Free WordPress Themes at Theme Lab

It was just announced that WordPress 2.6.3 has been released due to a security issue in something called Snoopy. Snoopy is something that grabs the feeds that are displayed in your dashboard. It’s supposed to be a relatively minor risk. If you don’t want to download the whole upgrade, you can get the following 2 files from the release post:

• wp-includes/class-snoopy.php
• wp-includes/version.php

And replace them. I just upgraded and it was a pretty painless process.

Snapshot is a showcase-style theme, suitable for portfolio websites or photo galleries. It’s a rare free theme release from the WooThemes team, who usually produce paid WordPress themes exclusively. I’ll be going over this free WordPress theme in a review post.

And now onto the review…

My Expectations

Aside from a clean looking showcase-style design, I’m expecting to make use of some third-party plugins. In the demo I noticed what appeared to be WP-PostRatings. We’ll see if this plugin is required to use the theme or not. I’m also expecting to use some form of custom fields to call the images.

I’m also expecting not to get any help from WooThemes developers, since you have to pay for that, kind of like everything else on the site.

Setting Up

When you first upload and activate this theme, you’ll get a site that looks like this.

Not very pretty, is it?

To fix this, you’ll need to open up the Snapshot Options panel, select a theme stylesheet, and save the changes. I’m not sure why the default one isn’t activated by default, but I guess it’s easy enough to change if you know what you’re doing.

Options Panel

In the previously mentioned options page, you can also control a few other things:

• Choose between a photo or design gallery
• The theme stylesheet (default, coolblue, limefresh)
• Full URL to custom logo image
• Google Analytics code (or other tracking code)
• FeedBurner RSS URL

Required Plugins

On the theme’s documentation page, it’s states there are two required plugins: WP-PostRatings and WP-PageNavi. By default, you don’t necessarily need the PostRatings plugin. Although if you want any pagination functionality at all, you will need the PageNavi plugin. There doesn’t appear to be any fallback on the default WordPress pagination system.

Photo Gallery? Design Gallery?

The difference between the photo gallery and design gallery is that the photo gallery is designed to showcase your own images, and therefore will internally link to your own WordPress posts. The design gallery is programmed to function like one of those “best design galleries” and will link out to external sites instead.

How Do I Add Posts?

You can add posts like normal. Input the title and content, choose the category and add tags. With this theme, you’ll notice a new set of extra input fields in your write menu.

The screenshot is the image displayed on the homepage. The larger image is displayed on single post pages (in photo gallery mode only). The website URL is used for the external link in design gallery mode.

I think this is a nice alternative to custom fields, as those tend to confuse people. This new menu is much more straightforward.

Support

If you need any help with this theme, don’t bother contacting WooThemes about it, because they’ll ignore you if you don’t pay for access to the forums. Access to WooThemes’ support forums cost $40 per year. Whether or not this is worth it is up to you. I didn’t encounter any major problems that required support in my experience with the Snapshot theme.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I really liked this theme, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a showcase-style template. I think this one is a lot better than the last showcase-style theme I reviewed, Infinity, because Snapshot is much more “generic” and easier to get set up.

Another week has passed, which means more WordPress resources!

Building a Control Panel for Your WordPress Theme - For WordPress theme authors out there, Ahmad of Custom Theme Design goes over how to create a control panel for your WordPress theme in this detailed tutorial. Complete with code examples!

Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO - Nathan Rice has published a 10 part series (so far) on WordPress SEO. Goes over several edits you can make directly to any WordPress theme to make it more “SEO optimized.”

WP Recipes - A great new site created by Jean-Baptiste Jung with several quick WordPress hacks and tips. All of them seem very concise and easy to implement.

That’s all for this week. If you know of any other recently published WordPress resources, feel free to let me know in the comments.

For the past few days I’ve had some real trouble trying to comment on other blogs. I would make a comment, and it would seem like nothing happened. No “Your comment is awaiting moderation.” message would show up. Same story even with blogs I’ve had previously approved comments on.

