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What To Consider When Choosing A WordPress Themes

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Premium WordPress themes ,What To Consider When Choosing A WordPress Themes Put another way, how much easier is buying a bottle of wine when you know that you prefer reds and that your favorite red is Australian Shiraz? This small amount of knowledge cuts a choice between 500 bottles in a store down to 10.

In this post, I’ll share what I believe are the most important factors to consider, so that you know exactly what to bear in mind the next time you’re on the hunt for a good theme.

To start off, let’s answer one of the most common questions asked: Is it worth paying for a WordPress theme, or can you get away with a free one?

1. Price: Free Vs. Premium Themes

Several years ago, the price of a theme was a good indicator of its quality. Free themes were often poorly coded at best, and were used to capture sensitive user data at worst. But times have changed, and developers in the WordPress community have created thousands of great free themes to choose from.

As such, there is no conclusive winner. Both free and premium themes have their pros and cons, which are detailed below.

PROS OF PREMIUM THEMES

  • More updates
    Perhaps the most compelling reason to choose a premium theme is that such themes are typically updated more often. Given the rapid evolution of the WordPress content management system (CMS), having a theme that is regularly updated to patch new security issues is critical.
  • Less recognizable design
    Because free WordPress themes are so popular, it’s not uncommon for tens of thousands of websites to use the same free one. Premium themes are less common, which set them apart a bit more.
  • Better documentation
    Most premium themes include a detailed PDF explaining how to get the most out of them. Such documentation is less common with free themes.
  • Ongoing support
    Premium theme developers certainly offer the best support, usually through a combination of a public forum, live chat and an email ticketing system. Free themes usually just have a public forum for support.
  • No attribution links
    Many free themes often require a link to appear in the footer crediting the theme’s author. While this is becoming less common in free themes, you can be sure that no links are required in premium themes.

CONS OF PREMIUM THEMES

  • The price
    You’ll have to invest anywhere between $50 to $200 in a premium theme.
  • More configuration
    Most premium themes have their own custom administration panel, with a variety of customization settings, which can take a while to learn and set up.
  • Unwanted features
    Premium themes tend to include a lot of bells and whistles, such as multiple slider plugins, a portfolio manager and extra skins. While these do make a theme very versatile, a lot of unwanted features will bloat the theme.

In general, the most important aspect to look for in a theme, whether free or paid, is the quality and care that’s gone into making it. The quality of the code will influence everything we discuss in this article, from security to page speed.

The easiest way to gauge quality is to read what customers are saying. If a theme has a public support forum, read what kinds of issues people are having, and how responsive the developers are in resolving them.

2. Speed: Lightweight Vs. Feature-Heavy Themes

In my last post here on Smashing Magazine, I emphasized the importance of optimizing website speed. Fast page-loading speed does not just improve the general user experience of a website, but has also been confirmed to improve search engine rankings, conversion rates and, thus, online revenue.

It should come as no surprise that I recommended avoiding sluggish themes like the plague.

Understanding a problem is the first step to avoiding it. So, what causes a theme to drag a website’s page speed into the gutter?

In general, it comes down to three things:

  • Too feature-heavy
    Be wary of themes that boast 10 different sliders, 20 preinstalled plugins and a lot of JavaScript animation. While this might sound like a good deal, no website that makes HTTP requests to 50 JavaScript files will run optimally.
  • Overuse of large file formats
    The keyword here is “overuse,” which admittedly is a bit subjective. Try to steer clear of themes that use a lot of full-width images, background videos, etc. Less is more.
  • Poor coding
    From wildly scaled images to inline CSS injection, poor coding has a significant impact on website performance. As mentioned, poor code usually means that a theme hasn’t been updated in a long time, so always check a theme’s update history.

Here’s a litmus test you can use to figure out how bloated a theme is. Go to the Pingdom Website Speed Test, enter the URL of a theme’s demo and see how long the page takes to load and how many HTTP requests are made.

Let me give you a quick comparison as a benchmark. Earlier this year, I built two websites with very different theme frameworks. The first website, BrokerNotes, was built with theFrank theme (a very lightweight theme designed for speed). According to Pingdom, the home page makes 38 HTTP requests and loads in under 1 second. 3.9 Mb in bandwidth is way too heavy though.

 

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May 18th, 2014

The Curious Case of Specialty WordPress Themes

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Have you ever needed a website that should be built with WordPress Themes, but also should push the boundaries of this beautiful content management system? Ever needed to create a WordPress Themeswebsite to share code snippets, or set up an online course to sell your knowledge, or build a support system for your agency?

Sometimes, a theme and a bunch of plugins won’t work for our project. Sometimes, we need a complete system with a decent design and solid functionality. That’s where specialty themes come into play.

