My second theme release for WordPress called Theme Starter. You can find my first theme here.
This theme is 3.0 compatible. This theme is meant to be a single theme starter for those that need a starting place without trying to take apart a more complex theme. It uses the 3.0 navigation, and includes the post thumbnails (option).
add the_post_thumbnail(); to uses the post thumbnail feature.
Here is a screenshot:
Here is a Live Demo
And you can find the download here: Theme Starter
WordPress has 9,992 plugins (at the time of this post) available on their Plugin Directory. I use an average amount of plugins for my client sites and personal sites, usually it varies per site. Part of my daily routine is to check out the 1000′s of new feeds that are related to my design and development. Half of them are WordPress related and over time I have download, tested, tweaked, and recommended 100′s of plugins. A friend on twitter @joshhemsley mentioned that I should do a post about my findings of WordPress plugins. Take a look and if you have any to add to the list leave a comment. So, here it goes…
by Amphibian
GigPress is a powerful WordPress plugin designed for musicians and other performers. Manage all of your upcoming and past performances right from within the WordPress admin, and display them on your site using simple shortcodes, PHP template tags, or the GigPress widget on your WordPress-powered website.
by Rocket Genius
WordPress form Management plugin
Conditional Form Fields
Enhanced Post Custom Fields
Dynamic Field Population
Post Category Field & Image Field
Easily Pass Data To Confirmation Page
Visually Create Forms with Our Sleek Editor
by Alison Barret
SimpleMap is a powerful and easy-to-use international store locator plugin. It has an intuitive interface and is completely customizable. Its search features make it easy for your users to find your locations quickly.
by Alex King
This plugin integrates your WordPress blog with your Twitter account allowing you to send new blog posts to Twitter as a tweet and and vice versa. Cross-promotion of a blog posts to Twitter is fairly common and can be automatically achieved with Twitter Tools. You can also create digests that consolidate all of your tweets. Also, the plugin is entirely pluggable and can be extended just like WordPress itself.
by Alex King
MailChimp’s Analytics360 plugin allows you to pull Google Analytics and MailChimp data directly into your dashboard, so you can access robust analytics tools without leaving WordPress. Using the Google Analytics API and the MailChimp API, you’re treated to the elegant user experience you expect from both platforms. Instantly connect the dots (literally) between posts, email campaigns, and your site’s traffic.
by Sociable
Automatically add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites!
Gary Keorkunian
The Social Media Marketing Plugin that lets you put social bookmarking links in your posts and other pages. Help your readers promote your blog!
by Upthemes
With Facebook’s recent release of the new Open Graph, you can now update your fans on Facebook when something on a page they’ve liked has changed! WP Facebook puts your posts, pages, and other types of content on Facebooks Open Graph where they belong!
by Simon Wheatley
This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus).
by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan
Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.
by John Blackbourn
Completely disables the plugin update checking system in WordPress. The plugin prevents WordPress from checking for updates, and prevents any notifications from being displayed on the Plugins page. Ideal for administrators of multiple WordPress installations.
by Nathan Rice
The WP-Cycle plugin allows you to upload images from your computer, which will then be used to generate a jQuery Cycle Plugin slideshow of the images.
Each image can also be given a URL which, when the image is active in the slideshow, will be used as an anchor wrapper around the image, turning the image into a link to the URL you specified. The slideshow is set to pause when the user hovers over the slideshow images, giving them ample time to click the link. Images can also be deleted via the plugins Administration page.
by Vinicius Massuchetto, Krizalis, Bojan Josifoski
This plugins is nothing else than a front-end to the nice S3Slider jQuery plugin that lets you:
Upload and crop images;
Set the size, order and timout of the slider;
Edit a text to be shown on each image;
by Anna-marie Redpath
This simple ‘utility’ plugin allows one to have any widget used in a page shortcode in any theme – no need to use the hybrid theme or create a special template.
Stefan Heb
The plugin is made for easily embedding videos into a blog post. The videos can be integrated from external portals (like YouTube, Google Video and many many others) or they can be uploaded to the web server or a remote server and integrated as well. Additionally a corresponding link to the video on the particular video portal page or a download link to the local file can be generated automatically, if demanded.
by Backend Labs, Inc.