I started to suspect that for some reason my comments weren’t getting through because I was being flagged by Akismet’s spam filter. I confirmed this suspicion this morning when I left a comment on a friend’s blog, and they informed me that I was indeed getting flagged by Akismet.

Remember, Akismet is used on thousands upon thousands of blogs to stop comment spam. Every time I would make a comment, it would be relegated “Akismet Spam” page. People don’t check this page as frequently as their non-spam comments. Although some may check it from time to time for the occasional false positive.

No, I didn’t overreact and start drafting some massive “Why you shouldn’t use Akismet” blog post. I simply posted this tweet and just a couple hours later, I received this response from Mark Riley of Automattic. This totally caught me by surprise, as I was definitely not expecting this issue to be resolved by a quick tweet.

So why was I marked as spam in the first place? I have no clue, other than the fact it had something to do with my URL (http://www.themelab.com). I’m just glad it could be resolved so quickly. Thanks Akismet!

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a tutorial here. I thought with Automattic’s acquisition of PollDaddy, this would be a good opportunity to write one about adding polls to your self-hosted WordPress blogs, more specifically - PollDaddy polls. In this tutorial I’ll go over:

• Installing the PollDaddy plugin
• Signing up to PollDaddy (if you don’t already have an account)
• Creating and managing polls from within your WordPress admin panel
• Inserting the polls you create into your WordPress posts and pages

And now onto the tutorial…

The Plugin

You can grab this plugin from this page over at WordPress.org. After installing the plugin, you’ll notice a prompt to input your PollDaddy account details.

Signing Up

If you don’t have a PollDaddy account already, not to worry! I’ll walk you through it. You can sign up for a free account here.

Fill in your name, e-mail address, and password choice, and you’re all set.

Configuring the Plugin

After this, you’ll need to go back to your WordPress admin panel and type in the login details you just created. Upon revisiting the PollDaddy admin page, you’ll see a new screen to create and manage your polls.

I’m not sure what that warning message means, but I’ll just ignore it and see if the polls work anyway. Seems some others are having the same problem as well.

Creating Polls

Click the “Add New” link to set up your poll. There’s an input box for the poll question, as well as three answers. You can click the “Add Another” button for more answer choices. You can also set up multiple choice polls, randomize the answer order, and allow other answers.

I’ll choose the “Simple White” design and leave the default settings for results and repeat voters.

After clicking the “Add Poll” button, I was greeted with a page with two warning messages on it. After re-logging in to the admin panel (somehow I was logged out) and visited the Polls page, it seems the poll I created was indeed successful.

Inserting Polls

The next step is to go write a post, and click the orange button thingy next to Add Media. You should see a screen like this with your newly created poll.

Again, the same warning message pops up. I’ll try my best to ignore those since they seem not to make a difference with the actual workings of the plugin. After sending the poll to the editor, WordPress will generate a shortcode to place in your post.

Help Me! It doesn’t work!

After saving/publishing, you’ll notice the actual poll doesn’t display in your post, just the unparsed shortcode. To correct this, you’ll need to install another plugin from PollDaddy. You can get it here. I grabbed the one for version 2.5 and above.

I’m not sure why this plugin isn’t even mentioned at all on the first plugin’s page. I had to check this support thread to find out why the polls weren’t displaying properly. Apparently the first plugin was just for creating/managing polls. This one is for having them display in your WordPress post.

All Done

That’s it. Here’s the poll I’ve just created in action.

Pretty cool?

Conclusion

First of all, I’d like to congratulate Matt Mullenweg and Automattic on this awesome acquisition.

It’s a mystery to me why the plugin for creating/managing polls and the plugin for displaying polls are separate. Maybe someone can enlighten me. I personally think that these two plugins should be combined into one.

I think it’s also worth mentioning the self-hosted WP-Polls plugin by Lester Chan, if you’d rather not be dependent on a third-party service.

Hope you all liked the tutorial. Feel free to comment with your thoughts on the acquisition, the WordPress integration, and the tutorial. I’d love to hear them.

I’ve always been a firm believer that WordPress can be more than just a “blogging platform.” With the power of themes and plugins, WordPress can be extended to do much more than just blog. This post over at the ThemeForest blog highlights several examples of WordPress themes that bring WordPress to higher levels of functionality.

