How to Blog » Templates

New Category/Feature on How to Blog: Readers Write In

Emily from How to Blog — Fri, 29 May 2009 20:53:48 +0000

I frequently receive email from readers of How to Blog, sometimes thanking me and other times with blogging questions that they have which they hope that I can answer. In many of the latter cases, I am able to answer their questions and get them back happily blogging. But there are times when I just don’t know the answer. So, I have decided to post the support questions that I receive that I cannot help with on How to Blog to see if any of the blog’s readers can help each other out!

I already posted the first Reader Question regarding a problem after a WordPress upgrade.. I hope that you guys are able to help out on that one b/c I’m clueless.

What do you guys think of this new addition to the blog – the occasional posting of Reader Questions or even any articles or opinion pieces? I’m all ears!

Updated my WordPress Theme List – now listing 960 wordpress themes!

Emily from How to Blog — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 01:21:17 +0000

My WordPress Theme List has been updated — and while I wasn’t sure if we would cross the 900 mark, turns out we’re only 40 themes away from 1000 free wordpress themes available for download!!!

Way to go to all of the wordpress theme authors!!

ArenaWP announces winners of WordPress 2.0 Theme Competition

Emily from How to Blog — Tue, 30 May 2006 19:57:04 +0000

Well this news is two weeks late, but better late than never. The winners of the WordPress 2.0 Theme competition hosted by arenawp.com have finally been announced:

The WordPress 2.0 Theme Competition Winners:

Best Overall Designs
1st Place – Durable by Andy Peatling
2nd Place – Kurtina by Gail Dela Cruz
3rd Place – Ambiru theme by Phu Ly

Most Creative Design
Foliage by Derek Punsalon

Best 3 Column Design
Tiga by Shamsul Azhar

Best 2 Column Design
Disconnected by Adam Freetly

Best Use Of Colours
Dapit Hapon by Gail Dela Cruz

Best Liquid Design
DarkPad by Sreejith Krishnan

Best Use of WordPress Theme Options
TBD by People’s Choice and Sponsor

Best AJAX Integration
TBD by People’s Choice and Sponsor

Congratulations to all of the winners, and thanks to all of the participants for all of their hard work in creating innovative wordpress themes. I’ve obviously got a lot of updating to do to my comprehensive wordpress theme list — hopefully I will be able to get it completed within the next day or so. How exciting! New wordpress themes! I can’t wait to go and check them all out!

WordPress 2.0 Theme Competition Officially Ends, winners to be announced in two weeks

Emily from How to Blog — Tue, 02 May 2006 00:58:28 +0000

ArenaWP has officially closed the doors to new entrants to its theme competition and so the judging process has begun! Terry (the creater of ArenaWP) says that

I know everyone is anxious to see the new designs, and they’ll be available in two weeks for download after the judging panel has reviewed all the entries. A screenshot of each design will be available later this week for a sneak preview of the designs that have been entered. I’ll also complile a list of all the new partcipants and come up with a final number of theme entries within the next couple of days

As of April 17th, there were 34 Theme Participants listed and I’m sure that list has grown as the competition deadline drew nearer. A big thanks to everyone who participated, and best of luck to all of you in winning some of the great prizes being offered up!

Personally, I’m uber excited to see all the new WordPress 2.0 themes that have been created! I hope that some designers really went to town with incorporating WordPress 2.0′s new Theme Options, which allow wordpress bloggers to customize the theme without touching (or knowing) a single piece of code.

I also can’t wait to see how much larger my comprehensive wordpress theme list will grow once all of the themes that were submitted to the contest are made available to the public. We’ve recently crossed the 800 themes mark — think there’s a chance we can make it to 900??

My Comprehensive WordPress Theme List has been updated and now consists of 744 wordpress themes!

Emily from How to Blog — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 02:13:14 +0000

Way to go to all of the wordpress theme developers out there! I just finished the latest update of my comprehensive list of wordpress themes, and we have now officially crossed the 700 mark and are almost halfway to the 800 mark with a whopping 744 wordpress themes available for download!