Have you tried all the other testimonial plugins for WordPress? Do they all suck? With our plugin you can easily manage the testimonials for your website. We allow you to configure the testimonial prefix, suffix, and even the number of testimonials displayed on your WordPress site.
You can feature, sort, and set the status (Hidden, Pending, Public) of testimonials. We even allow you to have a form so your users can submit testimonials right on your website. Best of all, they are marked pending and require your approval before they go public!
David Artiss
This is a very useful sidebar addition, as it can be used to display all sorts of useful information in a list format – news updates, site updates, software updates, etc. All you need is the URL of the RSS feed.
by Ben Millett
A non-JavaScript badge generator for videos in one’s vimeo account. This behaves similarly to the flickrrss plugin. Although the name of the plugin is VimeoRSS, it uses the xml feed provided by the simple API of vimeo. You can call this plugin multiple times for different users and feed types. This plugin can be used for groups, channels, and albums.
by Aaron Harun
AJAXed WordPress (aWP) is an extremely powerful plugin that harnesses the power of AJAX and WordPress to improve the user experience, the administration capabilities and the design potential of any WordPress based blog.
by Brahim Machkouri
Assigns icons to categories
by Dave Rupert
Uses the signature Dribbble shot CSS.
Specify the number of shots (up to 10).
You can enable/disable drop shadow.
by Dan Zappone
Lightbox Plus implements ColorBox as a lightbox image overlay tool for WordPress. ColorBox was created by Jack Moore and is licensed under the MIT License. Lightbox Plus permits users to view larger versions of images without having to leave the current page, and is also able to display simple slide shows.
Updated:
by blog.2i2j.com
This Plugin is an enhancement for WordPress’s comment function. It enables users to reply on a exist comment, and the discussion will be displayed threaded or nested.
Some other links for plugins and plugin development.
http://speckyboy.com/2009/10/09/essential-wordpress-plugin-development-resources-tutorials-and-guides/
http://wp-plugins.net/beta/
http://weblogtoolscollection.com/narchives/
http://wphacks.com/wordpress-plugins/
Because of CSSEdit’s unique focus on style sheets, it offers a wide range of features for any level of expertise. Starting out? Selector Builder and advanced visual editors will gradually help you understand CSS instead of dumbing you down.
For anyone well-versed in CSS, the Live Preview and intelligent source environment are invaluable tools to get your website or application styled in a fraction of the time it took before. Add powerful X-Ray web page inspection, and you’ve got an unbeatable CSS debugging suite.
CSSEdit offers unrivaled real-time styling of absolutely any web page. Even when your dynamic Web App is powered by a complex database or makes use of advanced AJAX, you can style and analyze it without the hassle of uploading or refreshing.
Design beautiful, innovative and fast-loading web sites… with a beautiful, innovative and fast app. CSSEdit‘s intuitive approach to style sheets and powerful previewing features will make you deliver awesome standards-based sites in no time!
I recently had a chance to submit my web design portfolio to a very well known and well designed magazine called Web Designer Magazine. A couple a months ago I recieved an email from them saying I got accepted. I was thrilled and super excited. My article is in May magazine, Issue 170. Here is a screenshot from my iPad.
I was recently working on my logo for Brisk Studios and I was having trouble and was tired of my current “brand”.
I wanted something fresh and bold. Something that would be to spread across all the branding types of media like business cards, website, letterheads, etc..
With today’s designers and the charity of their works and projects, I came across a site: tenbytwenty
He had posted a free font that I really like called “Nevis”
I definitely like sans-serif fonts and bold typefaces. I wanted the logo to have the letters B and S, but I wanted to add a little flare to it. Which gave me an idea to incorporate in my design. Lightning!
Lightning has some great qualities like: powerful, quick, energy, and light. The Definition of my last name Brisk is active, fast, energetic. So I thought to myself what a great connection.
Here are the sketches from the starting process:
I finally came up with something I felt fit me.
I was really happy with the final outcome, I was able to use that logo to make new business cards, new website design, and a new outlook on my business.