A WordPress theme must be developed to change the look of a website and avoid offering functionality embedded in its core. That’s called “invading the plugin territory” and considered as a bad practice since you basically chain the user to your theme with the functionality you offer. Luckily, there is a solution: You can provide functionality through plugins that you require your users to install. To do so, you can use a PHP library like TGM Plugin Activation.

But sometimes, a project requires that design and functionality work together. In this case, we have an exception, and the exception’s name, used throughout the WordPress market, is “specialty themes.”

If you decide to make a specialty theme for WordPress, you might want to consider a few things:

You must offer a unique approach in order to present your theme as a “specialty theme”. Go bananas if you like (if you’re certain that somebody will make use of your theme) and make the most eccentric theme the community has ever seen. Seriously, the community could use some variety in themes.

Actions and filters are part of the WordPress Plugin API, but that doesn’t necessarily mean themes can’t benefit from them. In fact, all of the most popular WordPress theme frameworks utilize actions and filters (mainly actions) so other developers can extend the frameworks. Follow their lead and make your theme extendable with WordPress action and filter hooks.

Here’s your “A-ha!” moment if you want to make more of your theme by diversifying design options—make your theme ready for child themes! Build your base theme (like a theme framework) and create child themes to offer different designs.

If you feel that other themes can benefit from a part of your functionality, go ahead and offer it as a plugin and require it by using the TGM Plugin Activation library. But in most cases, specialty themes’ functionalities can’t be used with other themes; so it would seem like a vain effort to convert the functionality.

But keep in mind that developers might create themes after you release your specialty theme, so it’s still a good idea to separate functionality from design.

There are so many types of specialty themes which can be made that it would be pointless to try to list all of them. But to get the idea, let’s write a few:

  • a job board
  • a question and answer system
  • a help desk
  • a learning management system
  • a crowdfunding website
  • a domain sale page
  • a “coming soon” page
  • a simple online wedding invitation
  • a knowledge base
  • a directory website
  • a contact manager
  • …and more

As I said earlier, any good idea could be—and should be—turned into a specialty theme. If you think you have a good idea to make an original specialty theme, go for it.

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May 18th, 2014

Customizing WordPress Themes Archives For Categories

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Most WordPress Themes users are familiar with tags and categories and with how to use them to organize their blog posts. If you use custom post types in WordPress Themes, you might need to organize them like categories and tags. Categories and tags are examples of taxonomies, and WordPress allows you to create as many custom taxonomies as you want. These custom taxonomies operate like categories or tags, but are separate.

In this tutorial, we’ll explain custom taxonomies and how to create them. We’ll also go over which template files in a WordPress themes control the archives of built-in and custom taxonomies, and some advanced techniques for customizing the behavior of taxonomy archives.

Terminology

Before continuing, let’s get our terminology straight. A taxonomy is a WordPress Themescontent type, used primarily to organize content of any other content type. The two taxonomies everyone is familiar with are built in: categories and tags. We tend to call an individual posting of a tag a “tag,” but to be precise, we should refer to it as a “term” in the “tag” taxonomy. We pretty much always refer to items in a custom taxonomy as “terms.”

Categories and tags represent the two types of taxonomies: hierarchical and non-hierarchical. Like categories, hierarchical taxonomies can have parent-child relationships between terms in the taxonomy. For example, you might have on your blog a “films” category that has several child categories, with names like “foreign” and “domestic.” Custom taxonomies may also be hierarchical, like categories, or non-hierarchical, like tags.

How Tag, Category and Custom Taxonomy Archives Work

For every category, tag and custom taxonomy, WordPress Themes automatically generates an archive that lists each post associated with that taxonomy, in reverse chronological order. The system works really well if you organize your blog posts with categories and tags. If you have a complex system of organizing custom post types with custom taxonomies, then it might not be ideal. We’ll go over the many ways to modify these archives.

The first step to customizing is to know which files in your theme are used to display the archive. Different WordPress Themes have different template files, but all WordPress Themes have an index.phptemplate. The index.php template is used to display all content, unless a template exists higher up in the hierarchy. WordPress’ template hierarchy is the system that dictates which template file is used to display which content. We’ll briefly go over the template hierarchy for categories, tags and custom taxonomies. If you’d like to learn more, these resources are highly recommended .

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May 18th, 2014

Quick Tour Of WordPress 4

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WordPress Themes has released the first release candidate (RC) for the upcoming 4.0 version. According to the official version numbering, WordPress 4.0 is no more or less significant than 3.9 was or 4.1 will be. That being said, a new major release is always a cause for excitement! Let’s take a look at the new features the team at WordPress has been working on for us. wordpress themes

Installation Language

Since I’ve always used wordpress themes in English, it took me a while to realize how important internationalization is. 29% of all WordPress.com installations use a non-English language which is huge and not that far from more than a quarter of all installations. Version 4.0 makes it much easier to get WordPress to speak your language. In fact, the first installation screen asks you to choose your native tongue. Nice!

