Weblog Tools Collection

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My primary responsibility out here at Weblog Tools Collection is to keep a close eye on WordPress plugin and theme releases.

One of the places I check regularly for theme releases is the WordPress Theme Viewer. I also keep track of updates via Google Alerts and more importantly our News section.

I’ve lost track of the number of themes that I have downloaded, read about and previewed.

While doing this, I have observed several different methods of promotion and distribution of themes by their authors; some highly effective and some so bad that I have had no option but to ignore the release.

This WordPress Codex page has an indepth explanation on starting off with themes for public release to promoting them and is a recommended read.

In this post I hope to address a few points that every theme author should consider when releasing a public theme.

The Theme Page

What use is a theme if nobody knows where to get it from? One of the most important elements in marketing your theme is a static page devoted to it.

I’ve seen a lot of theme authors have a single page which will list all their themes. It’s good if you have a single, but what if you release two, or maybe five or maybe fifty?

Do you want your visitor to download your theme quickly or search through the list to find it?

One practice I follow is to make a seperate page for each theme and plugin I create.

Contents of a Theme page

The theme page could contain the following:

1. Short description of the theme
2. Features
3. Screenshot or a Link to a live preview (I prefer the latter)
4. Download Link
5. Changelog
6. Known Bugs
7. Things you can do with the theme. This should preferably be a list of links to different posts that explain in detail
8. Support Information. Make sure you specify how a theme user should contact you if you are offering support. If you are not, make this clear.

How a theme page helps

For one, it provides a quick and easy way for people to link to your theme, find the theme etc.
It also works well with search engines as it normally becomes the top result if someone is searching for your theme.

Additionally, the page is timeless, unlike posts, especially if you have a permalink structure with the date in it.

Individual Posts

As I mentioned above, the theme should be on a static page. However, you should use individual posts to market the theme.

Posts should be used for theme releases and updates. It should also be used to highlight things you can do with the theme, e.g. if your theme has a custom header image support, then a post explaining how to change the header will be in order.

Posts also appear in your feeds by default and if someone is subscribed, he/she will be able to keep track of your development.

Effectively using the WordPress Theme Viewer

The Theme Viewer should be the first place where you should be getting your theme listed. It’s one place many people, including us at WLTC, track new themes.

However, this should not be your only place. The theme page belongs to your blog, not to some other site.

Another point I noticed with the theme viewer is that though you get a link back to your site, you don’t have a link to your theme page. However, they do allow you HTML in the post.

When writing a description, include the name of your theme and link that to the theme page you created. Also, a good detailed description with features works well, especially for those reading via RSS where categories are not visible.

Make the contents of your theme clear

I’ve recently been reading about the controversy surrounding sponsored links in a theme. While some authors are for this, others are against.
Hence, if you are including paid links into the footer, make it clear to those who are downloading that these are present. Also make it clear if you need them to be there, because if you have an open license, the user is free to modify your theme and remove these links.

While you don’t have to account for each and every file in your theme folder, it helps if you have an explanation for a few critical ones. e.g. if you have an Archives template, let your visitor know.

Summary

To sum up:

• Create a page for your theme
• Use individual posts for theme updates and other information related to your theme
• Use the Theme Viewer effectively
• Make the contents of your theme clear

Do you have any other tips that you would like to share?
If you are a theme author, what have you done to effectively spread the word about your theme. Have you posted your theme in our News forum?

Evanescence is a neat looking theme with two column fluid width layout and a widget ready right hand sidebar.

Black-N-White is two column, widget ready theme.

cgreen are two column, widget ready themes Headsetoptions and MandarinMusing.

Wood is a two column, widget ready theme with a wood background.

RockinBiz is a clean and sleek theme designed for business blogs and websites.

Top Level Categories allows you to remove the prefix before the URL to your category pages.

Cardioblog it is a simple plugin for wordpress who shows in a graph of bars the whole of post writings in the month in course.

import_wordpress allows you to import posts and linked files from a WordPress site to another WordPress site.

babel allows you to write your blog in multilanguage, and switch between these with a simple click on a flag.

HeadSpace2 allows you to add meta-data to your posts, pages, search results, archives, and categories. Meta data is added via a GUI, or can be automatically extracted from post content. Also allows modification to page titles, blog name, and per-post themes.

Cimy User Extra Fields lets administrators add extra user fields for additional user details.

MTW Word Count Counts words in a post, making it possible to display that word count on a page (along with date, author, category, etc.).

Build more Wordpress blogs. I tend to shy away from “me too” posts but I have to agree with this one. The more you Dive Into Wordpress, the better you get at it.

Inspired by Zeo who was in turn inspired by Warpspire.

Internet-Sharing is a two column theme with widget support, custom classes and admin configuration based on a template by Solucija.

Themey has released Apples and Reflection.

RockinBlueGreen is a simple, 2-column (right sidebar) theme with rounded corners and a nice blue and green color scheme.

TechmaniaWP is a two column widget ready theme based on a template by StyleShout.

Four Blank Wordpress Themes is a set of four templates which contain the CSS needed to position the header, footer, sidebar and main content area. Ideal of those starting off with a new theme design.

WP-Multiflex-3 is a WordPress theme based on the Multiflex-3 design by Wolfgang featuring widgetised sidebars, a widgetised header and is fully prepared for localisation by editing just 1 file.

Garden is a four column Zen style with fluid width, custom header, background and icons and widget support.

Coincidence is a two column fixed width, widget ready theme.

The Green House is a two column theme based on a template by Free CSS Templates.

dark.cash is a dark and simple theme that utilizes a slight glass effect.

WP Plugin Uploader lets you upload plugins to your blog.

WP-ExternalFeed displays links from del.icio.us, Technorati and Reddit that is relevant to the current category of your blog.

Wordpress Shop creates a fully featured shopping cart that currently allows paypal as a payment provider.

Link Harvest is a WordPress plugin that uses the content in your posts and pages to build a links list for you, based on the sites you actually link to.

SocialList is a Wordpress plugin that adds a page to your admin area allowing you to view details on submissions of your pages to social bookmarking sites.

Hide on Homepage allows you to hide posts on the homepage of your blog.

IM Status powered via onlinestatus.org and supporting most IM services including AOL, MSN, Yahoo!, Jabber, Skype, ICQ and IRC.

Surfer is a two column widget ready theme.

Quicklime is a three columned, widget ready theme with a lime green feel to it.

The Space Theme is a 2 column theme for Wordpress, using dark colours and transparency effects to achieve an effective mysterious space look.

Credit Cards is a two column, widget ready Wordpress theme with a right-hand sidebar.

Grab A Theme has released Fleur and Mawar.

OpenID According to Simon Willison, OpenID is a simple piece of infrastructure on which smart applications can be built and the buzz around OpenID is growing. This idea has been batted around for some time but the consolidation of ideas and a working version of the system really gives it some legitimacy. I still wonder what the uptake rate will be. If you are still wondering what OpenID is and what it can do for you, think of it as a decentralized authentication system much like Microsoft Passport but much less monolithic.

I can still think of various problems (Tim outlines some of those in his post). However, a good use could be in the Wordpress comment moderation system. Since Wordpress allows comments from previously authorized commenters, OpenID could be a way to positively identify a “valid” commenter on your blog forever. Of course, if any centralized whitelist type service is introduced in any form, that system could still be poisoned but that would be a weakness of the whitelist and not the OpenID platform. I also fear that since anyone can set themselves up as an OpenID provider, this could lead to a lot of confusion and possible weaknesses in the system. That is a discussion for another day.

At the heart of the OpenID system is the basic premise that only you have control over what shows up on your specified URI. As an example, if you have an LJ account and are setup with an OpenID for that account, you can specify your OpenID URI to login to any website that support OpenID. Once you specify your OpenID URI, you will be redirected to your site which will either ask you to log in or to authorize the website you are visiting to use your identity. (”no password” is slightly misleading)

There is already a lot of activity with openID in the Wordpress arena. Have you used OpenID yet?

SimpleFlickr allows you to embed a flickr integrated simpleviewer into your Wordpress site.

Flickr Tag Cloud Widget will display a tag cloud of links from your flickr account.

DivShare Uploader allows you to upload files directly from your “Write a Post” page to your DivShare account, and insert them into your post with a single click.

Wordpress Dashboard Editor allows you to add whatever you want to the Dashboard through PHP and HTML even Sidebar Widgets. You may also wipe the entire dashboard or individually remove sections like the Dev news, Planet Wordpress and the getting started section.

In-line Ajax Page (inap) displays the full contents of your posts and comments in-line without reloading the page or navigating away from your home page.

WP-ExternalFeed displays links from del.icio.us and Reddit that is relevant to the current category of your blog.

Google AJAX Search adds AJAX Search to your site.

flashSTAT, based on the Flash module from maani.us, shows your statistic in a nice flash chart.

RockinBlue is a 3 Column is a modern, clean and sleek theme by Cory Miller designed for reading and customization.

BlogCut has released two free WordPress Themes, “Road to Heaven” and “Worn”. Road to Heaven is a clean and clear theme while Worn has an aged look to it.