My new business cards:
My new website:
Conclusion: Thank you design community for the inspiration, free fonts, and encouragement. I hope this post will inspire someone else to use the high quality resources that are around and feel good about creating a brand for themselves.
I’m happy to announce today for download the release of my first custom WordPress theme called Squared 2! It still has some little minor things including no support for IE, but I’ll let the the wordpress dev’s take care of changing that.
You can see a live demo here.
So without further ado your download link:
Any questions or support needed feel free to leave it in the comments section. Thanks.
UPDATE: In the next version 1.1 I will be including a help text and fixes.
Custom Photography Blogs is going live on Aug. 31st and I can’t wait to proudly announce it on Monday. CPB is started by Jane Johnson who is a creative and passionate photographer who knows that every photographer wants their own person blog that they can express their photos and creativity. Just like she does.
I’m the other half of the project, I build what she designs, see my other post on the process we go through to build these custom blogs. We use WordPress for all of the photography blogs. We want people to be able to afford a custom blog so that’s where we come in, we design custom photographer blogs each with their own personality at a price that they don’t have to break the bank.
Preview of the home page:
Jane is a great person, has a passion for perfection and knows what she wants. She has made me a better designer and coder because of that. If you’re interested in a custom blog please check out Custom Photography Blogs.
You can also follow Jane on twitter.
If you frequently listen to music, surf the web, get your email, or chat with friends, you may want your computer to open those applications every time you start up. On a Mac, it’s simple to do. Select System Preferences from the Apple menu, then:
The next time you start up your Mac, iTunes will start up, too. In addition to opening applications at Start Up, you can have Mac OS X open documents and Network drives.
Part of my passion for design is being challenged and pushed beyond my current abilities, whether it’s in design, coding, or typography. I think we’re at our best when we’re inspired by a challenge or stretching. There are several influences in my life to that effect. One is a very talented designer and photographer, her name is Jane Johnson from Jane Johnson Photography here in Central Oregon. First, she is an amazing photographer, you can see her work here. Second, she has an amazing talent for designing personal, outside of the box, and unique custom WordPress blogs. The challenge to me was to take her photoshop mockups and make it a WordPress blog. This is pretty much a PSD to WordPress process, but because of her very custom ideas for the blog it becomes a challenge. Now through this process I’ve really advanced my knowledge in several areas like PHP, CSS, and JS. So, despite being challenging it has really helped me to grow as a designer and coder. I always look forward to the next project that we do because of the end result. You can view some of the work here: http://www.customphotographyblogs.com
Another influences for me is the design community as a whole. Each day I wake and check my twitters and RSS feeds, and each day there’s something the really grabs my attention or I just find amazing. I always find myself looking and wishing I could do those things. Well, thanks to the design community I can. People are willing to share there projects and knowledge and for that I am very thankful.
My question for you is, are you being pushed? Are you ready for a challenge? or are you just stuck in the same old ways and never growing or developing a passion for your career.
Who or what pushes you?
Picture this: Your driving along the coast on a warm summer’s evening, windows down, and fresh air blowing on your face. You turn a corner and the most beautiful golden sunset hits your eyes. What do you do? You stop to fill your mind and breath in the visually magnificent once in lifetime sunset. Next, you browse to your favorite site or artist on a warm summer’s evening, favorite song playing, and fresh brewed coffee smell hitting your face. You click on the front page and there’s a new post with a drawing of an amazing golden summer sunset that they did that captured the same beauty.
The reason I had you picture those two different but alike scenarios is to ask, What is the better inspiration?
My answer is both, we can’t really have one without the other. Sure we can look at other people’s work, but they had to get their work from somewhere too.
I live and breath the ever growing web design world, any design really. I find inspiration in all areas: internet, TV, nature, clothes, people, and typography. The list could keep going forever. I really find inspiration in other people’s work. It amazes me the creative, unique, mind blowing, and inspiring artists we have in the web and design world. Some of my favorite artists and designers include:
James White, Chris Wallace, Aaron Irizarry, Kyle Steed, Josh Cagwin, Adelle Charles, David Leggett and the list goes on. They each have their own personal and different ways of creativness, whether it’s simplicity, creativity, aesthetics, or shear talent. They all have one thing in common and that is community. They’re both willing and want to share their work or passions with other people. I usually find they go above and beyond to encourage and motivate other people. Their passion is to see other people share their passion.