Sponsor the WordPress Arena WP 2.0 Theme Competition by donating cool prizes

Emily from How to Blog — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 20:37:54 +0000

Much thanks to Terry/Kineda for reviving the spirit of the WordPress 2.0 Theme Competition that was intended by the original competition (that was later discovered to be a hoax) by launching a new one at wordpressarena.com with trusted, named judges like Terry aka Kineda, James aka Shadow, Bryan Veloso aka Avalonstar, and Dan Cameron.

The hoax competition had a lot of juicy prizes associated with it (likely because none of them were ever actually going to be awarded to anyone seeing as how it was a hoax). Theme designers worked their butts off creating new WordPress 2.0 themes in an effort to win some of those excellent prizes. While the new WordPress Arena competition is offering an iPod shuffle to the overall winner, the runner up prizes of a year’s worth of hosting (which people aren’t necessarily likely to take advantage of, generous as it may be, as changing webhosts is quite a production) and a book on the Zen of CSS Design aren’t quite as tempting as the electronic and cash goodies these designers were originally promised as prizes.

So I ask the community: if you have the means, please help reward the designers for all of their hard work and sponsor the WordPress Arena 2.0 Theme Competition by donating some enticing prizes to be awarded. This would then allow for more categories for themes to be judged upon and more winners, as was promised in the original competiton that sadly turned out to be a scam.

These theme designers who submitted their hard work to the hoax competition must feel really scammed and taken advantage of. Let’s make them feel appreciated – honor them for their work. Surely there must be some companies or individuals who have the means to donate some more prizes (cash or otherwise) and be proud sponsors of the new WordPress 2.0 Theme Competition.

WordPress Arena has graciously extended the deadline for submission of themes to May 1st to a) allow for the time for more sponsors to get involved and then decide on judging criteria for the new prizes, and b) provide extra time for the many theme designers who got scammed to learn about the new theme competition so they can all get their submissions in and for the rest of us to spread the word about the new competition. Winners will be announced on May 15th, 2006.

WordPress 2.0 Themes Competition Website got hacked – HOW?? Is there a security vulnerability in WordPress? Was the theme competition itself a hoax?

Emily from How to Blog — Wed, 08 Mar 2006 20:18:33 +0000

Update: It now appears that the kcyap theme competition was a complete hoax and the site owner made off with 188 WordPress 2.0 specific themes! The site itself has disappeared, the owner doesn’t respond to any questions nor does he make any attempt to restore the posts, etc. You can read up on some of the discussion in the WordPress Support Forums. I have removed the links to the hoax site so-as to not generate any additional traffic or inbound links for the jerk.

There is a new WP 2.0 theme competition that is taking it’s place and being run by respected members of the WP community over at WordPress Arena.

I ask that all theme designers who applied to the scam competition now enter the new, legit one — and also would be extremely grateful if you would submit your themes to me, as well. While I’ve nothing to offer in the way of prizes (wish I could, but hopefully some fame and the knowledge that you’re helping the community will be inspiration enough), I am extremely eager to create a Comprehensive List of WordPress 2.0 specific themes (and have plans to create a blog specifically about themes to make it much easier for folks to find the theme of their dreams). Please email all theme info to howtoblog @ gmail.com with a subject of WP 2.0 theme — thanks!

On March 5th, the WordPress 2.0 Theme Design Competition that was being hosted by kcyap.com claimed that it got hacked (and that his entire database was erased):

“Very regret to announced that this competition blog website had been hacked. I have no backup for all this data and not sure if the server admin did have a backup on it or not. I am very sorry for this incident.

The prizes will still be the same and i will upload once again all the submitted themes on by one from now. This may takes quite some time, please be patient.

The result for this competition will still be announce don the 10th March 2006.”

This should be a reminder to everyone to BACKUP YOUR DATABASE ON A REGULAR BASIS (I’ll write a how-to post on this shortly).

And as many commenters pointed out, it was unacceptable for a site hosting a theme competition of this level to not have backups. Other commenters suggested the site owner use the Google cache to try to retrieve the old posts.