Vertigo Squared is a modern, 2-column Widget-ready theme by Brian Gardner.

Bare Redux is a simple single column fixed width theme by Matthew Trevino.

cgreen is a two colum widget ready theme by Headsetoptions and MandarinMusing based on design by NodeThirtyThree.

Social Bookmarks Widget allows you to select a number of links to social bookmark sites which are displayed along with icons in the sidebar.

hideAd allows the owner of the blog to embed advertisements but give periodical visitors the possibility to hide these ads.

Thickbox Automator is an edited version of the original ImageWiz. After telling it where your images are located, what size thumbnails you want and a few other minor details, it produces the code which you can paste into any post or page.

LiveContact is an AJAX powered Contact Form plugin for WordPress.

Comment Spam Trap is a simple, yet effective plugin that kills comment spam, including the hated trackback spam.

Search Everything enables the searching of Pages, Comments and more.

Hover is a WordPress plugin replacing keywords with links and an optional popup.

xMark is a fully fluid 3-column, widget ready theme for WordPress providing users with a plug-n-play theme that does not require the need to know the technicalities of coding.

Hong Kong is a Wordpress Theme with widget enabled RH sidebar. Black background & funky neon. psd included for header.

Empowered Red is an adsense ready two column theme with a red color combination.

Logistix is a template by headsetoptions.org and Mandarin Musing based on design by Free CSS Templates.

Sheep Theme is a two column, widget ready theme by Zeebob.

Seasons Flashed is a dark theme based on Kubrick with added AJAX Comments and a Dynamic Flash header by Ekta Paneri

Valentine is a two column theme dedicated to all people fallen in love and to the Valentine’s Day.

16 Adsense Optimized Wordpress templates is a collection of Wordpress theme resources for AdSense optimized themes for Wordpress.

The ShiftThis WordPress Newsletter Plugin allows you to create and manage an web-based newsletter and mailing list within the WordPress environment.

Order Pages will help in re-arranging your page-order easily.

Attachment List lists attachments to a WordPress 2.x post in a list following the text with an icon based on their extension.

Ajax PagePost allows long post to be split across multiple pages and switch the post page without refresh the whole page.

CoolPlayer 9 for WordPress allows you to play multimedia files in your blog.

Cool Weather allows you to add weather forecast with an Ajax effect into your blog.

Blog Juice integrates the information from Blog Juice Calculator and allows you to display it on your blog.

The PhoneGnome Updater automatically updates your PhoneGnome public profile when you create, publish, or edit a post on your WordPress blog.

IP City Cluster Plugin (IPCCP) generates a geographical cluster map based on where from people access you website.

Dean’s FCKEditor replaces the default Wordpress editor with FCKeditor 2.3.2.

Upload+ allows you to change the filename for uploaded files automagically.

Nofollow Case by Case lets you selectively apply rel="nofollow" on comments.

fw-blogroll allows you to display your blogroll categories and links in different ways. It will show a list of categories and will dropdown its links when you click on it.

Citrus Island is a 3 columns, Fixed width, widget ready WordPress template by Headsetoptions.org and Mandarin Musing based on design by Styleshout.

Cleaker is a three column with a blue and green shade.

Green-Kupy is a two column fixed width theme by PinkSEO.

CityScape is a two column widget ready theme with custom header support based on the template by Free CSS Templates.

XiAP has released three themes viz. Tucana, Cepheus and Pyxis.

jd-nebula is a two column widget ready theme by John Doe.

Bluelinerc is a fluid width, 3 column widget ready theme with a soft color scheme by GPS Gazette.

AndrewE has released Pure and Simple, Curiosity, Tarkovsky and Blue Circle.

This week I received a request for a plugin that would allow upload of files from a Wordpress blog without requiring a user login. Ideally the plugin would send an email to the administrator of the blog when a file is uploaded, would allow the user to add some meta to the file being uploaded and the file upload location would be configurable. Some of the functionality already exists in the Secure Files Plugin

There has also been a request for a plugin that enables EXIF functionality in Wordpress, gathers the information from uploaded files, stuffs the EXIF information in meta for the post and then displays them as custom fields or when you hover over the image. Some of this functionality already exists in photo plugins and modifications but a simple and seamless plugin would be nice.

If you would like your need or idea for Wordpress functionality to be pitched here, please Leave us a Message

JD Sky is a two column, fixed width, widget ready theme for WordPress.

Natural Essence is a two column, light brown and white, fixed width widget ready theme.

Sacred Icon is a brown widget compatible, two column theme.