So, share some of your favorite places, sites, designs, or artist that inspires you.
I’ll leave you with some of my own inspiration:
and my favorite design quote by the Fuel Brand Team -
“GET INSPIRED“
Week 2 of my favorite links from around the web. Be sure to check them out.
1. Patternhead
2. 110+ Awesome Resources for Popular Adobe Products | Spoonfed Design
3. 101 High Quality CSS And XHTML Free Templates And Layouts: Part 1 | 1stwebdesigner
4. 65+ Hand-picked Free Fonts for Serious Designs | Fonts | Design
5. 50+ Freebies Every Web Designer/Developer should have | Desizn Tech
6. WordPress Logos and Graphics
7. 37 Ways to Design the Comments Form | Blog design Blog for Blog Designers
8. 15 mac apps web designers should have in their dock – Lee Munroe
9. Most Wanted Ajax Techniques: 50+ Examples and Tutorials | Noupe
Week 2 of my favorite links from around the web. Be sure to check them out.
1. jQuery Plugin: Scroll to Top
2. 10 Tips for Working With Clients Remotely: Part 1
3. Diving into PHP by Nettuts
4. WP sIFR wordpress plugin for custom fonts
5. 100 Free Useful Applications for Mac, Part I
6. Using Adobe Kuler to Enhance Your Photoshop Color Workflow
7. Download “Imprezz”, A Free WordPress Theme
8. 100 Beautiful Free Textures
9. LiteIcon – Free Icon changer for Mac
10. 28 Adobe AIR Apps for Designers and Developers – Need Some AIR?
Week 1 of my favorite links from around the web. Be sure to check them out.
1. The Ultimate Collection Of Photoshop Custom Shapes | Smashing Magazine
2. The Simple DVD Ripper for Macs | Ripit
3. Dynamic Content Gallery V2 | Studiograsshopper
4. Freebie – Grunge Corners and Edges Photoshop Brush Pack | Arbenting
5. Slickr Gallery (AJAX Flickr plugin for WordPress) | stimuli.ca
6. Free Font – FF MT | Creattica Daily
7. Customizable, User-Submitted, Helpful Web Design and Web Development Resources | CorkDump
8. 60 Impressive Free High Resolution Textures and Backgrounds | Photoshoproadmap
9. How to Setup a Dedicated Web Server for Free | NETTUTS
10. Free CSS Drop-Down Menu Framework | LWIS.NET
1. Burnt Negatives Brushes
2. Stars
3. Unreal Brushes
4. Border & Corner Brushes
5. Grunge Brush
6. Phobia Brushes
7. Border-Corner-Frame
8. Grungey Lines
9. Grunge Stroke Brushes
10. Halftone brushes
11. Halftone 2 brushes
12. Risingsun Brushes
13. 9 Grunge Brushes
14. Vector Line Brushes
15. PS Splatter Brushes
16. Decorative brushes
17. Scan Line Brushes
18. Equalizer Brushes
19. Floral Brushes
20. Flowers First
21. Vine Love Brushes
22. Green Ornaments Brush Pack
23. Horizontal Dividers
24. Dirty Spray
25. Bloody Splattz
26. Splatter 3
27. Splatter Brush 2
28. Galaxy Set
29. Particles and Stars
30. Flash Stars
31. Floral swirls
32. Swirls and Flourishes II
33. Painted Swirls
34. Lithium Brushes
35. Fly Brushes
36. Vector Brushes 1.0
37. Vector Brushes 2.0
38. Retro Dynamic Brushes
39. Vector Circles
1. Shape Brush
2. Grungy Vector Brushes
3. Wisps
4. Splatter
5. Birds
6. Leaves and Foliage Brushes
7. 10 Retro brushes
8. Paisley Brush
9. Floral Stroke
10. Glow Brushes Part I
11. Crack Brushes I
12. Circle Brushes
13. Grunge Brushes
