem and gave it a spin. Read on for my thoughts.
Desk Mess is a two columns (sidebar to the right), widget and gravatar-ready theme. From the theme’s description:
Casual work-desk theme for a different blogging experience. Brought to you by Geek with Laptop
Why, it looks good, doesn’t it? The header area is a major point of interest for this theme, resembling a messy desk from which this theme gets its name. Aside from the somewhat puzzling look of the top nav (pieces of paper stapled to the desk), the whole thing looks quite realistic and nice.
Crafty Cart is a sweet-looking, 2-columns theme from King Cart. While it is intended to be used as a WordPress e-commerce theme in conjunction with the WP e-commerce plugin, it works without a hitch for your regular blog without requiring you to install the plugin. In fact, this review is aimed toward its usage for regular blog instead of for e-commerce.
Crafty Cart has a soft, friendly visual style with pastel colors and cute imageries. This might not fit with the general content of your blog, but you can’t deny that there’s a polished feel about the look: the elements fit together and it doesn’t feel cheaply designed like most WordPress themes out there. The details are there: the various icons looks great together, the search form is nice, and the top nav actually gives you a dropdown menu displaying sub-pages (something I’d like to point out since the theme’s release article doesn’t even mention about it).
Also, the typeface choice for the headers is nice. You might not think this is important, but you’d agree with me that most of the stuffs you see on the Web are done in the usual limited choices of Helvetica, Georgia, Lucida Grande, Verdana, and the like. Crafty Cart uses Century Schoolbook, giving it a unique look, a kind of lightness feel that works well with the rest of the theme’s visual style.
Now, I am using the Sandbox Design Competition‘s dummy content (links to zip file) to test this theme, and this dummy content isn’t pulling any punches when it comes to having obscure HTML and WordPress elements that need to be supported by a theme. Fortunately, Crafty Cart does very well here. Post paging (a.k.a Page-Links), one of the most frequently neglected features, gets styled:
Upon testing, various HTML elements like <dt>, <cite>, <abbr>, <del>, <ins>, and nested <blockquotes> are styled accordingly as well. Very nice.
The Comments area is well done too. You have different stylings for odd/even comments and another one for admin comments. The theme is also smart enough to separate between trackbacks and comments, displaying the entire comments first before listing the trackbacks for the post.
As it turns out the blog title area looks best when your title is long enough to form two lines of it. One line or three lines and above kind of disrupts the visual:
Having too many pages will ruin the top nav, although to be fair this is a common problem for most themes:
Lastly, hovered anchor texts on the sidebar gets a bold styling. This means a particularly long text might create a new line when hovered, creating a jumpy effect that can affect the rest of the sidebar:
The various nit-picking I did to find this theme’s flaws actually shows that it doesn’t really have any major issue. It has a lot of attention to details put into it, with a profesionally-designed visual look that’s friendly and pleasing to the eye. To top it all, this theme is released for free. So just go here to grab your copy, and poke around the demo site to learn more about this great theme. We don’t get a unique, pleasant-looking GPL WordPress themes like this too often, so don’t forget give it a try!
There has been a lot of buzz regarding using WordPress as a CMS lately, with many clever solutions that come up. Today, we will be a bit lazy try to use a plugin that is made precisely for CMS-making instead.
One of the important feature of a CMS is the capability to create different content types. Say we want to make an “Events” content type. Here, we will probably need to make it so that user can input a title, a description, and the date/time for that event. Under WordPress, you can trick this by using the custom field to store that date and time value, and calling them within the theme’s code.
This practice, of course, is tedious, error-prone (mistypings, etc), and generally inconvenient.
Enter Flutter.
Flutter allows you to create what it calls a Write Panel. This, basically, is a custom content type in which you can add your own fields. So, if a vanilla WordPress installation gives you two different content types (Post and Page), Flutter enables you to add more Write Panels to your likings. Now let’s go make ourselves an Events Write Panel!
The steps to create a Write Panel will be like this:
Install and activate Flutter. This will Create two different menu on your dashboard: A “Flutter” menu and another one under “Settings > Flutter”. Create a category. Name it ‘Events’, for our example. Create the Write Panel. Go to “Flutter > Write Panels” and click the “+ Create a Write Panel” button.
Next is the Write Panel setup page:
What happened here? First, you decide whether this Write Panel should mimic the Write Post or the Write Page panel. Assuming we’re going to have multiple Events posted, we go with Post. This choice also affects what Advanced Fields options are available for this Write Panel (try toggling between the Post and Page option). For the Assigned Categories, we give it “Events”. We didn’t just make this category previously for nothing, right?
Now, the Standard and Advanced Fields are interesting. These are basically the default fields you get when you open Write Post (or Page). If we don’t tweak this, then the Write Panel will look exactly like a Write Post page. If you want to make things simpler for your user, for example, you might consider removing some of them. For our example here, I remove everything from the Advanced Fields (I’ll show you the result soon). Click Finish when you’re done.
Get back to “Flutter > Write Panels“. Our Events Write Panel should be there, and there’s an “Edit Fields/Groups” option next to it. Go there. On the next page, you have the option to create a Group or Field. A Group is basically a box that contains one or more fields. For simplicity sake, we go straight to creating a new Field.
Name it, label it, and see that there’s even a built-in Date field type already. How convenient! Continue and you will be given a option to choose how to format the Date. Pick one and finish it. That is all!
Now let’s see the result of our work so far. Pick the topmost “Write” option, and you should see a new submenu named “Events”. Could this be…?
Oh yeah. Very nice. At the bottom of this page, you should see the Date field we just made. Also notice that the usual options (Trackbacks, etc) are gone, because we opt not to display it back at the Write Panel setup page.
The documentation (PDF file) does a good job explaining it. Go to part 3. Flutter Reference and you will se the three functions (get(), get_image() and get_audio()) needed to grab the value of the custom fields in our Write Panel. This comment thread could also be some help, too.
Geared towards making WordPress a powerful CMS, Flutter does a lot of things right. In fact, Write Panel is just one of its strong feature; there’s also a layout and module management built into this plugin as well. As of this writing, Flutter is currently in beta, so there are plenty areas where it can be polished (uninstallation apparently does not work cleanly, for example). Nevertheless, I believe this is a plugin worth keeping an eye on.
And who knows? Before getting acquired, BuddyPress was once just a set of plugins too, right?
