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Content suggestion engine for WordPress: TechCrunch has an interesting article this morning on the Alpha release of a product called Zemanta. Zemanta is a contextual content suggestion engine and works with WordPress and Firefox. With nothing to install on the blog, and a simple FF extension, Zemanta creates a little AJAX box on the side of your write panel in WordPress with suggestions on what to add to your content. This information is gathered real time from various media publication sites and blogs. I am watching the Zemanta control box as I type this post and it seems to update after regular intervals with new suggestions. It also lets you add links to various keywords on your post to other articles on the web and your blog.

I just tried out some of the features including addition of pictures and related links but the soup generated is not pretty and I personally do not care for it. But it is still Alpha code but it sure is fun to play with and discover related and relevant content to display to your readers. If you are a WordPress (or Blogger) user, give it a try and let us know what you think.

Three Column Themes

Blue Lily

Blue Lily is a three column theme which is quite simple and attractive, the main background is a striking blue with green color for the header. The navigation menu is right on the top of the page making it easily visible.

Content area is big enough and has a gray background. There are two sidebars which you can use to show off additional information.

Widget Ready: Yes

Compatibility: There were no issues that I saw with this theme on Firefox 2+, IE6, IE7, Flock.

Validations: Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional | Invalid CSS with 1 error

Demo | Release Page | Download

Blue Dream

Blue Dream is a three column theme with a graphical header and rounded navigational menu on the top of the page. The theme comes built in with RSS icons on top of the page to make it easier to subscribe to feeds.

There are two sidebars which can be used to display additional information and advertisements.

Widget Ready: Yes

Compatibility: There were no issues that I saw with this theme on Firefox 2+, IE6, IE7, Flock.

Validations: Invalid XHTML 1.0 Transitional with 32 errors | Valid CSS

Demo / Download

Airborne

Airborne is a three column theme which makes use of clouds in the header and footer sidebar section as a background. The main content area is a bit small which does not allow you to add big images into the content.

There are two sidebars for showing additional content, it also has a footer sidebar where you can add more content allowing you pack all the information like top posts, recent posts etc in a single page.

Note: The release page is in German.

Widget Ready: Yes

Compatibility: There were no issues that I saw with this theme on Firefox 2+, IE6, IE7, Flock.

Validations: Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional | Valid CSS

Demo / Download

Theme Releases

Two Column Themes

GreenTech

GreenTech is a two column theme with pleasant colors. It makes use of a mix of brown and green colors. The background is creme in color. There are plenty of advertisement options available in this theme.

Author comments on the blog are styled differently than the other comments. Overall a good looking theme.

Widget Ready: Yes

Compatibility: There were no issues that I saw with this theme on Firefox 2+, IE6, IE7, Flock. The header section appears broken in Opera.

Validations: Invalid XHTML 1.0 Transitional with 29 errors | Invalid CSS with 1 error

Demo | Release Page | Download

Three Column Themes

My Starcraft 2

My Starcraft 2 is a theme based on Starcraft 2. The theme uses dark and vibrant colors with a mix of black and gray. The links are orange color making it more visible on the darker background.

Overall looks are quite good with ample advertising options. The theme is available in English and German versions

Widget Ready: Yes

Compatibility: There were no issues that I saw with this theme on Firefox 2+, IE6, IE7, Flock and Opera browsers.

Validations: Invalid XHTML 1.0 Transitional with 11 errors | Invalid CSS with 3 errors

Demo / Release Page /Download

Four Column Themes

Techicon

Techicon is a wide 4 column theme with beautiful use of colors. It is simple and classy at the same time. The theme comes with a sub header with 3 columns which can be used to display information such as Latest posts, popular posts etc.

The main content area is quite wide and can easily accommodate large images, the sidebar is huge and is made up of three smaller sidebars. Overall a great theme with ample advertising options.

Widget Ready: Yes

Compatibility: There were no issues that I saw with this theme on Firefox 2+, IE6, IE7, Flock and Opera browsers.

Validations: Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional | Invalid CSS with 3 errors

Demo | Release Page | Download

Plugin Releases

Set Email “From” Address

The default emails that get sent out by WordPress is usually wordpress@yourdomain.com. This plugin allows you to change the from address to any email you want to so that all outgoing emails go out with your personalized email address.

Compatible Versions: WordPress 2.0 and above

Category: Administration

Release page | Download

SmartLinks Widget

This plugin allows you to automatically display content from Amazon, Netflix, Last.fm, IMDB etc. The items have SmartLink rather than links which opens up a small inline window with the best information from around the web without the user have to leave your site. (Disclosure: SmartLinks is an advertiser on this blog)

[EDIT] from the comments:

Smartlinks offers personalized Widgets for Netflix Queue, Amazon Wishlist, and Last.fm playlists. Each contains a SmartLink that allows you to monetize the content in a number of ways.

Compatible Versions: Up To WordPress 2.3.2Category: Widgets

Release Page | Download

Berri Technorati Reactions on Dashboard

WordPress 2.3 and above displays incoming links from Google Blog Search, this plugin displays you the Technorati Reactions of your blog in the Admin Dashboard.