This is a big step up from either having to download in your own language, or grabbing language files manually and modifying the config.

Embed Previews For URLs

Embedding content into posts has also become a much nicer process. One of my irks with the visual editor used to be that it wasn’t visual enough. Not that long ago, you just got a grey box in place of a gallery or other media/embed items. The “Smith” release took care of galleries and 4.0 is taking care of a host of other items. If you paste a YouTube URL in text mode, it will render as a video in visual mode. How handy is that?

I find this a lot more pleasing to work with — I see exactly what I’m going to get. The media modal’s insert from the URL feature is getting the same upgrade. As soon as you’ve entered a URL, the video will load — playable and all! The good news is that it works with all the services you’d expect, from Vimeo to Twitter, Hulu and Flickr. Scott Taylor (who is a core contributor working on this) has kindly gathered some test URLs. I recommend checking outTrac ticket to find out more in this regard.

Media Section Grid

The media section now has a grid view by default. This isn’t a groundbreaking coding feat by any measure, but it does introduce a sleeker UI which is perhaps a glimpse of what is coming up in the future.

While this is a minor change, it does give you a way better overview of your media files than the default view of 20 images in a list.

Plugin Discovery And Installation

In my opinion, the plugin “Add New” page got a much needed makeover. The top navigation looks a lot like the new navigation in the media section — another indication of a slightly more modern interface creeping into the system. Plugins in the list view are displayed in a much more visual fashion, and it looks like it’s time for developers to start making thumbnails! While the plugin details screen could use a makeover as well, I’m sure this is a work in progress and will be explored further.

Better Post Editing

One feature I’m particularly happy with is how the editor height has been changed to use screen real estate better. Mark Jaquith painted a great picture of the problem:

“The post editor feels like it has been relegated to a box of medium importance on the edit/compose screen.”

UI Improvements For Widget Customization

It’s great that widgets have been included in the wordpress themes customizer. Usually, if you had more than five to six widgets, things became a bit too crowded. Fortunately, the new WP version has now put all widgets into a sub-section of the customization screen. This essentially minimizes them when not needed — a welcome UI improvement for sure!

Join The Fun

As always, the latest development versions can be tried out pretty easily. By installing theWordPress Beta Tester plugin you can update to the latest beta builds or nightlies and play around with the brand new features.

If you happen to find any bugs, you can add them to the WordPress Trac and you can even fix them and contribute to the core! wordpress themes is a community project, and every little bit helps!

from : http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/08/27/a-tour-of-wordpress-4-0/

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May 17th, 2014

Speed Up Your WordPress Themes

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WordPress Themes can be more faster than you think let’s see how !!?

A few months ago, I ran an experiment to see how much faster I could make one of my websites in less than two hours of work. After installing a handful of WordPress plugins and fixing a few simple errors, I had improved the website’s loading speed from 1.61 seconds to 583 milliseconds. That’s a 70.39% improvement, without having made any visual changes to the website.

According to a 2009 Akamai study, 47% of visitors expect a page to load in under 2 seconds, and 57% of visitors will abandon a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Since this study, no shortage of case studies have confirmed that loading time affects sales.

In 2006, Amazon reported that a 100-millisecond increase in page speed translated to a 1% increase in its revenue. Just a few years later, Google announced in a blog post that its algorithm takes page speed into account when ranking websites.

So, how can you speed up your WordPress website?

Below are twelve quick fixes that will dramatically improve your website’s loading time, including:

  • identifying which plugins are slowing down your website;
  • automatically compressing Web pages, images, JavaScript and CSS files;
  • keeping your website’s database clean;
  • setting up browser caching the right way.

Lay The Foundation

When your house is sinking into the ground, you don’t polish the windows — you fix the foundations. The same goes for your website. If it’s hosted on a sluggish server or has a bloated theme, quick fixes won’t help. You’ll need to fix the foundation.

So, let’s start with what makes for a good foundation and how to set ourselves up for a website that runs at lightening speed.

CHOOSE A GOOD HOST

Your Web hosting company and hosting package have a huge impact on the speed of your website, among many other important performance-related things. I used to be sucked in by the allure of free or cheap hosting, but with the wisdom of hindsight, I’ve learned that hosting isn’t an area to skimp on.

To put this into perspective, two of my clients have similar websites but very different hosting providers. One uses WPEngine (an excellent hosting company), and the other hosts their website on a cheap shared server.

The DNS response time (i.e. the time it takes for the browser to connect to the hosting server) of the client using WPEngine is 7 milliseconds. The client using the cheap shared hosting has a DNS response time of 250 milliseconds.

If you want your website to run quickly, start with a good hosting company and package.