However, the big question that’s on my mind – and which was brought up by CountZero is how did this happen??

“But the really more important task than assigning any guilt to anyone on this case, I suppose, is to find out how the hacker could compromise the machine. Did he use some undiscovered WordPress vulnerability, did he make use of those being published just about a week ago, or did he make use of other security issues on your server? Is it sure that these loophole(s) are closed now, and can you make sure there is no backdoor/rootkit left on the machine now?”

I hope the WordPress team is taking a good look at this to ensure that it wasn’t the result of some previously unknown security vulnerability in WordPress. Was the kycap Theme Competition Blog running on WP 2.0 or WP 2.0.1? And if he was running the latest version (WP 2.0.1), did the hackers get in through a WordPress security flaw, or through some other method related to his specific hosting situation? Or perhaps he had spyware on his PC and they had a keylogger which gave them access to his password so they could just easily log into his account. (Which reminds me that everyone should have Microsoft’s free Anti-Spyware software installed on their Window’s PCs)

Additionally, there has also been speculation that the whole Theme Competition was a hoax (to gain google pagerank?). Many commenters have found it rather suspicious that even if the database was wiped that there still wouldn’t be backups of all of the themes that designers had submitted – after all, they sent them in through email. And what of all the ‘unnamed judges’ (which I always thought was a little shady..) – shouldn’t they have copies of the themes and their descriptions, as well?

IMHO, the Theme Competition site owner (Justin) owes it to the WP community to work with both his webhost and the WordPress team to discover just how that site got hacked, and then reveal that information to everyone – both to restore his credibility and so that we can all know whether we need to be worried about the same thing happening to us – and learn from his situation about how to protect ourselves. Specifically, we need to know whether the hack stemmed from a problem with WordPress security. I’ll rest easier once this information is known, especially since I’m still entrenched in hoards of hours in porting How to Blog over to WP from TypePad (it was easy to import the posts, but there’s all this minutiae that’s taking hoards of hours to deal with as part of the transition).

My Comprehensive WordPress Theme List Crosses the 600 Mark!!

Emily from How to Blog — Sat, 21 Jan 2006 01:24:12 +0000

Wow, I can’t believe it – I’ve just uploaded the latest update to my WP theme list and it now contains a mindblowing 615 free wordpress themes that wordpress users can download and use on their blogs for free.

Some of the themes have been tested on WordPress 2.0, and have been marked as such, and a few of the themes are actually specifically for WordPress 2.0 and won’t work with 1.5.x (also marked accordingly).

I’m super excited about the prospect of all the new themes to come down the pipeline now that WP 2.0 is out – and for all of the updates to current themes that theme authors might be lured into performing given the fabulous customization that wordpress 2 allows.

For those who don’t know, WordPress 2.0 has taken themes to the next level in a serious way, providing the ability for theme authors to actually allow theme users with options that can be easily customized through a panel in the adminstration area of WordPress. If a theme is customizable, there will be a tab under Presentation for “Current Theme Options”.

The Default theme that is packaged with WordPress 2.0 allows you to make changes to the theme’s header, including the font color and colors used for the background of the header.

But themes like Regulus 2.0 really take it up a knotch by providing checkboxes allowing the blog owner to change the header image, the color scheme, whether to show full posts or excerpts on the homepage, whether to display the post’s author on the homepage, as well as sidebar options such as ‘show calendar’, ‘show recent posts’, ‘show all archive months’, etc.

You can also see a running demo of a new WP 2.0 theme called BloxPress which actually allows the blog viewer to change the layout of the theme, dragging and dropping theme sections around to change their order in the sidebar at will and adding and removing content as it suits them (something which I wish was incorporated into the WordPress core for the blog owners, at least). Seriously cool stuff.

It’s a beautiful thing, this level of customization. I sincerely hope that more WordPress 2.0 theme authors create their themes with these sort of theme options (and more!) in mind!

WordPress 2.0 also allows theme designers to include a screenshot as part of their theme package which will then display on the Presentation|Themes tab so it’s much easier to select a theme that’s suited to your blogging style.