• Content Management System
• Magazine
• Job Listings
• Showcase
• Portfolio
• Real Estate
• Game/Film Review
• A Forum
• Twitter

Most of the themes featured on the post are commercial, available for purchase on ThemeForest or other outlets.

Can you think of any examples of innovative WordPress sites or themes that really push the envelope?

Today we have another nice looking blog theme, designed by Anto. It has a widget-ready sidebar, Gravatars for comments, and WordPress tag support.

Live Demo | Download

Another week has passed, which means another set of weekend resources.

13 Wordpress Plugins You Probably Don’t Use But Should - Okay, I admit I’m a sucker for these list posts. This one, however, had several plugins I’ve never heard of before. Has several admin tools, social plugins, and others for you to check out.

Ian Stewart On Child Themes - Part 1 & Part 2 - This interview was so long, it had to be broken down into 2 parts. In this interview, Ian Stewart goes over what a child theme is, their benefits, theme frameworks, and effect on the premium theme market.

Interview With Revolutionary Brian Gardner - In this audio interview conducted by Jeff Chandler, Brian Gardner discusses his move to open source, WordPress theme licensing, among other things. It’s about an hour long.

That’s all for this week. If you have any other recently published WordPress resources, feel free to let me know.

Today we have a very cool looking theme, designed by Anto. I took the design, coded it in XHTML/CSS and then ported it to WordPress. This theme is just a normal blog layout with the usual features. A widget-ready sidebar, Gravatars for comments, and WordPress tag support.

Live Demo | Download

I recently came across this awesome looking magazine theme and I thought I would share it with all of you in a review. It’s called Guzel Magazine, created by Custom Theme Design. I’ll be going over how to set it up and other features.

And now onto the review…

Setting Up

After uploading and activating the theme, you’ll probably have a pretty empty looking front page, even if you have lots of existing content. To fix this, you’ll need to open up your settings.inc.php file in the theme editor. This is where a number of theme settings are stored. Option 1 controls which categories are displayed on the top tabs on the homepage.

$cat1 = 1;
$cat2 = 3;
$cat3 = 4;
$cat4 = 5;
$cat5 = 6;
$cat6 = 9;

Replace the numbers 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 9 with your actual category ID numbers.

To change the categories on the left and right columns on the homepage below, you’ll need to scroll down to option 5 and 6. You’ll need to replace the category ID numbers in a similar fashion.

$leftcolumn_category_1 = 17;
$leftcolumn_category_1_postsnum = 3;
$leftcolumn_category_2 = 18;
$leftcolumn_category_2_postsnum = 2;

There are a few other things that can be edited in this file, including:

• Featured excerpt length
• Amount of items in the “popular” tabs to the right
• FeedBurner information (ID, blog title, and location)
• Post excerpt length (for bottom columns)
• Video category ID number

Set the Language

This theme has 2 built in languages, English and Spanish. If you plan on creating a Spanish blog, you can change that on the theme options page.

You may notice some strange code in place of where you would expect to see words in the theme files. If you want to edit any language of the theme, it can be edited with a text editor. The language files are located in the /lang/ directory. Since these files are located in a subdirectory, they can’t be edited in the theme editor.

Thumbnails

One of the features in this theme is automatic thumbnail support for stories. All you have to do is upload the image on your post, and the thumbnail is set. This is handled by WordPress’ built in image resizer. It’s recommended by the developers of the theme to use 135 width and 100 height, cropping to those exact dimensions. These settings can be configured on the “Miscellaneous” settings page.

Conclusion

Like the Arthemia theme, Guzel doesn’t make much use of the theme options page. It would certainly be nice if the settings.inc.php page was somehow integrated in the options page, instead of just language settings. I do like how the thumbnails are supported, as no extra custom fields are needed.

All in all, this is a very good looking magazine theme, one that I would almost expect to be considered “premium.”

I hope you enjoyed the review, and if you have any suggestions on which theme I should review next, I’d love to hear them.