CHOOSE A GOOD THEME

Unfortunately, not all WordPress themes are created equal. While some are extremely fast and well coded, others are bloated with hundreds of bells and whistles under the pretence of being “versatile and customizable.”

A few years ago, Julian Fernandes of Synthesis ran an interesting case study in which he updated his theme from WordPress’ default to the Genesis framework, monitoring page speed. He noticed that just by changing the theme to Genesis, his loading time improved from 630 to 172 milliseconds.

When you choose a theme, check the page speed of the theme’s demo, using a tool such as Pingdom, to see how quickly it runs with nothing added to it. This should give you an idea of how well coded it is.

USE A CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK

I recently started using a content delivery network (CDN) for one of my websites and noticed a 55% reduction in bandwidth usage and a huge improvement in page-loading speed.

A CDN hosts your files across a huge network of servers around the world. If a user from Argentina visits your website, then they would download files from the server closest to them geographically. Because your bandwidth is spread across so many different servers, the load on any single server is reduced.

Setting up a CDN can take a few hours, but it’s usually one of the quickest ways to dramatically improve page-loading speed.

12 Quick Fixes To Speed Up WordPress

Now that our foundation is solid, we can begin fine-tuning our website.

A good way to start speeding up a website is to look at what can be removed. More often than not, a website is slow not because of what it lacks but because of what it already has.

1. IDENTIFY PLUGINS THAT ARE SLOWING YOU DOWN

P3 is one of my favourite diagnostic plugins because it shows you the impact of your other plugins on page-loading time. This makes it easy to spot any plugins that are slowing down your website.

A common culprit is social-sharing plugins, most of which bloat page-loading times and can easily be replaced by embedding social buttons into the theme’s source code.

Once you’re aware of which plugins are slowing down your website, you can make an informed decision about whether to keep them, replace them or remove them entirely.

2. COMPRESS YOUR WEBSITE

When you compress a file on your computer as a ZIP file, the total size of the file is reduced, making it both easier and faster to send to someone. Gzip works in exactly the same way but with your Web page files.

Once installed, Gzip automatically compresses your website’s files as ZIP files, saving bandwidth and speeding up page-loading times. When a user visits your website, their browser will automatically unzip the files and show their contents. This method of transmitting content from the server to the browser is far more efficient and saves a lot of time.

There is virtually no downside to installing Gzip, and the increase in speed can be quite dramatic. As we can see in the screenshot above, MusicLawContracts.com goes from 68 KB to only 13 KB with Gzip installed.

for more : http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/06/25/how-to-speed-up-your-wordpress-website/

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May 17th, 2014

Using PHPMyAdmin with WordPress Themes

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WordPress Themes PHPMyAdmin – or PMA – is an excellent free, open source web-based database client which can be used to interact more easily with MySQL and WordPress databases. I’ll describe how to install it, secure it and some common scenarios with which it can assist you in WordPress administration. Here’s an online demo of PMAfor you to explore.

In addition to offering a visual GUI for database operations, I also appreciate being able to run command line SQL operations via my browser without having to log in to the server via SSH. For example, some WiFi and mobile connections regularly terminate persistent SSH sessions, making database tasks problematic.

Getting started with PMA is fairly straightforward on Linux. I’ll describe how to do so with Ubuntu 14.x at Digital Ocean. Log in to your server via SSH:

apt-get install phpmyadmin

You can use the default settings during installation or customize them to your liking.

On a typical WordPress installation, there aren’t any direct ports to MySQL for a hacker to try to access. They might try to break in via SSH or try SQL injection attacks against WordPress, but they can’t directly attack the database. Once you install PMA, anyone can run web-based attacks against it in order to gain control of your database, so care is warranted.

There are a few precautions I recommend when configuring PMA.

1. Use very strong passwords for all of your MySQL accounts, especially the root account. e.g. 25 characters for the root password.

2. Use different MySQL accounts and privileges for each WordPress site running on a single server. This way if one WordPress password is compromised, only one site’s database is compromised.

3. Change the default URL used by PMA. This way people can’t visithttp://yourblog.com/phpmyadmin. While this security by obscurity isn’t a very effective technique, it does add some protection.

Add an alias to the apache.conf file:

Reload apache:

service apache2 reload

Then, to access PMA, visit http://yourblog.com/myobscuredpma

If you need to modify your PHPMyAdmin password, you can edit the config-db.phphere:

nano /etc/phpmyadmin/config-db.php

4. Configure Web Authentication for the PMA Site. This will require that you enter an additional password to gain access to PMA, in addition to your database password, like this:

It’s very important to remember that PMA allows you to directly manipulate the WordPress database; that means it’s quite easy to break your WordPress site if you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s especially unwise to apply database scripts from the web unless you understand them completely. Use PMA with great care.

for more: http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/installing-and-using-phpmyadmin-with-wordpress–cms-21944

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May 17th, 2014
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