I’m going to need a better way of managing my theme list now that some themes are for v1.5.x and others just for 2.0, etc which isn’t something I can easily due from within the constrains of TypePad. Which leads me to my next post: feeling like I’m stuck in limbo and with a conundrum on my hands.

WordPress Theme Toolkit allows users and authors to add an admin menu to existing themes

Emily from How to Blog — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 02:35:58 +0000

Just found out that Ozh has created a WordPress Theme Toolkit which, upon editing three lines of code in any existing theme, will provide Theme Authors with an admin menu accessible through the WordPress Presentation UI. Very cool stuff – all would-be wordpress theme authors should check it out! Same goes for those of you dabbling in modifying existing themes. Nice work Ozh!

Holy Moly! WordPress Theme List grows to over 460 WP 1.5.x Themes!

Emily from How to Blog — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 02:33:59 +0000

Boy, theme authors have been busy during the month-plus while I was sick!

I just spent the entire day working on updating my comprehensive wordpress theme list, and it’s now up to a whopping 463 wordpress themes!

When I first started the list, I never guessed it would grow to be so large! I thought we’d hit a huge milestone when we crossed the 200 mark. Now we’re at 463 and growing — way to go to the wordpress community and all the theme authors that so generously have shared their work with us!

Color me blown away!

Update: The theme list now contains 615+ WP themes and growing!

369 Free WordPress Themes now available – the wp theme list has been updated!

Emily from How to Blog — Sun, 27 Nov 2005 20:51:30 +0000

Just a note that my comprehensive list of free themes for WordPress 1.5 and up has been updated to add 13 new themes, and now consists of a whopping 369 themes! (update – make that 616 themes!)

As always, tremendous props to the many theme authors for all their hard work in creating these themes AND for their generousity in sharing them with the wordpress community. If you’re using someone’s theme, I’d bet they’d love to hear about it so shoot them an email and give them the thanks they deserve.

On a more frustrating note, I’ve discovered at least two people who have stolen my wordpress theme list and reprinted it on their websites without my permission, one of them even claiming it as his own work (with the audacity of reprinting word-for-word all of the accompanying verbiage that went with my post!) Fortunately, I’ve resolved the issue in both instances, but this prompted me to remind everyone that my blog posts (and yours!) are protected under copyright laws and may not be reprinted without permission.

Much thanks to Tony at tonystreet.com for notifying me about the guy who stole my post in it’s entirety and helping me to get him to remove it (and also for all the wonderful wordpress themes he has created and shared with us!)

To my loyal blog readers – if you come across a site which has stolen my theme list, please let me know by emailing me at howtoblog @ gmail.com (remove the spaces – protecting myself from spammers). I’ve spent well over 40 hours in the months since March 2005 on both creating and maintaining my comprehensive list of free wordpress themes.

Also, thanks to everyone for the kind words (and patience) while I’ve been ill. Migraines are a real nightmare to deal with, and prevented me from being online for quite some time. But I’ve been feeling better lately, and while I’ll need to attend to some work in order to be able to pay my mortgage, I look forward to getting back to work on How to Blog!! I’ve missed you guys!

Update: the theme list now contains 615+ themes and will soon have even more — a huge update is on the way!

WordPress 1.5 Theme Cheat-Sheet– PLUS WP Theme List updated to 330+ wordpress themes!

Emily from How to Blog — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 02:34:34 +0000

Tech Wench has created a great cheat sheet with the bare minimum of what you need to know in order to create a new wordpress theme. Thanks, tech wench.

Speaking of WordPress themes, I’ve been updating my comprehensive list of wordpress 1.5 themes and it now links to a whopping 330+ wordpress themes!! Theme designers in the wp community have been busy – and we thank you for your efforts and generousity!

Update: the theme list is now 695+ themes and growing!

Need someone to create a custom template or plugin for your blog? Need help with SEO? Check out Rent A Coder!

Emily from How to Blog — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 04:20:29 +0000

I just found the coolest resource! It’s called Rent A Coder, and you can post any project that you need help with, whether it be as simple as installing WordPress / MovableType / etc for you on your server, or as complex as asking someone to write a custom blogging platform for you. Want a custom template for TypePad or a special WordPress theme and don’t have the time or skills to do it yourself? Just Rent A Coder to do it for you. You can even find people to help you with Search Engine Optimization, people to write content for you, etc.

Once you post the specifics of the project you need help with, coders will then bid on your ‘job’ and you can decide who you want to hire based on their bid, the feedback they received from other users on other projects they’ve completed, etc.

From their website:

Need a coder to help you create the next ‘killer app’ or answer questions? Just post your program or question here and coders from around the world will email you bids on doing the work.

You can review each bidder’s resume and reputation online, and when you’re ready to make your decision, you can rent your personal, expert, coder with just a few clicks! Its that simple!

Posting a bid request is free, and you are under no obligation to accept any bids sent to you unless you choose to. Once you accept a bid, you will place your payment into escrow. The money is not released to the coder, till they complete the work according to your original specification. There are no service charges or finders fees for buyers.

On the flip side, got skills? Flaunt ‘em and earn cash!

Looking to earn extra income using your hard-won technical skills? Rent a Coder lets you locate and bid on coding projects and questions from around the world! By completing a free registration, you can publicize your skills on the online resume system and receive emails as new bid requests come in.

So those of you who are creating all those great free themes and plug-ins (which I hope you’ll continue to offer for the sake of the blogging community), you may wanna consider listing your talents at Rent A Coder and earning some extra $$ through freelancing.

I just did.

Customizing existing wordpress themes continued

Emily from How to Blog — Sat, 07 May 2005 01:49:14 +0000

Sorry for the delay in getting this out there, but Urban Giraffe has come through again and given us even more tools in the quest to modifying wordpress themes to better suit the desired look and feel of your site.

Check out part two of Dissection of a WordPress Theme:

‘Part two of this WordPress dissection continues to try and explain
the basic workings of the software, how this relates to the layout, and
how anyone can personalise their blog.

The focus will be on
finalising the basic layout from part one, and then finishing the
header and footer sections. Both of these are important as they
stylistically define a blog and act as visual focal points – do it well
and people will want to read your blog, do it badly and they may not
even bother.’

And when you’ve digested that, be sure to finish with Dissection of a WP Theme Part 3:

‘This part will focus on the sidebar, the navigational centre of a blog, and flesh out its raw contents to be more functional and attractive.

The
sidebar is where a visitor first looks when they have finished reading
a blog posting. It tells them what else your blog has to offer, how to
find it, and where to go next. It can be a great aid in directing
visitors, or it can confuse them entirely. A confused visitor is not
likely to return and so we should persuade them to stay as long as
possible.’

How to customize an existing WordPress 1.5 theme just the way you want

Emily from How to Blog — Thu, 14 Apr 2005 14:45:00 +0000

Well, a big THANK YOU is in order to UrbanGiraffe who has created a theme guide for modifying WordPress 1.5 themes to customize them for your site (in case none of the 369+ free wordpress themes currently available completely fit the bill for your site). Part 1 of the Guide spans 8 (!) pages and is quite detailed. Here’s an excerpt that hilights what you can expect from Part 1:

“Despite the availability of hundreds of themes, and the general goodness of the default Kubrick theme, sometimes you just want to give your blog that personal touch, and the only way to do this is by going under the hood and having a look around.

With this in mind I decided to write a guide that would help not only myself, but might also help others who have been put off trying to experiment with WordPress.

In writing this I will assume a rudimentary knowledge of HTML and CSS. I will attempt to annotate all the important parts. The guide will begin slowly, but should speed up once a level of comfort has been reached.

Rather than starting a theme from scratch, and having to explain everything, I will instead focus on dissecting an existing theme and explaining parts as they are required. From a personal point of view, I find it easier to learn things by focussing on the small details, and ignoring everything else. In this instance I will be using the default WordPress 1.5 theme Kubrick.”

Part 2, which has yet to be posted, will focus on customizing your sidebar content.