Compatible Versions: WordPress 2.3 and above

Category: Administration

Release Page | Download

One Column Themes

DePo Skinny

A very simple one column theme with easy integration for your Flickr pictures at the top of the page. It is a real bare bone theme and is only 500 pixels wide. Though DePo Skinny does not have a sidebar it makes it up in the footer with a bottom sidebar to display additional information.

Being a one column theme main advertisement options are within the post itself.

Widget Ready: No Sidebar Options

Compatibility: There were no issues that I saw with this theme on Firefox 2+, IE6, IE7, Flock and Opera browsers.

Validations: Invalid XHTML 1.0 Transitional with 30 errors | Valid CSS

Demo | Download

Two Column Themes

Twister 2.0

Twister 2.0 is made up of dark colors with a mix of gray and black with on a grayish background. The links are white in color and easy to spot with the darkish background. However the text color is harder to read in bright lights. This is an update over the earlier version which includes CSS code cleanup a fix for sidebar in IE6 and a new addition of 3 new columns in the footer.

Overall a good looking theme which is a bit more than simple. Main flaw is that there is very limited advertisement options.

Widget Ready: Yes

Compatibility: There were no issues that I saw with this theme on Firefox 2+, IE6, IE7, Flock and Opera browsers.

Validations: Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional | Invalid CSS with 90 warnings

Demo | Download

Codelog

Codelog is a minimalistic two column theme with sparse use of colors. The theme consists of a sidebar and navigation to the left side. The right side consists of the content area.

Codelog theme is quite simple and makes use of 3-4 colors. Advertising options are limited to the content area.

Widget Ready: No

Compatibility: There were no issues that I saw with this theme on Firefox 2+, IE6, IE7, Flock and Opera browsers.

Validations: Valid XHTML 1.1 | Valid CSS

Demo | Download

Three Column Themes

Amazing Grace

Amazing Grace is a fast loading theme made with light colors that are variants of green. There are two levels of menus one on the top of the page and one included in the header which are quite diversified to gain maximum user attention on the top of the page.

The link colors are a bit dull and a darker shade would look more better. Other than that a good theme which can be optimized to include better advertisement options.

Widget Ready: Yes

Compatibility: There were no issues that I saw with this theme on Firefox 2+, IE6, IE7, Flock and Opera browsers.

Validations: Invalid XHTML 1.0 Transitional with 45 errors Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional| Valid CSS

Demo | Download

ColorblindS

Colorblinds is a dark 3 column theme with minimal use of colors, the background is made up of gray and black with small squares and rectangles forming part of the background image. The text is again gray with the links a mix of variations of green. Comes built with a drop down menu which I don’t see would be useful for regular blogs. Overall quite a simple theme and good for blogs which do not want much fanfare.

The major backdrop is advertising options are quite limited for both contextual as well as banner ads.

Widget Ready: Yes

Compatibility: There were no issues that I saw with this theme on Firefox 2+, IE7, Flock and Opera browsers. In IE6 I could see some color loss in the content area.

Validations: Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional | Valid CSS

Demo | Download

9 WordPress admin themes: There aren’t a lot of developers and designers working on admin themes for WordPress and I was really pleasantly surprised to find this list on welovewp.com. This posts lists nine themes for the administration back end of WordPress. Some of them I had seen before such as Tiger and Spotmilk, but there were a few that were new to me. Josh (I am assuming that Josh wrote the above post, this is why an about page is so important and posts should list authors) has included thumbnails and small reviews for each of them.

• WP Tiger
• Spotmilk
• JS Spotmilk
• Planet X7
• afd WordPress2
• WordPress NiceAdmin
• WordTunes2
• Shuttle
• Digg
• Barunio

Unfortunately, two of the admin themes, Digg and WordTunes2 are MIA but I did manage to dig up one more that should be mentioned. If I missed a couple, please leave a comment and I will add it to the list.

Wordpress Theme Generator: There used to be some very good ones out there but they seem to have dropped out of favor. This new one offers such conveniences as instant previews, lots of layout, color and gradient settings, custom header graphics and download of individual files as well as a neatly packaged zip. This could be a good starting point for Wordpress bloggers who want to play around with colors and layout and do not want to muddy their hands with code. I like the instant gratification and appreciate Yvo’s hard work.

Thanks to posts here on WLTC and around the blogosphere, the topic of “sponsored themes” is at the top of everyone’s minds. I thought this would be a good time to share my thoughts on the ramifications of sponsored themes, and what it means for our community.

For those who are new to the topic, in the past yew years a market has developed around advertisers that pay money to websites to have plain-text links back to their properties so they can rank better in search engines like Google for the text in those links. At some point the people gaming Google realized instead of buying links from dozens of individual sites, they could pay theme authors to bundle their links with their download and get hundreds or thousands of sites with their link for a small fraction of the cost. This is politely referred to as “theme sponsorship.”

