Why use a Third Party Blog Editor

Each user has their own reasons to use their blogging client. The most common reasons are:

• They can write a post and publish it at once on multiple blogs and across different platforms.
• Third party blog applications and clients come with a Desktop-like look which they prefer over a web-based interface.
• These blog clients and apps come with more writing tools to format their blog posts.
• Writing without an internet connection and saving the posts to be published later on.

These blogging tools are designed to be easier and friendlier, most of these editors focus more on writing than managing a website. This might have helped some users feel more inclined towards writing new content without bothering to look at comments and maintenance tasks of their websites.

Custom Post Types Not Supported

There are some cons to using a third party blog client. The major fault that I found is that most popular weblog clients didn’t catch up with latest versions of WordPress and they cannot offer you to choose between a blog post or a custom post type. Which means you can create Post or Pages but not custom post types. This could work for a lot of users but for those who are using custom post types their posts will be saved as default Post type. Same goes for custom taxonomies as these clients do not recognize them either.

Prepare WordPress to Work with Blog Clients

WordPress comes with an API that allows third party tools to access your blog and post content on it. This feature is turned off by default. So if you want to use a third party tool, you will have to enable this feature. Once enabled, you can post from any third party tool that supports WordPress API by providing your blog URL, username, and password.

Login to your WordPress admin area and go to Settings > Writing. Under the Remote Publishing section check both boxes for Atom Publishing Protocol and XMLRPC publishing protocol.

The file that allows remote posting is called xmlrpc.php some blog clients may ask you for the location of this file on your server. By default this file is located in the root directory so its location would be http://www.example.com/xmlrpc.php

Blog Clients for Windows

Publish Directly from Microsoft Word to WordPress

You can directly post to your WordPress blog from Microsoft Word. Write your post in Microsoft Word and when you are ready to publish it click on the office icon > Publish > Blog. This will convert your Microsoft Word Document into a blog post format. Now click on the Publish button, Microsoft Word will then ask you to register a blog account. Choose WordPress from the list of blog providers and click next.

Provide your blog URL, username and password on the next screen. MS Word will then show you a success message and ask for your username and password again to publish the post on your WordPress website. You can add multiple blogs by clicking on Manage Accounts button under the blog tab.

Pros: If you are already writing your posts in MS Word then no need to copy paste and format posts, you can directly publish from MS word.

Cons: You can add categories but you can not add tags, change author, or schedule a blog post.

From Word to Blog in no Time »

Windows Live Writer

People who are used to Microsoft Office Tools would find Windows Live Writer more convenient than Microsoft Word to write their blog posts. I do not have statistics to support, but I have a feeling that it is currently the most popular Desktop Blog Client for Windows platform.

What makes Windows Live Writer popular is its intuitive interface. You have your buttons on the top menu bar just above the editor. Switching between multiple blog is easier, you can change the skin color of the GUI. The main section has a sidebar where you choose or add categories, tags, add pictures, tables, etc. You can also add Bing Maps and videos from YouTube.

Below the main container, in a collapsible tab you have advance post edit options such as changing the author name, save as draft, schedule post to be published, post slug, and excerpt. This Advance post editor does not support custom fields so if you are using custom fields you won’t be able to use them in Windows Live Writer. But good thing is that you can save a draft of your post on your hard disk or save it on your website and continue editing on your website.

Download Windows Live Writer »

BlogJet

Blogjet is a proprietary blogging client available for a free 30 day trial. The interface is clutter free, the writing screen has a sidebar similar to Windows Live Writer, to set all the post options like categories, tags, post statu, etc. On the top menu bar it has buttons for formatting, inserting images and tables. In short BlogJet has all the features of Windows Live Writer but what I can’t understand is that when Windows Live Writer is available for free then why would anyone want to use Blogjet?

It has a nice interface and it looks easier on eyes but Windows Live Writer is not that heavy on eyes either. I think that is why they offer a trial version, so that people can get used to the software and find out why they should purchase it.

Try BlogJet »

Browser Based Addons and Apps

ScribeFire

ScribeFire is a browser based blog client available for Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari web browsers. Unlike Desktop Blog Clients, ScribeFire looks very webbish (I don’t know if its a word). I think that people looking for a desktop application like feel would be disappointed. The interface is a bit cluttered. There are offers from ScribeFire partners such as AdBull and Zemanta to use their services. In fact there is a button in post editor to enter Zemanta related links into your posts.

The post edit area looks very similar to TinyMCE in WordPress. It has all the features of Desktop blog clients including ability to create and add categories and tags, saving as draft, scheduling posts, etc. I was a bit disappointed looking at it because since it was reviewed everywhere I thought it would be a little better.

Download ScribeFire »

JustWriteBlog

JustWriteBlog is a Google Chrome App available for download from Chome Webstore. It is a browser based app with a nice and simpler interface to post. This nifty little app is not as polished as the blog clients we have discussed earlier. The dark green background is a little too loud for my taste.

But what I liked about this tool is that it is small, sits on my Google Chrome’s Apps dashboard, and it is easier and quicker to launch. I thought users who like to quickly share random stuff from across the web on their blogs would find it useful. Also I believe that this review would encourage the developer to continue this project and improve it.

Download JustWriteBlog »

Desktop Blog Clients for Linux

I use Debian GNU Linux, its a free open source operating system (like Windows and iOS). Since I do most my work online using mostly the browser, so I am comfortable working on any operating system that has Google Chrome web browser. Writing this post reminded me that there are so many Desktop Blog Clients available for Linux users. So I decided I should review them too.

QTM Blog Editor

QTM is a blog editor for Linux but it also works well on Windows. It uses QT for GUI, QT is also used by WordPress for their Nokia App. The interface of QTM is simple, connecting to your blog is easy, and making new posts is a breeze. However, QTM does not support uploading images to WordPress, I don’t know. You can however give an image URL which it will embed into post. There are not too many buttons on the front but click on the drop down menu on the left and there are few advance options that you can play with.

QTM Cross-Platform Blog Client »

Lekhonee Gnome Blog Editor

Gnome has its own application for blogging which is called Gnome Blog. That application is so simple and so useless that I decided not to review it. Instead I am mentioning Lekhonee which is another Gnome Blog Client, just a little better than the gnome app. Lekhonee, like all Gnome applications has a simpler and cleaner interface. The good thing is that you can edit HTML and see post preview inside the application. You can create and edit categories, load categories from your blog, save as draft on your local disk or on your server.

Lekhonee-Gnome »

WordPress Clients for Smart Phones and Tablets

WordPress provides free official WordPress apps for iOS, Android, Blackberry and Nokia. These apps have mostly the same features but they use different UI to adapt to their native environment.

The iOS and Android apps have a much cleaner interface, which makes it easier to write. Also uploading the photos is much smoother in Android and iOS than it is on Blackberry or Nokia. The Nokia app uses QT for User Interface which looks a bit ugly.

Unlike other blog clients we mentioned earlier, the official WordPress apps for smartphones and devices can not only be used for editing and writing posts, you can also use them to upload photos and videos, moderate comments, reply to comments, read your blog, checkout stats and even create pages.

WordPress for iOS WordPress for Android WordPress for Nokia WordPress for BlackBerry

Conclusion

Third Party Blog Clients make writing posts easier, the ability to save drafts locally and prepare a post without an internet connection, make these blog editors a very useful application. However, WordPress is not just a blogging platform any more. WordPress has a lot more features available and many of these features are conveniently ignored by most Blog clients. I am wondering if any of our readers use any third party editor to write and publish their posts?

Besides themes expressly for certain non-profit organizations I’ve tried to gather together a healthy mix of each theme type (corporate/creative/magazine) so as to cover all the potential needs your non-profit company may have. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to leave them in the commenting section below. Enjoy!

Malachi

The Malachi Theme is a video-based theme designed specifically for churches who need a website rich in video and media content. It features high quality videos right on the home page in a slider that lets users cycle through featured videos and photos. But video isn’t the only thing this theme handles with ease. It also has streaming sermons, photo galleries, and podcasting built-in – right out of the box.

• Full Details | Price: $79

Micah

Micah is a powerful WordPress theme designed for churches to use as their website with features crafted specifically for churches. The theme comes equipped with easy-to-post sermons, news, events, photos and more.

• Full Details | Price: $79

Ezekiel

The Ezekiel theme is perfect for Churches looking to have an interactive website powered by WordPress. It includes many church-specific functions including sermon podcasts, news, photo galleries, and events.

• Full Details | Price: $79

Moses

The Moses Theme features a classy home page with a large image slider. It comes with 5 different styles and is ready out-of-the-box for a church to begin using as a fully-functional WordPress website.

• Full Details | Price: $79

Pixel Happy

Your talents and services deserve to be seen and shared with the bright, modern frame and portfolio style of Pixel Happy theme.

• Full Details | Price: $79.95

Family Tree

Family Tree is a safe and imaginative home for your family’s unforgettable moments.

• Full Details | Price: $79.95

Bhinneka

Bhinneka is a responsive WordPress theme with two-column page layouts, slideshow support, three alternative styles, widgets and drop down menus. Perfect for non-profit organization, charity, or corporate websites.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Glory

Glory is a WordPress theme aimed at making your new church or other non-profit website the best one on the block! Feel free to send me feature requests if you feel I’ve missed something! It’s not just for churches and non-profits! If you’re looking for a media-centric and/or event-based theme, this might be the one for you too!

• Full Details | Price: $35

Wisdom of Life

WISDOM of Life, it’s a clean and elegant theme, developed mainly to setup NGOs, non-profit orgnizations and corporate websites. Using the color scheme of your choice by using color picker make it elegant and high visual impact experience. This theme is best suitable for a small to large NGO Organizations to setup reference website. Theme works in all the major browsers, and has massive features to use for your next projects as well.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Campaign

Campaign is a theme that’s made to help you win in your political race and be the hub of your campaign. It’s built with the WP Email Capture plugin in mind to collect names and emails of your constituents and The Events Calendar plugin to display all of your upcoming events. There’s also an easy to set up donation button in the header. Whether Democrat, Republican, or any other type of party, this theme will handle any politician or cause.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Rebirth

Rebirth is a Church WordPress Theme aimed at making your new church website the best one on the block! Feel free to send me feature requests if you feel I’ve missed something!

• Full Details | Price: $35

Born

Born is a Church WordPress Theme aimed at making your new church website the best one on the block! Feel free to send me feature requests if you feel I’ve missed something!

• Full Details | Price: $40

WordPress Aid

WordPress Aid is ideal for charity organizations. It’s focused on raising funds for your charity and alerting visitors to important issues happening in the world.

• Full Details | Price: $35

WP-Church

WP-Church is a Premium ChurchTheme built on a highly intelligent framework.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Ray of Light

Ray Of Light is great looking Religious Movements and Church theme that is also very feature rich and customizable.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Ecclesia

Ecclesia is a WordPress theme created with church websites in mind. Flexible and easy to use, this theme will help you bring your church website to the next level.

• Full Details | Price: $35

WordPress Politico

The premier political theme on Theme Forest! WordPress Politico is ideal for political campaign sites. The slideshow is great for drawing attention to important issues or promoting a candidate into office.

• Full Details | Price: $35

GC02 Religious

Religious … The Church Theme made by KarmaThemes! Religious is a spiritual and fancy WordPress template with good Karma – perfect for all types of churches or religions.

• Full Details | Price: $30

Light of Peace

This is a church theme WordPress Template. Some people use it for wedding and non-profit website. There are four color scheme included in this template. This wordpress theme also has an admin panel.

• Full Details | Price: $30

WordPress Church

The ORIGINAL church-themed WordPress template.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Goodnews

Goodnews is Premium WordPress News / Magazine Theme Fully Customizable , has an extensive Theme Options with Import/export System , WPML Ready, RTL Full Support .

• Full Details | Price:$35

Ares

Ares is The Clean Magazine, News and Blog Template built with latest WordPress features.

• Full Details | Price:$35

Responsy

Responsy is a responsive html5 wordpress theme suitable for personal portfolios or creative agencies. Responsy has been coded in HTML5 & CSS3 and jQuery. It has a solid flexible responsive layout that scales from 320px to 1170px.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Apollo

Apollo is a sharp, responsive WordPress theme perfect for any business, portfolio or blog. With it’s extensive documentation and intuitive options panel it’s quick to setup and a breeze to customize.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Kingdom

Kingdom is a responsive WordPress portfolio theme. It’s designed for creatives who want a versatile and no-nonsense way to showcase their work. Featuring retina images and iconography, it really is something that has to be seen to be believed. Powered by the ultra-slick Swift Framework, it’s also filled with templates, shortcodes and features that you’ll love to use and show off.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Natural

Natural Theme is a responsive Premium WordPress Theme with a powerful, but easy to use, Admin Panel and near endless customization possibilities. You can create a corporate website, a personal portfolio or a professional looking weblog in just a few minutes. It requires no coding skills, but it also gives a lot of possibilities for experienced developers.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Snap

Snap is perfect for a creative agency, a modern freelancer or general business. Organic design, responsive laypout, smooth shadows and a bunch of awesome features to make everyone happy.