UPDATE: Customizing existing wordpress themes continued

Alex King announces winners of WordPress 1.5 Themes Competition

Emily from How to Blog — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 01:58:03 +0000

For full details, head on over to Alex’s Theme Contest Winners Announced where he describes the prizes, judging criteria, etc. Thanks again, Alex, for hosting such an amazing contest which has truly brought out the creative energy of some very talented authors. And many thanks to all the theme authors – you’re a big part of why the WordPress community as special as it is!

For those of you who just want the down and dirty details, here are the winners for the various categories

The Poobahs!

Grand Poobah – Connections
Plain Ol’ Poobah – Rin
Mini Poobah – Red Train

Honorable Mention – Wuhan
Honorable Mention – Orange Sky
Honorable Mention – Green Marinee

Most Creative Design

Head (in a very close race)

Random Draw Prize Winners

Almodovar wins Web Standards Solutions
Greenwood wins The Zen of CSS Design

Pixel Perfect Design Prize Winner

Modifying WordPress 1.5 Themes – a guide to good manners

Emily from How to Blog — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 18:13:56 +0000

Root wrote a very excellent article entitled “WordPress – themes made simple” that is dripping in enough well written sarcasm to get a good chuckle out of you while at the same time making a very valid point that I think needs reiterating. It’s a reminder about a little thing called common courtesy.

If you’ve downloaded a theme that someone else has spent an awful lot of time making, and you implement it on your site, it’d be nice if you (at least somewhere on your blog) gave a nod to the theme author.

But more importantly, if you make modifications to that theme, and especially if you then make your ‘new’ theme available for download for use by others, please, for the love of god,

Give it a new name so it isn’t confused with the original author’s theme
GIVE CREDIT TO THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR AS IS RIGHTFULLY DUE, even if you just leave it in the comments or the readme. Just because someone was generous enough to make their template freely available to the WP community to download and modify as they see fit, it’s just rude to do so and not in any place indicate that your theme is “based on SuchAndSuch theme”

You can feel Root’s frustration in his post – and rightfully so. Everyone remember the golden rule? You know – do unto others? I feel like Emily Post here, but a little ettiquette in theme use and distribution is certainly warranted.

WordPress 1.5 Header Replacement options for default Kubrick theme

Emily from How to Blog — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 01:29:16 +0000

Digital Westex Image Gallery has 60 different header art replacements that you can use instead of the one included in the default Kubrick Theme for WordPress 1.5 to more personalize your blog.

Alex King’s WordPress 1.5 Theme competition and lots of WordPress templates

Emily from How to Blog — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 17:49:48 +0000

Well I finally installed WordPress 1.5 and am pleased to report that it is just as much of a piece of cake to install as previous versions were. The new dashboard is more pleasing, and the concept of Themes (more elaborate than templates) has been introduced.

This is a great change, but one might worry that there aren’t enough themes available for WordPress 1.5. Well that ain’t the case – and the list of existing themes keeps growing, much thanks to Alex King’s blog hosting a WordPress 1.5 Theme Competition.

There are various different prizes being offered from different organizations, each with its own criteria. For example, one random lucky person will win a $150 Prize just for submitting a theme to the competition and also checking it in to the themes repository at wp-themes.org. There’s a $25 amazon gift certificate for ‘the best theme that looks like a real paper diary’, a $40 starbucks giftcard for the WordPress theme with the ‘most versatile design’, $55 to the best overall design, etc.

Alex’s site uses the theme switcher so you can easily switch from one theme to the next and experience how they’d look on your blog. All themes submitted to the competition are available for download and use by WordPress 1.5 bloggers.

While I haven’t gone through all of the themes yet, some are rather basic, others quite elegant. So far my favorites include Devenir En Gris (which sports a three column layout) and Gespaa Theme Two Columns.

When I last checked, there were 80+ WordPress 1.5 templates to choose from. Nice. Thanks Alex!

update: I’ve compiled a comprehensive list of over 130+ WordPress 1.5 themes that I found by hunting around the blogosphere, so if you’re looking for a new theme for your wordpress 1.5 site, be sure to check out that post, which I’ll be updating as new themes become available.