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…

Event Calendar

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.

Gravity Forms

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

SimpleMap Store Locator

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.

Twitter Tools

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.

Analytics360

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.

Sociable

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!

Bookmarkify

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!

WP Facebook Plugin

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!

Exclude Pages

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).

WP-DBManager

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.

Disable WordPress Plugin Updates

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.

WP-Cycle

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.

S3Silder

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;

AmR shortcode any widget

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.

Embedded Video

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.

Collision Testimonials

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!

Simple Feed List

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.

VimeoRSS

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.

AJAXed WordPress

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.

Category Icons

by Brahim Machkouri

Assigns icons to categories

Dribbble Plugin

by Dave Rupert

Uses the signature Dribbble shot CSS.
Specify the number of shots (up to 10).
You can enable/disable drop shadow.

Lightbox Plus

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:

WordPress Thread Comments

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/

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 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.

You can see a live demo here.

So without further ado your download link:

Download Squared-2

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.

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.

1. Click Accounts (in the System row of the System Preferences window).
2. Click the Login Items tab.
3. Click the Add (+) button.
4. Scroll down and click Applications
5. Select the app you want to start up and click the Add button.

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.

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?

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“