The goal of the project is not to change the existing design, but to rather consolidate and simplify the existing CSS to allow for easy expansion and alteration in the future.

If you can offer your skills to this project, I’m sure the developers and future WordPress 3.3 users will be much appreciative.

Those of you with WordPress theme design and modification experience may find the lack of being able to edit the template files to be quite limiting, but nothing could be further from the truth.

If you’re a WordPress.com user seeking to produce your own unique design, look no further than this collection for some of the best Custom CSS blogs on WordPress.com.

Some of the blogs in this collection used the Sandbox theme (practically a blank slate) to build their unique design using nothing but their own CSS, but some have used their Custom CSS upgrade to build extensively on top of existing fully designed themes.

Do you use custom CSS on your WordPress.com blog?  If so, we’d love to see it!

If you think about it, there are many plugins that only do something once in a blue moon. Table of contents, text manipulators, galleries, sliders, etc, etc. If only they loaded their frontend code strictly when necessary, most page loads would suddenly become much lighter.

This technique if implemented by plugin authors sounds like it could have a significant impact on end users websites, especially when it comes to loading times. I’m always impressed with the speed of WordPress when I install a fresh copy without any plugins. WordPress loads very quickly both on the front and back ends. However, once I activate 30 or so plugins, most of which add functionality to the front end of the site, I see the page loads increase significantly. It’s a shame too since I routinely hear people claim WordPress is sluggish software only to find out they have over 30 plugins activated on their site.

If you’re a plugin author, can you please tell me what some of the drawbacks are with Artems approach?

cSprites for WordPress plugin helps speed up your blog by reducing the number of requests made for images. When activated all images within a post will automatically be stitched up and displayed properly as compressed CSS sprites.

Screenshots

Before activating, all images within a post are being retrieved using separate requests.



After activating, all images are stitched together into one compressed image and retrieved using only one request.



The plugin then uses CSS magic to display these image sprites properly within the post.

Features

• Quality and style settings let you specify the compression level for the stitched up image sprite.
  
• Ability to include/exclude certain types.
  
• Cache expiration tuning.
  
• SEO Options for SEO nerds.
  

What I Like About It

cSprites for WordPress was written to do one thing (convert all post images into compressed image sprites to speed up your blog) and it does it very well.

Installation was very easy. Just download it, activate it, and all your post images automatically turn into images sprites.

Just because you use image sprites doesn’t mean that you should lose SEO. I like that this plugin does not ignore SEO and there are SEO options for displaying any ALT or TITLE text you want.

Next, this plugin supports caching image sprites, so it automatically includes external images into image sprites for you. Because of this, you are also saving external domain DNS resolutions to help make each page load even faster.

What I like most about this plugin is that it can be used in conjunction with WP Super Cache. In that scenario WP Super Cache helps you avoid PHP execution/MySQL queries, and cSprites for WordPress helps you reduce strain on your web server and improve front end page load time.

Possible Areas of Improvement

As of version 0.508, here are some drawbacks of this plugin:

• PHP5 with GD Library is required for this plugin.
• cSprites will not distinguish between PNG8 and PNG24 and will always sprite PNG images with PNG24.
• cSprites cannot handle dynamically generated images (e.g. “…thumbnail.php?thumb=http://example.com/myimage.jpg”)
• When upgrading via SVN, “svn up” command gives “svn: Unable to lock ‘cache’”. I have to remove the cache directory, run “svn cleanup”, then “svn up” to upgrade via SVN.
• You cannot use padding when displaying images or else it will show part of another image. It would be nice to be able to generate the image sprite with configurable padding so you can use padding when displaying images.

Final Words

If you can take advantage of this plugin (i.e. your host offers PHP5 with GD Library), then it is definitely worth a quick install.

Are you currently using cSprites for WordPress? Are you happy with the performance improvements? How much load time has this plugin saved you? What additions would you like to see in this plugin?

For those wanting to add this type of support to your theme, you can install WP-Print. WP-Print picks up where most theme authors have left off by providing printing support in such a way that end users can print either articles or comments, depending on how you have configured the plugin.

