Fried Logic

Tara's Top Tweets of the Week – WordPress

Sorry for the delay in finally getting this post up; it’s definitely been longer than a week, more like a month, since my last post. This collection of links are all about WordPress, the most popular open source blog platform, which can also be used as a content management system for websites and not just blogs. This is in no way a comprehensive list of resources for WordPress since there are so very many good articles on the subject, but it is a collection of some of the better ones I have found within the last month.Top WordPress Articles and Sites for this month:

1. 20 Fresh WordPress Themes from The Web Squeeze: Very nice collection of contemporary WordPress themes that have recently been released. Some are free, while others are available for a relatively small price. Many of them have a ton of customizable options. One of my favorites from their list is the Stratie theme by New WordPress Themes. It is a free premium WordPress theme with tons of customizable options including ability to use your own header/logo image, ability to easily add advertisements in the header and right column, twitter feed, gravatars for comments, and featured content both in the main content area and sidebar. Here’s a live demo.
   
2. WPCookies – WordPress Tips & Tricks, Themes, Plugins, Showcase and more… has a nice collection of “how-to” articles geared more towards WordPress newbies. It’s not a huge site yet, but is growing quickly. One of their posts features 30 Free Magazine Style WordPress Themes, many of which I had never seen before. The IsoTherm News Theme is one of my favorites.
   
3. I love jQuery, so I must mention this article – 17 Most Used WordPress Jquery Plugins from Skyje: All of these WordPress plugins are great and help add some style to your site’s functionality. One that I’ve used before and really like is the Tweet Blender – it has support for just about anything you would want to show in your Twitter feed with many different filters. You can show tweets for a topic, multiple authors, multiple lists, multiple keywords and hash tags all blended together however you like. If you want to add a Twitter feed/stream to your blog, you should definitely check this plugin out.
   
4. 10 WordPress Hacks to Make More Money Online from Cats Who Blog (one of my favorite WordPress resource sites). Who doesn’t want to make money??!! They aren’t really “hacks”, btw, just tips.
   
5. Back to WordPress theme resources – This article has a fantastic list of Great Websites Dedicated to Help You Find WordPress Themes from Tripwire Magazine: This is, by far, the best collection of WordPress theme websites I have ever seen. I will definitely be going back to this list many times in the future for finding new themes. One site they listed (out of the 24) is Great WordPress Themes – they have around 150 pages of themes! To help find the “right” theme for you, they have a robust search engine, categories, and tags for each of the approximate 3000 themes. They also have user ratings and number of downloads for each theme.
   
   
6. If you’re just getting started developing themes for WordPress or are looking for better ways to go about it, this article is for you: Best Practices for WordPress Coding from Cats Who Code (same author, Jean-Baptiste Jung, as Cats Who Blog). The additional resources he lists at the bottom of the post are really good, too.
7. Phenomenal collection of 100 Top WordPress Tips by FAQPAL: I’ve been developing in WordPress for around 5 years, now, and thought I knew a lot of the “tricks” to it. I hadn’t seen or heard of at least 20 of these! Every WordPress developer should keep this page bookmarked for reference.
8. And to get further into WordPress development – 10 WordPress query_posts Tips You Probably Don’t Know by BinaryMoon: These tips are a “must” for any serious WordPress developer.
9. What’s coming up in WordPress 3.0 from Designer Daily: The beta version of WordPress 3.0 was released in early April. One of the biggest new features is that WordPress is integrating its multi-users version’s (what was WordPress MU) functionality into the stand-alone version for those who want to create their own blog network. So now, once you have one blog setup and going and decide you want to expand it into a network of blogs, you don’t have to completely start over with an install of WordPress MU; you can now just enable the multi-user functionality from the tools menu. There are a few new features which will make WordPress more geared towards a full CMS (content management system), such as the ability to create custom menus mixing categories, pages or custom URLs and the added ability to create custom content types. For those of you who have used WordPress for a while, you know that it has had the same default theme (Kubrick) ever since it started. Now, there is finally a new default theme, Twenty Ten. It has several preloaded header images you can choose from or you can upload your own. Here’s a screenshot and link for full theme details:
   
10. And last, but definitely not least, the article New and Updated WordPress Plugins in 2010 from webexpeditaion18 is a must-read. There are thousands of great plugins for WordPress that extend its functionality and/or help add some pizazz to your site. This selection of new and updated plugins is a nice sampling of some of the better ones. One plugin that I just recently started using is the W3 Total Cache plugin. So far, it has been the best caching plugin for WordPress that I’ve seen and tried. If you have a large site or a very image heavy one, you definitely should consider implementing some type of caching to improve the performance and speed of your site.

Thanks for reading, and happy blogging!