Sometimes theme authors do this without telling their users it’s a sponsored theme before download, or use CSS or PHP tricks to hide the links or other ads in the template so most people will either never notice or not know how to remove the ads. I’m not going to talk about these folks, because they’re obviously unethical and should be banned in every way possible.

However there is another class of themes that disclose up front they’re sponsored, and generally appear on the up and up — what about those? I think there are three main issues we need to keep in mind:

1. Google penalizes sites that promote things Google considers spam. Because of the trend of paid links, even on respected sites, Google has publicly stated that they have taken measures to diminish the effect of these links by lessening the value of where they’re coming from. I don’t claim to know their internal rankings, but I believe this is related in some way to Trustrank — if you link to untrustworthy places your Trustrank goes down. (Just like if you kept recommending crappy movies to your friends they’d stop taking your advice.) I’d be the last to recommend any of us should tailor what we do to please Google or any other search engine, but at least on my blog it accounts for 60% or more of my traffic, so I’d rather stay on their good side. Once someone understands the ramifications they are welcome to make a link ad decision for their own site, but it bothers me when theme authors are making the decision for others.
2. Many users of WordPress probably don’t understand the above point or are not able to properly modify their templates to remove the bundled ad if they did. In fact, the economics of theme “sponsorship” depends on most site owners not touching the link. When advertising or something else unwanted is bundled with a desktop application and relies on most users not removing it we have a word for it — adware. (Sometimes malware.) It’s not illegal, and it’s certainly one way for software authors to get paid for their work, but it’s ultimately disrespectful toward the user and reputable download directories like Download.com ban it.
3. Finally many of these themes try to legally disallow you from removing the advertising link by claiming it’s part of the Creative Commons attribution to leave it. This is almost funny, because these themes are on shaky legal ground themselves. WordPress is Free, meaning you’re free to do pretty much anything you like with it. It’s under a license that encourages user freedom called the GPL, which says if you distribute something that links internal functions and data structures of a GPL program (like themes do with WordPress) that also needs to be Free. At best, theme authors claiming you can’t remove the link are ignoring or ignorant of the license issues, at worst they’re actively exploiting the work of thousands of volunteers that have poured their blood, sweat, and tears into WordPress.

There are other issues, such as a proclivity of some ad-bundled theme designers to value quantity over quality, but I don’t think those are as important.

Themes with bundled and embedded advertising will always exist, and it’s perfectly within the rights of the GPL for people to create them and even sell them. I also bear no ill-will toward theme authors who’ve succumbed to the attraction of the money, I disagree with their decision but people make mistakes and it’s not a personal thing. However as a community we should decide whether the slippery slope of bundled advertising is a behaviour we want to encourage and promote on our official resources such as WordPress.org and the Codex, and even on community hubs like Weblog Tools Collection.

I’ve seen some designers claim if we discourage bundled advertising with themes we’re taking away their livelihood and saying they should work for free. (Conveniently ignoring the fact that WordPress was built “for free.”) However just because you can make money from something doesn’t mean you should. Something doesn’t have to be illegal for it to be wrong. There are more important things in life. At every conference I go to I meet dozens of people who make their living with WordPress and manage to do so in a way that doesn’t exploit users or cross ethical lines, so I find it hard to believe that the lack of sponsored themes will hurt the WordPress ecosystem. Authors could also monetize their own sites with ads, instead of putting them on yours.

Finally, no one is forcing these people to make themes. In fact I would posit that it’s better not to release anything at all than to release a sponsored theme. Our design and theme community thrived before themes with embedded ads came along, and it will continue to thrive long after their gone. Embedding ads in themes is disrespectful to users, and creates confusion and uncertainty about which themes people can trust.

Two years ago I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life when I made a decision to accept a “sponsorship” on WordPress.org without considering the ramifications it would have for its users, our community, and the web as a whole. It pains me to see others going down a similar path. We should think about how these people are trying to exploit the WordPress community and good name instead of looking the other way because they’re paying.

Once you’ve had time to mull over the social and ethical issues of ad-bundled themes, I encourage you to vote on this WordPress Idea to remove sponsored themes from WordPress.org, rating it 5 if you agree and 1 if you don’t. Thanks for your time, and happy blogging.

I read this question in a comment and though I had an answer from my own personal preference, I think it would be really helpful for others to make this decision and consequently for theme developers to get a good feel for where and what they should concentrate on if there were some discussion on it.

I personally prefer one column themes with a minimal second column. Most information that is put on my sidebar(s) is extraneous and could be placed elsewhere. I have also found that some of that information deters from the original content of the blog. The landing page concept is nice for search engine traffic where extra links and information on the content might help you draw in the user to explore some more. However, the face of the blog is cleaner and chock full of good stuff to read with lesser distractions.

That being said, I have seen and read some really good blogs/sites that have made appropriate use of sidebar content including the venerable Slickdeals and the Wordpress Development blog.

Do you like one, two or three (or more) column themes and why?

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?