WordPress Theme Viewer — Still Crippled
It’s been 5 months since WordPress decided to close access to theme designers uploading and updating their themes on the official WordPress Theme Viewer, and the longer it stays closed, the worse the entire situation gets for WordPress Theme users and designers.
Every once in a while, I check out the sites that use my themes, both the ones I’ve released here, and the ones I did at RockinThemes.com.
I recently updated one of my most popular themes, RockinBizRed and I released it here at NathanRice.net. I then updated all the links at RockinThemes to reflect this new version.
However, to this day, I continue to see new incoming links from the older version, the buggy version, from RockinBizRed on the WordPress Theme Viewer, the official site for WordPress Themes, a site which continues to be closed to WordPress Theme authors and designers for updating their designs.
Talking WordPress: Not Bad At All!
As I’ve expressed before, I’m disappointed with the quantity of good podcasts out there that talk about WordPress. Obviously, with only one podcast out there, it’s hard to get good quality content in podcast format on the topic of WordPress.
But I recently discovered a podcast that looks like it has some serious potential to be a hit.
TalkingWordPress.com is host to a great little podcast! I listened to all 3 episodes so far in a single sitting, and I REALLY liked what I heard.
Do You Value a Good Designer?
A few weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to participate in a group chat with Darren Rowse of Problogger.net. I got to watch as bloggers from all over the place asked him questions about blogging and making money online with their blogs.
Although I asked him a few questions, I asked him a question that particularly interested me … did he think it was worth it to pay for his recent redesign???
His answer really made me happy … not just because I’m a WordPress designer, but because I have seen way too many people devalue the work people like me actually do. He raved on Ben, and made it clear that he did not overpay for his design, but he didn’t get a steal either. But overwhelmingly, his redesign was worth the money.
But this is not the case with a small percentage of the potential clients who contact me.
DeepBlue Theme Released!
A while back, Daniel at DailyBlogTips.com approached me about doing a free theme for him. As an avid reader of his blog, and a friend of his own theme designer, I jumped at the opportunity.
I didn’t want to skimp on this theme either. I wanted to make sure it was a good theme, both in form and function.
The theme features …
Make Money, Get Busy, and Forget to Innovate
I just got an email from Brian telling me that he just got listed on Automattic’s WordPress Consultant’s list. Congratulations to him for this, for sure!
But one of the things that disappointed me about this list was the fact that most of these sites, individuals, and companies, despite being on Automattic’s approved list, rarely, if ever truly innovate in the field of WordPress development.
For most of us who started out in the theming business, it was a hobby … something we did in our down time to get some traffic, and offer something back to the community that helped us start our own blogs. Innocent enough.
NewsPixel - A Newspaper WordPress Theme that Rocks!
After eluding to it a couple of days ago, I’m happy to announce the completion of NewsPixel, a premium WordPress theme that we are releasing through RockinThemes.com.
This theme goes beyond what any of my free themes do … this newspaper WordPress theme makes starting a news blog a breeze!
I’ve included a homepage that is more of a portal than a blog, including featured posts, asides, featured video, easy adsense integration, and javascript tabs that display your most popular posts, recent comments, and the most commented posts.
This feature packed theme includes theme options, so you can select the category you would like to go in the “feature” section without touching a line of code! Just go into the theme options page and choose which category you would like to be displayed where, and there you go!
The same goes for adsense … all you have to do is paste your adsense skyscraper code, and you’re on your way to monetizing your blog!
I’m not just hyping it … a lot of work went into this theme, and we’re excited to finally launch it! Head over to the demo site and check out the features.
Finally, one of the best things about this premium theme is the fact that Cory has done some excellent screencast tutorials for setting up the theme. If you’re unsure about how hard it might be to set up the theme on your site, take a look at the instructional videos and see how fast and easy you can be up and running with your new blog. Once you purchase this theme, you can be set up and running within 10 minutes.
The theme is being introduced at $97, and you can get your copy today by heading over to the purchase page of NewsPixel.
Enjoy!!!
Premium WordPress Themes?
If you are looking for a good PREMIUM WordPress theme, why not check out my newest project, Proximity News Theme. Check out all the cool features. It won’t disappoint!
Although there has been quite a bit of “hoopla” over the recent announcement from Matt Mullenweg indicating that we could see a premium theme marketplace for WordPress.com users in the near future, I’m going to save the commentary on that front for another day.
Today, I want to focus on the now … the immediate … the present. What’s hot right now seems to be the business of selling “premium WordPress themes” for a small fee (usually around $60-$100 USD). This is a lucrative business because it opens the possibility of making many times what you could have made doing a single custom theme, for about the same amount of work.
ElegantBlue 1.1: Bug Fixes
Hey Guys! After a little research and some elbow grease, I figured out how to fix the trackback and comment number bug. Click Here to download ElegantBlue 1.1 or Click Here to download the ElegantBlue upgrade package, then just upload the files in the package to your themes/ElegantBlue directory and overwrite the old files.
If you want to update the theme yourself because of the custom mods you have done, here are the steps … Download the upgrade package, but only upload the functions.php file to your server. Then, you’ll need to edit the following files (with line numbers):
- index.php (line 41)
- archive.php (line 40)
- search.php (line 17)
- single.php (line 13)
Replace the following line …
<strong>Posted by <?php the_author_posts_link(); ?></strong> on <?php the_time('F j, Y'); ?> | <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>#comments">Comments (<?php mw_comments('count'); ?>)</a> | <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>#trackbacks">Trackbacks (<?php mw_trackbacks('count'); ?>)</a>
with this line:
<strong>Posted by <?php the_author_posts_link(); ?></strong> on <?php the_time('F j, Y'); ?> | <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>#comments">Comments (<?php comments_only_number('0', '1', '%'); ?>)</a> | <a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>#trackbacks">Trackbacks (<?php echo trackpings('count'); ?>)</a>
And that’s it! Feel free to upgrade yourself, but be forewarned … because you are editing theme source files, you should be very careful. I cannot offer support for any damage you do while editing the source code. I HIGHLY recommend upgrading your theme by either reinstalling version 1.1 or using the upgrade package.
IE Double Margin Bug
OK, I’ve just seen it plague too many designs and WordPress themes to ignore it anymore. I was completely oblivious to it when I started developing themes, and if you look at some of them, you’ll be able to tell it.
It’s … the dreaded IE Double Margin Bug!!!
The Problem
I’ll break it down … basically, on any floated item (for me, that would be the 3 main sections of a site, Content, Left sidebar, Right sidebar), no matter what margin you give the div, IE6 (maybe 7?) doubles that number. So if you have a left sidebar, floated left, along with a middle content section, also floated left, and finally a right sidebar, again … floated left, and you give them each a left and right margin of 10 pixels, IE will make it 20 pixels instead.
This comes as a HUGE problem when you have a fixed width layout, because too much margin on your floated columns will break your layout, causing a sidebar to fall down below the other columns.
A Solution
PageRank, Technorati, and Free WordPress Themes
OK, first of all I want to preface this by saying that I have never, and will never try to game any ranking system. OOO — take that back, I did include sponsored links in some of my first free WordPress themes, but other than that, I’ve never tried to game a ranking engine. AND, I would never recommend you doing so either.
However, one of the very fortunate side effects of releasing free WordPress themes is that you get a killer amount of backlinks for your trouble.
And to be honest, I don’t really mind recognizing, and leveraging that fact to my benefit.
Always include two links in the footer
That’s right, as of right now, there is no blowback for including a link to the support page of the theme, along with your name as the author. This means