14. Swirls and Flowers
15. Trees
16. Press clipping
17. Splatters Brush Set
18. Ultimate Brush Pack No.3
19. Rock & Roll
20. Jakandara
21. Grunge and Splatter
22. High Res Splatter Brushes
23. Godspeed Brushes
24. Flowersn’ ornaments
25. Paint Splatter
26. Scratch Splat Grunge
27. Floral Brushes
28. Swirls and Seeds
29. Flowers
30. Grunge Brushes 007
31. Dot Round
32. Massive Splatter
33. Go Media Spills & Splatters
34. Mimi Brushes
35. Photoshop Plant
36. Tattoo Borders
37. MF Splatter Brush Pack
38. High-Res Leaves
39. Barbarja Trees
40. Floral Brushes II
41. Splatters
42. Hi-Res Watercolor PNG’s
43. Floral Swirl
44. Lines and Circles V3
45. Hands
50. Appendix Big Boxes
51. Fantasy Cloud
52. Splatters 05
53. Paint 7
54. 2Bit Twilight
55. 50 Grunge Brushes
56. Swirly ornaments
57. Coffee Stains
58. Paint Drips/Splats
59. Botched Ornaments 01
60. Floral
61. Vector Curves
62. Large Deco Brushes
63. Grass Brushes
64. Floral Ornaments
65. Big Star Fields
66. Ka05′s Splatter Brush
1. Rabies Star Brushset
2. Foliage Swirls
3. Flames Fire
4. Japanese Stencil
5. Floral Deco Brushes 2
6. Typographic Grunge Brushes
7. Twirl Border Brushes
8. GRAFFITI TAGS
9. Abstract-Lighting
10. Rain and Stars
11. Tribal Brushes
12. Vector Flower Brushes
13. Swirls – Flourishes II
14. Vectorpack
15. Planets II
16. Ornament Brushes 2
17. Swirls And Flowers Brushes
18. Ornament Brushes 1
19. HighTech Circles 2
20. Circle Flower Brushes
21. Light Rays
22. Japanese Brush
23. DVD Resource Brushes
24. Geometrees
25. Gaby’s Paint Strokes
26. Intricate
27. Swirly Scribbles
28. Ornaments
29. Heraldry
30. Swirly
31. Swirls And Grungey
1. Grungy Watercolor
2. Acrylic
3. Grungy Wings
4. Messy Spraypaint
5. Grungy Texture
6. Splatter
1. 74 grungy Photoshop
2. 20 Paint Splatters
3. Dirty Spray
4. Paper Brushes
5. Jenn B’s Fancy Border
6. JennB’s Starlight Brushes
7. Obscuro Border Brushes
8. Janne’s Fireworks
9. Adam Woodhous Grunge 1
10. Adam Woodhous Grunge 2
Smashing Magazine:
1. 100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes
2. 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design
3. 35 (Really) Incredible Free Icon Sets
4. 50 Photoshop Tutorials For Sky and Space Effects
5. Grunge Style In Modern Web Design
Tutorial9:
2. 250 Hi Res Splatter, Spray, & Watercolor Photoshop Brushes
3. 99 Free Canvas, Paper, Paint, and Metal Textures
4. Mysterious Lighting Effect Tutorial for Photoshop
5. Enhance Graphics with Easy Depth of Field
Noupe:
1. 53 Killer Photoshop Illustrator Effects and Tutorials
2. 37+ Great Ajax, CSS Tab-Based Interfaces
3. 50+ Amazing Jquery Examples- Part1
4. Adobe Photoshop: 50+ High Quality .PSD Files and Tutorials
5. High Quality Photoshop Brushes, Resources and Tutorials
Nettuts:
1. Create Your Own Simple Reset.css File
2. Create a Slick Tabbed Content Area using CSS & jQuery
3. How to Load In and Animate Content with jQuery
4. Unraveling the Secrets of WordPress’ Comments.php File
5. From PSD to HTML, Building a Set of Website Designs Step by Step
Abduzeedo:
1. Wallpapers
2. HDR: Not Only The ‘Magic’ Effect
3. Super Cool Frilly Bits Typography
Links to the Wallpaper sites: