Articles under Tag : Tech
24 Stunning Free Drupal Themes!
One of the knocks on Drupal has been it’s lack of high quality theme contributions. This was also an assumption on my part. I want to apologize for assuming that this is the case. Drupal actually has some fantastic free contributed themes. And although there may not be as many as it’s counterpart Wordpress, you do have some fantastic options with Drupal.
Below I have compiled a list of the 24 most stunning free Drupal themes in the community to-date. These are the best of the best and you won’t find better ones anywhere. Not yet anyways. But with Drupal’s bright future not so distant, there is sure to be more added to this list in the coming months.
1. Ebizon Redfire
Compatible with Drupal 5 & 6
Ebizon RedFire is a strict xHTML validated, standards compliant CSS based drupal template with mission statement, breadcrumbs, custom footer. It is a fixed width with beautiful red, black on white background color theme.
2. Sky
Compatible with Drupal 6
This is a center aligned, CSS-based (no tables), multi-column layout theme, with some configurable color options, and support for many core configurations and some popular contributed modules.
Everything you need to know about WordPress 2.9’s post image feature
In this tutorial, I’ll be covering the various things you can do with the post image feature. Some things will be specific to end users while others will be useful for theme and plugin developers.
One important thing to note is that this new feature is an image-based representation of a post. The image itself is directly tied to your post. You shouldn’t think of it as something different than that.
How does an end user make use of this feature?
First, your theme must add support for it. Otherwise, you won’t be able to use it. At this point, let’s assume that your theme does support it. I’ll go over instructions for theme authors later.
To use this feature, you must be within the post editing screen of your WordPress admin. On this screen, you’ll see a new meta box labeled “Post thumbnail” (or “Page thumbnail” for pages). There’ll be a link to “Set thumbnail,” which will allow you to use the media uploader to load a new image.
It’s not just for thumbnails
Even though it is called “post thumbnails,” we can technically use the feature for all sorts of things (e.g., feature images, medium-sized images for the front page, etc.).
By default, WordPress gives you several image sizes each time you upload an image. These image sizes are:
- Thumbnail
- Medium
- Large
- Full (the image you uploaded)
Some plugins even extend this by allowing more intermediate sizes. The important thing is that you understand that more than thumbnails can be used here. Read the rest of this entry »
10 new WordPress plugins you might want to test
The wonderful community of WordPress developers constantly provides us with interesting new themes and plugins. I have scanned the most recent WordPress plugin releases and came up with a list of 10 plugins definitely worth taking a look at.
Keep in might that these are new releases and so, their stability and status should be considered as BETA. You might want to test them on a backup server before going live. The descriptions listed here are those submitted by the plugins’ authors and do not necessarily express my views. Read the rest of this entry »
A Look Into the WordPress Themes’ Options Pages
For a long while the option panels where something that people could only find in premium (commercial) themes, and for a good reason. The pricing of their licenses allowed the premium theme developers to invest more time in giving theme users the ways to do through these panels what they could not do through coding.
With the buzz created around these themes, regular users became aware of what could really be achieved, and thus, those that could not afford the license of a premium theme, became more selective with the free ones. A good-looking theme was not enough anymore, and WordPress developers realized it.
A good premium theme would bring its developer not only a good amount of money, but also recognition in the community, and this is where the free theme developers scored their biggest points. Now that their “turf” was endangered they had to react, and they did. For premium themes like Thesis or WP Unlimited, users have now alternatives like Thematic, Hybrid, Carrington, WP Framework or my own (even if not a framework) Simple Balance.
Why should free theme developers consider adding an options page?
jQuery 1.4 Released: The 15 New Features you Must Know
jQuery 1.4 was recently released. This wasn’t simply a maintenance release as some had speculated; there are many new features, enhancements and performance improvements included in 1.4! This post covers the new features and enhancements that you may find beneficial.
You can download jQuery 1.4 right now, here: http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.4.js
10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.9 | Technosailor.com
Gentlemen, start your engines! WordPress 2.9 is just around the corner. Unlike WordPress 2.8, which Mark Jaquith describes as the Snow Leopard of WordPress since most of the basis of the WordPress 2.8 upgrade was complete rewrites and optimization of the infrastructure that ran WordPress instead of providing lots of new features in the same way Apple’s new OS X release is a focus on improved performance instead of features, WordPress 2.9 brings major new “bling” to the table. As a reminder of WordPress 2.8, you can see the writeup that Jonathan Dingman brought us last time around.
By and large, this release is a plugin developers release with lots of new APIs and abstraction. However, there are significant additions for theme designers and users as well. As a result, unlike previous iterations of this article (I do one for every major WordPress release), I’m going to break this down into sections for each kind of feature.
Themes: the_post_thumbnail()
Theme developers have a new piece of functionality that have become extremely popular in themes these days. As blogs have evolved from journal form into entities that can be very magazine-like, the use of thumbnail images has also grown. Typically, this layout is achieved through the use of custom fields that must be manually created and populated. No more!
As of WordPress 2.9, if you use the built in image uploader, then WordPress handle this for you. Theme designers that wish to support this feature can add the template tag the_post_image() to their themes to achieve proper placement as required by the theme layout. The template tag can optionally take a “size”, which is one of the WordPress default sizes: thumbnail, medium, large, etc. If none is provided, it defaults to your preset thumbnail size. Read the rest of this entry »
30+ Plugins for Wordpress Comments
When working on a WordPress (
) blog, posts often take center stage. However, the comments are often just as important – they create valuable discussion. And yet the default WordPress comment box is simplistic and uninspiring – here are Mashable’s (
) favorite comment-focused WordPress plugins that can eliminate spam, improve the appearance of comments, and add more value to your posts.
Fight Spam
Akismet – Antispam plugin from the creators of Wordpress that uses a central database of spam comments to flag spam. Requires a free API key from Wordpress.com (
)
Spam Karma – Analyzes comments for spam based on a karma system.
Bad Behavior – Prevents spambots from even accessing your site by analyzing their HTTP requests.
Did You Pass Math? – Asks commenters a simple math question before their comments are posted.
Comment Timeout – Closes comments on old posts. Read the rest of this entry »