In fact, doing a search on the plugin database for the keyword of “print” brought up two pages worth of search results. Another solution for you theme authors out there is called Bunny’s Print CSS. This plugin provides two files, print-css.php which is the plugin file and print.css which is the print stylesheet.

A link to the print stylesheet will be placed in your theme’s header, providing it uses the wp_head() function/hook. An admin panel is added to the Presentations menu and it will allow you to edit the stylesheet if you make print.css writeable. You probably want to edit the stylesheet provided to your liking, though it will hopefully do most of the job if your theme is sandbox-based.

This method takes most of the hard work out of creating a print.css file, even though theme authors would most likely have to modify the stylesheet to make it compatible with their theme.

For those who would like to manually create the style sheet, there is an article on the Codex entitled “Styling For Print” which covers all of the basics necessary to make a pretty, yet functional print stylesheet to include with your theme/themes.

I hope that by linking to the Codex article and bringing this issue to light, we will start to see more themes being released with built in printing support. It’s not a deal breaker for me, but I’d rather see themes that support this feature than those that don’t. My personal opinion is that, printing support is a nice finishing touch to round off any theme, and having it built in allows me and a number of other users to stop using another plugin.

Now it’s time for you to sound off. Is this a trivial issue, or is there anyone else out there that would like to see this feature in more themes?

After downloading and installing the plugin, you can access it by browsing to SETTINGS-COLOR SCHEMES. There are three color schemes to start you off, Classic, Fresh and Washedout. The plugin does not allow you to delete nor edit the Classic and Fresh color schemes. This makes sense as you wouldn’t want to screw up a default skin only to have to reinstall WordPress to fix the issue. However, you can edit the Washedout color scheme which introduces you to the plugins functionality.

The plugin starts off by giving you the chance to name your color scheme. Next, give your color scheme four primary colors. If you don’t know of a six digit color code, there is a small arrow to the right of the text field that will open up a color picker. Opening the color picker and then selecting a color will automatically place the corresponding color code into the text field.

Once you have your four primary colors in order, the next step which is the longest of them all is to go through all of the CSS specific code and change the color code values to something else you prefer. There at least 10 different CSS files which make up the styling of the administration panel. There are more if you want to include support for RIGHT TO LEFT text. This plugin takes all of those CSS files and puts them in one place for you to edit, which makes things so much easier. Also, for those who have javascript enabled in their browser, you can view a live preview of what the changes will look like on an active WordPress administration page. Very handy as it cuts down on the browser refreshes.

One thing that I think this plugin is missing is an easy way for users to share their creations. If a download or save link could be added to the color schemes which would automatically package the necessary files together which could then be saved to my desktop for distribution, this would make the plugin a home run.

If you are looking at adding some spice to your WordPress back end, give this plugin a try. I don’t think it could be any easier than this plugin. The only problem with creating a color scheme is figuring out where each CSS class or DIV is defined. That’s where FireBug comes in.

Good luck and if you happen to create a color scheme using this plugin, be sure to say so in the comments.

• Paged Comment Editing
  By default, “Manage Comments” only list the 20 last comments. What if you were on offline holidays for a month and have a blog that receives quite a few feedback ? This plugin allows browsing of older comments with paging through them.
• Cat 2 Tag
  If you create a lot of categories, this plugin makes selection easier when writing a post : a handy “tag cloud” avoids cumbersome scrolling through a long category list. There is also a fancy “suggest category” feature that proposes categories as you type them.
• WordPress Admin Drop Down Menu
  The lazy and the productive will love it : you can go from any to any admin page without having to stop by the “top level” page first. For instance, no more loading “Manage” first , and then “Comments”, since all admin links are available in a CSS driven drop down menu (demo). Admin menu the way it was meant to be (and even compatible with Tiger Admin)
• Tiger Admin
  While adding no particular feature, this plugin completely revamp the admin part of your blog by heavily tweaking the CSS, giving your admin pages a brand new look (for Safari, Camino and Firefox only)

If you are using a plugin that adds functionnalities or redesigns the admin interface, feel free to pimp it in the comments. Also, I advise plugin authors to update their plugin descriptions over at WP-Plugins.net once the administration pages will include “WordPress 2.0″ in the compatibility check list.