• Full Details | Price: $35

InkDrop

InkDrop is a hybrid blog/portfolio/business theme. Everything from the Obox Themes OCMX Gallery functionality, to multiple page templates and different home page layouts have been thrown into this theme.

• Full Details | Price: $30

Press

Press is a minimalist blog theme which can serve many different purposes. The nature of its design means the modifications are endless and the boundaries for content are only determined by you.

• Full Details | Price: $30

mag.Press

mag.Press is ‘Magazine’ theme from Obox, joining the likes of our two best sellers InkDrop and Press.

• Full Details | Price: $30

A good example of a WordPress admin that has been completely customized and branded is Happy Tables, check out the modifications they have made, an end user wouldnt even know they are using WordPress.

In this post we will look at how WordPress developers can completely transform a WordPress admin area and tailor it to your client’s needs completely.

Get Rid of Blog Posts

The Posts tab in the admin area, is an obvious indication of a blogging tool.  They wouldn’t necessarily notice all the transformation and development you have done because those are not as easily visible as the “Create New Post”. It is everywhere, in the admin menu, on the top admin bar. I am assuming that you have created a custom post type for your client with custom taxonomies and meta fields. Like for example a custom post type called “Products” with custom taxonomy “Sections”. Now how cool it would be if your client logs on to their site and see Add New Product instead of post? So lets fix this.

Remove Posts From WordPress Admin Menu

WordPress 3.1 was a significant release as it came with many new features that made it easier to take full advantage of WordPress as a CMS. Removing menu items from the admin menu was possible before 3.1, but not easier. Now you can add a menu item by using remove_menu_page function. In our example we are going to remove Posts from the menu. Remember that this goes into your themes functions.php file.

add_action( 'admin_init', 'my_remove_menu_pages' );

	function my_remove_menu_pages() {
		remove_menu_page('edit.php');
	}

Doing this your custom post types and taxonomies will replace Posts in the menu, if they don’t check their menu position and bring them up. Now when the clients sign in, the first item on their admin menu is not posts but the one you have created for them which could be anything like products, items, services, etc. When clients are creating new content, they know that they are adding their own content and not writing a blog post.

Remove New Post from the Admin Bar

The +New menu item on the admin bar has Post as a submenu. Since we want our client not to see the post because they wont be writing posts, they will be adding content using the post type we have created for them. The first item in the top menu will be irrelevant to them so lets fix this and remove post from the Admin bar. While we are at it, how about removing links and comments as well. The code below will remove +New menu, comments and Links from the Admin bar.

function remove_admin_bar_links() {
	global $wp_admin_bar;
	$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('new-content');
	$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('new-link');
$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('comments');

}
add_action( 'wp_before_admin_bar_render', 'remove_admin_bar_links' );

Now that we have removed the useless items from the Admin bar, it looks empty and sad. Adding items and custom links to WordPress admin bar is as easy as removing them. In the example below we are going to create a menu for adding New Products and Sections which will be the main content our client will be generating. Here is the code:

function add_mycms_admin_bar_link() {
	global $wp_admin_bar;
	if ( !is_super_admin() || !is_admin_bar_showing() )
		return;

	$wp_admin_bar->add_menu( array(
	'id' => 'add_product_menu', // Could be anything make sure its unique
	'title' => __( 'Add Products'), //This will appear on the Menu
	'href' => __('http://www.example.com/wp-admin/post-new.php?post_type=products'),
	));

	// Add sub menu link "View All Products"
	$wp_admin_bar->add_menu( array(
		'parent' => 'add_product_menu', // The unique ID of the parent menu
		'id'     => 'view_all_products',
		'title' => __( 'View All Products'),
		'href' => __('http://www.example.com/wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=products'),
	));

	// Add sub menu link "Sections"
	$wp_admin_bar->add_menu( array(
		'parent' => 'add_product_menu',
		'id'     => 'my_sections',
		'title' => __( 'Sections'),
		'href' => __('http://www.example.com/wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=Section&post_type=products'),
	));

}
add_action('admin_bar_menu', 'add_mycms_admin_bar_link',25);

Remove Comments and Links from WordPress Admin Menu

As a professional WordPress developer you will be developing websites with different objectives. Most of your clients will not be looking for blogs and many clients will be over protective of their brand. So there are a lot of WordPress features they wont be needing. Like for example, links. Your clients will not want to add a blogroll or favorite links list anywhere on their site. They may also not want to have comments enabled on individual pages and items they create.

So lets remove comments and links from client’s dashboard as well because if they don’t have comments enabled then there is no need to have comments and links in the admin menu. To do that we will revisit the code we used above to remove Posts from the admin menu and add lines to remove comments and links as well.

add_action( 'admin_init', 'my_remove_menu_pages' );

	function my_remove_menu_pages() {
		remove_menu_page('edit.php');
		remove_menu_page('edit-comments.php');
		remove_menu_page('link-manager.php');
	}

Fix your Theme for a CMS

Most WordPress themes you choose for the development will have blog elements for clients that need them. But if your clients don’t need them then you need to make sure that your theme does not give any hint about those things. Like for example, showing a big heading telling users that “comments are closed” or “No Comments” on a post where comments were never actually enabled, or a search page, or a 404 page telling users that “No posts found matching their criteria”. These tiny things will give you away and your client may think that you didn’t do justice to the job. Polish your theme to match your CMS and the features your client and their visitors will be using.

Fix your Widgets for a CMS

In the widgets area there will be widgets to show recent posts, recent comments, popular posts, calendar, links, meta and what not. Make sure that your clients have the widgets they need. Replace recent posts widget with the recent post-type you have created for them. Remove recent comments widget if your clients don’t have comments enabled. Remove widgets for links, blogrolls, tag clouds and monthly archives.

Wouldn’t that make my theme look less sophisticated? It would, thats why you need to provide widgets that your clients will actually use. Rethinking Widgets will create a better user experience for the client and it will be a good experience for you as well to think outside the box and look at WordPress differently.

Rebrand WordPress and Convert it into a Highly Customized CMS

WordPress is an opensource platform, this means that you have the freedom to modify it and use it. Now your clients ordered a customized CMS for their business website. How about you put your client’s brand first? Trust me those business minded folks love it when you put their logos on top. So lets remove WordPress branding and add your client’s brand first.

Replace WordPress Logo on the Login Page

The login screen of a WordPress installation has the official WordPress logo. This logo looks awesome and changing it does not adds or remove any functionality of the software itself. However, clients love their brands and once you are done with their project and invite them to check it over, they would be happy to see their own logo instead of WordPress.

Changing this logo is fairly easy and simple. You can add a simple function to your theme’s functions.php file to replace the logo with your client’s logo.

// Custom Login Logo //

	function mywp_custom_login_logo() {
    		echo '<
        		h1 a { background-image:url('.get_bloginfo('template_directory').'/images/mywp-login-logo.png) !important; }

		>';
	}

add_action('login_head', 'mywp_custom_login_logo');

Source: Change the Logo on your WordPress login page

An alternate method to replace this logo is to rename your logo image to logo-login.png and place it in /wp-admin/images/ folder replacing the original WordPress login logo.

Remove WordPress Logo from Admin Bar

The WordPress logo in the admin bar is linked to the about section of the admin area dashboard. It is also a drop menu with links to WordPress Documentation and support forums. It can be easily removed by adding a line to the function we used abot to remove Posts from the admin bar. So if you are already using that function add the line to remove wp-logo from the admin bar like this:

 function remove_admin_bar_links() {
	global $wp_admin_bar;
	$wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('wp-logo');
	}
add_action( 'wp_before_admin_bar_render', 'remove_admin_bar_links' );

Conclusion

This is not all that can be done to better represent WordPress as a CMS to clients. I am sure some of you will have your own tips on the subject and experiences you had with clients while developing with WordPress. Please share your tips and stories in the comments below.

Crius

Crius is the Responsive Photography, Portfolio, Personal website Template built with latest WordPress features. Advanced Gallery admin, Kenburns Slideshow etc.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Invo

Invo WordPress theme is perfect theme for running freelance business. Simple communication with client from client area, client invoicing and 2 payment gateways (PayPal and 2Checkout) are functions that makes Invo theme ROCKS ! Check screenshots to see all pages (client area)

• Full Details | Price: $35

Shutter

Shutter is an elegant and flexible portfolio theme for photographers, artists and design studios.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Unix

Unix Universal WordPress Theme with 6 different style variations.Unix Template is simple and clean template with a lot attention to detail. It is suitable for a lot of different business and private uses.

• Full Details | Price: $30

The Navigator

The Navigator is ideal for travel blogs and/or location guides. This directory-based theme utilizes Google maps to display exact locations and provide users the ability to interact with the location. This theme could also function as a real estate listings directory or store locator.

• Full Details | Price: $40

The Novelist

If you’re looking for a basic blog, you’ve come to the wrong place. This theme is built for the serious writers looking to showcase their talents. ‘The Novelist’ is a premier RESPONSIVE portfolio theme for authors and/or copy writers. Content is king people.

• Full Details | Price: $40

Alive

Alive is a versatile and dynamic WordPress theme designed to provoke the “WOW” response from anyone that views it. It is a jQuery / Ajax powered WordPress theme with deep-linking and SEO support that provides a number of animations that make the page feel ‘alive’. ‘Alive’ comes with a full-screen background slideshow, SEO with deep linking Ajax pages, animated navigation menu, easy to use theme options menu, custom gallery support, jQuery twitter feed, jQuery pagination and image hover effects, translation file for multilingual installations, Ajax powered contact form as well as a host of other features. Try it for yourself today!

• Full Details | Price: $30

Domena

Domena was built with simplicity in mind and gives you the tools to start selling your domains after just a few short minutes of setup.

• Full Details | Price: $20

William

William is a grid-based, responsive, minimalistic, ajax powered portfolio theme for creatives. The theme comes with a well thought out responsive layout, unlimited sidebar management, 5 post formats, simple theme options and much more.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Spotlight

Spotlight is clean and minimalist WordPress theme. This is unique theme to show off your portfolio/projects. This theme suitable for business, agency, personal work and more.

• Full Details | Price: $30

Lisya

Lisya is an powerful WordPress Theme that perfectly suits your Portfolio, Creative, Blog or Photo Gallery Website. Auto complete search, Video Self Hosting, Liquid Layout, Unimited Sidebar make this theme beautiful.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Right Now

Experience the New and Impressive touch to HTML5 and CSS3 Right Now! Draw the Screen to Navigate. Leave behind the “Modal Boxes” and ski among your images and video files, enjoy with your audio player. It is Enhanced with AJAX , Seamless and Fastest experience.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Bee Bee

Whether an artist, designer, photographer or anyone in the field of creative services the way your work is presented is crucial to first impressions. Bee Bee is an html template designed with that philosophy. The over all balance and contrast of the design was created with showcasing of works and sale of service in mind.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Atom

ATOM is highly customizable, we already provide 4 kick-ass schemes but you can change the colors and the background pattern to create your own scheme!

• Full Details | Price: $35

Me

Hi there! This is the wordpress version of the five start rated html template called “Me”. It designed and built with user experience in mind! It is an easy-to-use wordpress theme with detailed documentation, and tutorial videos. If you need a website to showcase your work, just buy Me:)

• Full Details | Price: $25

Primento

Primento is a One Page WordPress Portfolio which includes a HTML Resume. The theme has a unique retro and creative look and feel to it which is easy to edit and maintain. Sections can easily be added and taken away to personalize your portfolio. The Portfolio supports images, multimedia such as youtube, vimeo, flash and a lot more. The Theme included all PSD to edit any design and details and the theme as you wish.

• Full Details | Price: $30

SquareGrid

Hello. This is a SquareGrid theme for Portfolio. It has really powerful portfolio template that will can show your items for 5 different layouts. Also it supports Image (images), Audio and Video (youtube, vimeo).

• Full Details | Price: $35

Circled

Circled is a creative WordPress theme perfect for your portfolio or personal website! Each project is made of up of a perfectly round circle and you can show them off in 6 delicious colors!

• Full Details | Price:$35

View

View is a Responsive WordPress theme. This is minimalist design and is best for personal and portfolio site. A lot of features like gallery, video, flex slider, and a many more. You may check the live preview to see the actual action. You get 2 themes with this purchase: full site and one page portfolio site.

• Full Details | Price: $30

Breath

Simplistic design that packs a punch. Breath will capture your vision with cohesion and creativity, that will put you right at the top of the game.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Purty

Purty is a fun and energetic agency, portfolio, and freelancer’s dream theme. It’s jam packed with loads of top-notch features, widgets, shortcodes, sliders and more…all to spice up your ever-growing presence on the interwebs.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Responsive

RSW ( Responsive Fullscreen Studio for WordPress ) is a powerful theme for photographers and creative artists and comes with Light and Dark with theme options supporting multicolor customization of theme elements using color pickers. Creative artists can easily display their products using unlimited portfolio and post formats supporting Aside, Quote, Audio, Video, Link, Image and Gallery.

• Full Details | Price: $35

HyperGrid

HyperGrid is a feature-rich, responsive WordPress theme which easily transforms your basic blog into a fully functional gallery showcase website. It comes with a built-in submission form to accept user-submission entries into your collection. Use HyperGrid and start your very own gallery site!

• Full Details | Price: $35

Jacto

Jacto is the perfect solution to your online portfolio. Whether you want to simply showcase your latest work or go further by adding a blog you’ll find what you need all in one theme.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Saigon

You can change any background, color, heading font by using Theme Options inside admin panel.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Stilo

Welcome to Stilo… A full-fledged Responsive Portfolio / Gallery Theme, built to showcase your beautiful works with a certain pizazz. It’s an easy to use theme with loads of nifty features.

• Full Details | Price: $35

The First

The First is a Multi-Purposes WordPress Theme. You can change any background, color, heading font by using The-First Theme Settings inside Admin Panel.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Radius

Featuring a responsive design, you can scale Radius all the way down to iPhone size and still have a beautiful, full-featured site in the palm of your hand. Try out the demo!

• Full Details | Price: $35

Orchid

Orchid is a simple and clean portfolio type WordPress template. It is filled with tons of features but i would say its responsiveness is its key feature.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Notebook

Notebook is a responsive and simple-to-use WordPress theme for the creative agency, freelancer or virtually any other business looking for an attractive, professional web presence.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Clean up Unwanted Drafts

If you run a busy website or a site with multiple authors, you will have several unpublished posts in drafts. There will be posts that were started but never completed, posts that were later changed into something else. This is the clutter made during the creation of new content. A lot of this clutter can be made usable, rest of them are just taking space and creating a messy look. Cleaning up drafts that you no longer need will keep your posts area cleaner and more organized. Revisiting drafts will also give you a chance to find new post ideas or give rebirth to an untested idea.

Delete Spam and Trash Comments

As your website gets older and starts building a reputation around the web, you start getting more and more spam comments. Akismet catches a lot of spam and stores them in your database for your review. There are also comments that got away from Akismet and are awaiting moderation, then there are comments that you trashed. These comments are just taking space, cleaning them would make it easier for you to review the discussions on your website, it will also make your comments admin area look cleaner. I personally keep this area clean as comments are a very helpful resource for me to look at and think about what I should write next.

Manage Categories and Tags

Categories and Tags were so badly misused by people who thought these are some kind of tools to tell Search Engines what a website is about. Well after the recent updates to Google Search, many website owners and bloggers have recognized that this is not the case. However, most busy websites have many categories with no posts, irrelevant tags, posts with no categories or tags, and so on. Open your categories and tags and delete categories/tags with no posts or if you remember some post that might be relevant to that category/tag edit those posts and properly categorize them.

While you are managing your tags and categories you would notice that you can add descriptions for your categories and tags. A lot of users don’t take advantage of this search engine friendly feature. Unfortunately, many WordPress theme developers also don’t take advantage of this. I think adding description below category title on categories templates would make category views useful for visitors as well as search engines.

Managing categories/tags will make your website well organized. It will also make it easier for visitors to browse content on your website. Browsing through your posts, categories, and tags will also give you some nice post ideas.

Database Cleanups

Your database size isn’t this huge because of your lengthy posts, there is data stored by plugins and the default WordPress settings that is useless and you probably don’t need it at all. Some of this data can be easily removed without affecting anything on your website. Removing this data can potentially make your database queries run faster, and would definitely reduce the size of your database backups.

Warning: Please be careful while updating your database. Make sure you have made a complete backup of your WordPress database before updating it.

Clean up the Fetched Feed Data

WordPress comes with a built-in mechanism to fetch RSS feeds and display them in widgets. On a default WordPress installation, you would see this in action on your admin dashboard where it automatically fetches the feeds for WordPress Development Blog and WordPress Planet. The data for these feeds is stored in your database. It is quite harmless but you can clean it up if you want.

DELETE FROM `wp_options` WHERE `option_name` LIKE ('_transient%_feed_%')

Clean up Unwanted Database Tables Created by Plugins

I love trying new plugins and themes, some of them become a permanent part of that setup and some don’t. Some plugins I deactivate and delete while others are left activated doing nothing (I know that’s very irresponsible of me). A lot of WordPress plugins and themes store data in your database and if you are like me then over the time you will have several entries and tables in your database that are totally useless. Any good plugin author would include the removal of these entries into their uninstall script or would at least provide you instructions on how to remove them. Unfortunately, some plugin authors choose not to do so. Theme developers prefer not to uninstall that data because it may contain your widgets, header, background or navigational menu settings.

To remove unwanted plugin and theme data from your database, browse it to find such entries and tables and delete them. Make sure you first deactivate and delete the plugins and themes you don’t need. Also I can not stress this enough, make a backup of your database before doing anything. The first place you would want to look at is your wp_options table in your database. Browse the table carefully and see if you can find entries related to an inactive plugin.

Apart from wp_options, some plugins will also create their own tables to store data. These will be quite easy to identify among your WordPress tables.

Cleanup Post Revisions

By default, WordPress saves posts revisions, these are auto-save versions of your posts stored in your database. If you have hundereds of posts on your blog than each of them would have several revisions stored in your database. Deleting these revisions would reduce the size of your backup file and would probably make your queries run a little faster. Running the following query on your WordPress database you can easily remove revisions.

DELETE FROM `wp_posts` WHERE `post_type` = 'revision';

I don’t think that turning off revisions on a multi-author website is a good idea. There are other ways to manage revisions to make sure that there are not too many revisions in the database. But if you insist on turning them off altogether then all you need to do is to add this line to your wp-config.php file:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

Deleting Unwanted Files in Media Library

Images and files uploaded to your server while writing posts or separately, are managed in the Media Library. Now there are two kind of files that you would want to delete. Firstly you would need to find the files that are not attached to a post and just lying there because you or some other user on your website uploaded them and didn’t use them anywhere. On the Media Screen, click on Unattached and WordPress will display files that are not attached to any post. Please browse the list once before deleting these files, there might be image files used in your themes and widgets.

Secondly, you can choose to delete different sizes of the images stored on your server. By default WordPress saves an image in three sizes; full, medium, and thumbnail. However, make sure you are not using those sizes anywhere on your website. By default WordPress saves an image in three sizes full size, medium size and thumbnail.

Conclusion

WordPress requires maintenance just like a good car. It would run faster and consume less resources if maintained and optimized regularly.

Charlton costs $49 or the developer club membership is $99 which includes all themes. WPLift readers can use the following coupon for 50% off both until the end of the month (31st May) :

• Purchase Charlton for $24.50
• Join the developer club for $49.50
• Use Coupon code: CHARLTONLAUNCH

Theme Details

As with all ThemeFurnace themes, Charlton includes our Theme options panel which allows you to upload a logo, change footer text and scripts, take full control over the typography – choose Google webfonts to use for headings or body text, control the built-in nivo slider, choose which social media services to display ( along with follower counts) and the theme has some custom widgets built in for showing your tweets and flickr photos.

Post Formats

We have included the following post formats with the Charlton theme:

• Standard – for normal posts
• Aside – for quick text snippets, no title is added
• Link – For linking to any URL – post title becomes the link
• Gallery – for adding multiple images
• Audio – for embedding audio
• Video – for embedding video
• Quote – Large font for quotes, no post title
• Image – for single images

Conclusion

Im pleased with this theme – it should be a solid base for someone wanting a clean and modern personal blogging theme with up-to-date features.

• Purchase Charlton for $24.50
• Join the developer club for $49.50
• Use Coupon code: CHARLTONLAUNCH

Beer Credits

Feel The Yarn

Enterprise Nation

Stu Connect

Love this Tune

Rockhaq

Lega Nerd

My Telegraph

UBC Blogs

Startup Weekend

Little Sketchers

Kodingen

Culture 360

Bitsy

Operation HQ

De Elas

Salomon Trail Running

Caryl

Women in Marketing & Communcation

VC 4 Africa

The company was started by designer Nick Roach, single-handedly, and now employs 13 people which is impressive. Nick has given me 3 club memberships to give away to WPLift readers, you can enter using the widget below – winners will be drawn at random in 7 days time ( 28th May 2012).

a Rafflecopter giveaway

I also took this opportuity to ask Nick some questions about Elegant Themes…

What is your background with WordPress?

I am designer at heart and a lover of technology. I have been putting these two skills to work for some time now, creating templates and themes for various platforms. I became interested in WordPress early on and never looked back. The community is great and I am really glad to be a part of it. I started ElegantThemes a few years ago after having creating several free WordPress themes.

How many people work at ElegantThemes now ?

There are 13 people that work for the company. The majority of our staff are dedicated to technical support and spend their time helping out our members in the forums. There is one designer (me) and two rock star developers that have been working with me for years.

You were one of the first with a yearly membership structure, do you think this helped ?

Yes, it certainly did. I love the membership structure and am glad that I chose this business model. Being a “member” is different than being a “customer.” Membership is something more and has helped instill a stronger sense of community.

Where do you get ideas for new themes / design inspiration from ?

I spend a lot of time simply browsing the web, and follow that up with sitting in my room for hours and hours milling over concepts in Photoshop. It’s a lot of trial and error, but eventually something great always emerges!

For someone wanting to start selling premium themes, do you have any advice ?

I have a few suggestions to people just starting out.

• 1) Focus on quality over quantity. There are so many themes out there already and it’s important to make something great if you want to stand out.
• 2) Don’t underestimate the importance of customer satisfaction.
• 3) Don’t give up too early. Establishing yourself won’t happen overnight.

How do you see the premium theme market evolving over the next 12 months ?

I think that we will continue to see more niche themes being created as WordPress as a CMS expands into more and more online applications.

What do you have planned for ElegantThemes in future ?

Right now we are really focused on mobile. The way that we are browsing the internet is changing drastically, and it is important to start designing in a responsive manner. We have been working hard to convert our old themes to be fully responsive, meaning that they will adapt to small screen sizes and display beautifully on smartphone and tablets. I hope to show initiative in this area and make sure that our customers are ready for the mobile revolution.

Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions, good luck with the future of Elegant Themes!

Easy

Easy is a great Magazine WordPress Theme that offers a clean design and neat code. The rich theme admin panel and widgets enable you to control over your content, manage your advertisment, show your latest tweet, video, photos and much more.

• Full Details | Price: $37

Noxon

Noxon is flexible, customizable and fully responsive magazine WordPress theme with clean and sleek design. Theme includes lots of advanced features and functions and is based on solid backend framework.

• Full Details | Price: $37

Maggie

Maggie is a clean and simple magazine WordPress theme, created specially for anyone who wants to create a news editorial sites, magazine sites or personal blog.

• Full Details | Price: $37

Smartberry

Smartberry WordPress Theme is a top notch Magazine, Community & Blog Theme full of custom options, custom widgets and smashing design. Smartberry is suitable for content producers at all levels – small and large online magazines, bloggers or professional communities. Tempus is a beautiful and pixel-perfect blog and magazine Theme from Themica.

• Full Details | Price: $37

Zen

Blog/Magazine WordPress theme perfect for personal blog pages completely coded on HTML 5.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Simplee

Simplee is a great magazine wordpress theme clean designed and neat coded. The compact theme admin panel and widgets enable you to control over your content, show your latest tweet, photos and much more.

• Full Details | Price: $37

Premium Pixels

The Premium Pixels theme is perfect for the blogger who takes pride in their appearance. This theme has appeared in numerous design galleries while serving PremiumPixels.com and has gained countless ‘nods of approval’ from those in the know. Now it’s all yours.

• Full Details | Price: $40

Typo

Typo takes advantage of WordPress 3.0 menus, automatically sized featured images and custom theme options. Take a look at the demo site to get a better look! This theme, like all Okay Themes, comes with an extensive help file and installation video to get you started.

• Full Details | Price: $40

Website

Website is a responsive theme, which means it adapts to the device on which it’s displayed.
The theme cares for your content so it looks great on all devices, but you can also decide to show part of a content on some versions only, and hide on others.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Handmade

Handmade is the last Obox Theme for 2011. Designed by Shyama Golden this theme has been in our stables for quite a while now. It just took some time to fit it into our schedules, however we feel that the time it has taken has been well spent as the execution is lovely.

• Full Details | Price: $30

Waves

We are continuing our run of producing tumblog themes and today see the introduction of a brand spanking new template called “Waves” which has been designed by Luke Beard.

• Full Details | Price: $30

PixelPower

This is a clean, modern, powerful WordPress tumblog-style theme designed for a wide variety of uses from bloggers to design portfolios. The responsive web design adapts from large to mobile screens, just resize the browser window to test it out, no additional setup required!

• Full Details | Price: $35

Memo

Memo is a super-awesome tumblog style WordPress theme with a clean, minimal design. If you’re looking to get started with microblogging then Memo will be right up your street.

• Full Details | Price: $40

Actme

Actme is a friendly theme and very easy to use. You can add a different slider for every page with his own functions, anytime you can turn on / off the slider or change the function for every page.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Socialike

Localization / internationalization (i18n) ready Socialike is a WordPress Tumblog with lots of features. First of all these cool features is Social media pages (Twitter, Dribbble, Flickr, LinkedIn, SoundCloud, Lastfm, Tumblr). These pages draw data from your social media accounts to your website. So you will have the chance to showcase all your social activities directly from your website! Cool isnt’t it? Secondly, you will have a Tumblr-style WordPress blog with cool icons per each post style (music, article, photo, photo gallery, quote, link, video). You also have the chance to manage your posts directly from your iPhone with Express app. Thirdly, there are two different gallery template options to display your latest works: Thumbnails with masonry/lightbox and full-width with carousel.

• Full Details | Price: $30

Rapture

Rapture WordPress and Tumblog theme is a creative and highly customisable theme that allows you to update your blog just like Tumblr. Rapture uses the WooThemes Tumblog Plugin so you can create specific posts such as images, videos, audio, text, links and quotes at the click of a button.

• Full Details | Price: $30

Dulce

With Dulce, it’s all about versatility. The theme supports seven post formats, offers four color variations, boasts three options for gallery posts, provides an easy to use theme options, features a custom designed audio player and more. If you’re interested in offering your readers a smart-looking, user-friendly, stylish, intuitive and creative driven blog, look no further.

• Full Details | Price: $35

wpTraveller

WP Traveller is a WordPress theme that has been created specifically with “travellers” in mind. It comes with many built-in features perfect for people looking to share their traveling experience. Great for photographers who spend a lot of time traveling around the world or for anyone else that loves to discover the world and share it.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Construct

Construct is a smart, professional and responsive theme designed to show off your (or someone else’s) work. It can be used as a personal portfolio or as great place to link to anything you think deserves it. It utilises a column based layout and some funky animation effects to keep your users entertained. Construct also takes advantage of AJAX which allows the user to load more corresponding posts on the fly without reloading the page or hindering SEO . It also degrades gracefully if JavaScript is disabled.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Rewrite

Rewrite is a versatile WordPress theme with a super clean, responsive design. This theme looks just as great on the iPhone as it does on the desktop.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Quicknote

Quicknote is a simple & functional blog theme, suitable to share your thoughts in a very unique way. With 6 background options you can match your personal preference.

• Full Details | Price: $30

A

Unique classic blog WordPress theme, created with readability in mind. Clean and intuitive design, big font for easy reading, works great in handheld devices. If You like to know more about theme features continue reading or if You are tired of reading just go straight to live preview and screenshots.

• Full Details | Price: $30

The Blog

The Blog is a powerfull theme for blogging and any website, packed with awesome features and simple to use. Supports unique style for categories, pages and posts, including many visual elements, headers and backgrounds. Fully compatible with latest WordPress 3.3.2+ Supported by all major browsers.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Sentence

Sentence is a responsive Blog and Portfolio Theme (try resizing your browser), suited for users who want to run a professional or personal blog and in addition to that want to showcase their work on a neat portfolio site.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Arcadia

Simply the perfect place. Clean, edgy and a cinch to work with, Arcadia is just the right space to share your creativity in words, images, video, and music via soundcloud support. A blog and portfolio featuring a variety of sliders gives your muse exactly the expression it seeks on every page.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Endless

Endless is a clean and stylish infinite scrolling theme, perfect for bloggers and storytellers. We’ve delicately put together some awesome HTML5 mixed in some CSS3 and added a bit of jQuery on top to make this beautiful theme just for you.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Confidence

The Confidence WordPress theme is perfect for personal blogs and magazine sites, it also can be used as a personal portfolio. Responsive layout makes it easier for your visitors to open your site from any various devices. Confidence is very easy to be customized for beginners or experts, with more than 80 theme options allow you to do it all from just one page.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Boldframe

Unique timeline blog & portfolio created with maximal focus on content and its presentation.

• Full Details | Price: $30

Sofa Lathika

Sofa Lathika WordPress theme is primary made for bloggers. It takes behalf of WordPress post formats and custom post types in such way to allow users to maintain both Blog and Portfolio in fashionable manner.

• Full Details | Price: $30

Leap

Leap is a Unique, Personal Blogging & Portfolio Theme for WordPress – it has everything to quickly and easily create an awesome, personal website. With room for customization and a simple installation, Leap is a must-have theme for your personal site.

• Full Details | Price: $35

When I was writing the post “WordPress Advance Menu Plugins“, I realized that I am writing about plugins because I never fully tried to understand the Menu System. This is when I took a mental note of learning more about creating Navigational Menus for WordPress. I was able to modify existing menus in any theme but now I wanted to add my own, right from the scratch.

How the WordPress Menu System works

Since WordPress 3.0 theme developers can define navigational menus in their themes. Most modern WordPress themes come with menu locations defined so in most cases you probably don’t need to create your own menus. However, lets assume that your theme does not have menus or you want to create an extra menu location. Then you need to understand how the menu system in WordPress works.

In the first step theme developers define their menus and their location in the theme by registering menus. In the next step they add their menu to the location they have defined and then they stylize the appearance of the menu. Theme developers can add support for multiple navigational menus in their themes. The last step is when a user edits the menus using the built in Menu Editor.

Registering and Displaying a Navigation Menu in WordPress

Registering Menus is simple all you have to do is to tell WordPress to register a menu and provide a theme location and a name to your Menu.

	register_nav_menu( 'header-menu', 'Header Menu');

		// Or you can register multiple menus at once:
	register_nav_menus(
    		array(
      			'header-menu' => __( 'Header Menu' ),
      			'Top-menu' => __( 'Top Menu' )
    		)
			  );

Once you have registered your menu(s) you can add them to your themes. Like this:

<nav id="access" role="navigation">

				<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'primary' ) ); ?>
			</nav>

Styling your WordPress Menus

The wp_nav_menu function allows you to define menu container, container id, menu id and menu class so that you can later stylize them easily. Before you dive into styling your WordPress menu it is important that you understand the CSS classes used by WordPress in the menus. First have a look at how we are going to style our menu:

/*
First we prepare the navigation menu bar
 */
#access {
	background: #4572BF; /* Show a solid color for older browsers */
	background: -moz-linear-gradient(#4572BF, #6187C7);
	background: -o-linear-gradient(#4572BF, #6187C7);
	background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, from(#4572BF), to(#6187C7)); /* older webkit syntax */
	background: -webkit-linear-gradient(#4572BF, #6187C7);
	-webkit-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4) 0px 1px 2px;
	-moz-box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4) 0px 1px 2px;
	box-shadow: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4) 0px 1px 2px;
	clear: both;
	display: block;
	float: left;
	margin: 0 auto 6px;
	width: 100%;
}

/*
Now we style the unordered list, hover effect, and sub menus
 */

#access ul {
	font-size: 13px;
	list-style: none;
	margin: 0 0 0 -0.8125em;
	padding-left: 0;
}
#access li {
	float: left;
	position: relative;
}
#access a {
	color: #eee;
	display: block;
	line-height: 3.333em;
	padding: 0 1.2125em;
	text-decoration: none;
}
#access ul ul {
	-moz-box-shadow: 0 3px 3px rgba(0,0,0,0.2);
	-webkit-box-shadow: 0 3px 3px rgba(0,0,0,0.2);
	box-shadow: 0 3px 3px rgba(0,0,0,0.2);
	display: none;
	float: left;
	margin: 0;
	position: absolute;
	top: 3.333em;
	left: 0;
	width: 188px;
	z-index: 99999;
}
#access ul ul ul {
	left: 100%;
	top: 0;
}
#access ul ul a {
	background: #f9f9f9;
	border-bottom: 1px dotted #ddd;
	color: #444;
	font-size: 13px;
	font-weight: normal;
	height: auto;
	line-height: 1.4em;
	padding: 10px 10px;
	width: 168px;
}
#access li:hover > a,
#access ul ul :hover > a,
#access a:focus {
	background: #efefef;
}
#access li:hover > a,
#access a:focus {
	background: #f9f9f9; /* Show a solid color for older browsers */
	background: -moz-linear-gradient(#f9f9f9, #e5e5e5);
	background: -o-linear-gradient(#f9f9f9, #e5e5e5);
	background: -webkit-gradient(linear, 0% 0%, 0% 100%, from(#f9f9f9), to(#e5e5e5)); /* Older webkit syntax */
	background: -webkit-linear-gradient(#f9f9f9, #e5e5e5);
	color: #373737;
}
#access ul li:hover > ul {
	display: block;
}
/*
Styling the currently rendered page
 */
#access .current-menu-item > a,
#access .current-menu-ancestor > a,
#access .current_page_item > a,
#access .current_page_ancestor > a {
	font-weight: bold;
}

Understanding the CSS Classes Used by WordPress Menu System

WordPress displays Menus in unordered list formats. If you are a CSS beginner then perhaps you should stop reading this post and instead head over to the ancient but still useful article of “CSS Design: Taming Lists” for a basic understanding of how unordered lists can be used to create beautiful navigational menus for websites.

In this unordered list, WordPress assigns classes to each item rendered in the menu. There is a container class which contains the unordered list, there is a container ID, there is css class for the menu, and then separate css classes for each menu item and each menu item type.

This might sound a bit overwhelming and confusing, but actually it is not. There are so many classes because WordPress allows you to add many type of items in your menus. You might want to add a page, a category, a custom link or may be even an external link in your Menu. WordPress treats each type of item differently so that designers can have more options to use with the menus.

Conclusion:

Learning to develop with WordPress is easy and fun. Personally, I can’t believe how far I have come from just a blogger with a desire to write journal to a blogger writing about CSS, HTML and WordPress functions. WordPress Navigation Menus are not that difficult to conquer. For more examples and inspiration, download other WordPress themes and have a look at how they have designed their menus.

Many magazine themes are a perfect fit for a blog or website dedicated to reviews but with this roundup I tried to focus almost exclusively on WordPress themes equipped with their own rating system ( we covered review plugins before here). In some cases that means five stars, a ten point scale, an adjustable slider, or some other quickly recognizable way to rank the product or content you’re reviewing. I felt that these design considerations not only help users make quick use of your expertise but it also means that you don’t have to spend time as a reviewer coming up with a rating system yourself – you can focus on content. Which is always a bonus. So, that’s what you’re getting into here and I’d love to read your thoughts and comments below on my collection of 25 WordPress themes for Review Sites.

InReview

InReview is an advanced Review Theme that allows you to transform your WordPress blog into a fully-functional ratings website. The theme makes rating products easy with our custom options and integrated user-review system. The theme also includes affiliate integrated and custom widgets to help you increase conversions.

• Full Details | Price: $39 (gets you access to all 70+ Elegant Themes)

ProReview

ProReview is packed with a TON of great and powerful features like, custom slider, extensive option panel, high customization options, useful WP features, custom widgets, shortcodes and custom post types, this will make your job easier while building review sites, give it a try and you’ll see this is the only theme you’ll ever need to build review websites. ProReview theme uses all the power and flexibility of WordPress to build effective and outstanding review sites with full content capability.

• Full Details | Price: $37 (Single Site License. Multisite and Developer Licenses also available)

Strings

Strings is a powerful wordpress magazine style, provided with many options. You can put a unique background in each page, blog post, portfolio item, albums, gallery you create. With more than 70 customization options you can improve your look and be unique on the web!

• Full Details | Price: $35

The Reviewer

Reviewer is a WordPress theme built for one purpose: writing reviews. Whether it’s reviews for movies or TV shows, Reviewer can handle it.

• Full Details | Price: $35

ReviewIt

ReviewIt is a WordPress and BuddyPress theme that provides you with powerful review and community features.

• Full Details | Price: $45

Marisa

Marisa is a simple, clean and beautiful WordPress magazine theme with great features, such as the built in review system that lets you review whatever you want and gives you up to 5 rating criteria. Furthermore you can add a “Buy now button” which you can use for example an affiliate link. The theme comes with 2 skins, a light & dark. You can easily customize the main and secondary colors of the theme inside the custom Theme Options.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Ermark Adora

Ermark Adora is a clean WordPress theme best suited for restaurants, cafes and product showcase sites. It comes with an advanced product manager and reservations system powered by a full featured admin panel. The visitors are able to rate, comment or share products on facebook (facebook integration).

• Full Details | Price: $35

CookingPress

CookingPress is a WordPress theme for foodies. This recipe theme will let you share all your recipes and cooking tips with wide audience. It’s one of the first WordPress recipe themes with support for Google Recipe View. What does it mean? it means that your blog will be understand not only by people, but also by search engines.

• Full Details | Price: $40

Darwin

Darwin is a simple to use responsive wordpress theme, it can be used for almost any purpose: blog, bussiness, portfolio, magazine.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Feature!

Feature! is a magazine theme that works perfectly with BuddyPress and BBPress. Now you can build a community around your website with social networking functions and forums.

• Full Details | Price: $45

Score

Score is a WordPress and BuddyPress theme that is ideal for reviewing any kind of content.

• Full Details | Price: $45

Bodega

Bodega is a modern WordPress magazine style theme. Perfect for blogs/magazines writing about urban culture, action sports, movies, video games, music, fashion and many more.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Continuum

Continuum is great for Magazine & News blogs, Gaming sites, Movie & Music review blogs, product review sites like Cnet.com, portfolio sites, personal blogs, and book review blogs.

• Full Details | Price: $40

Avenue

Avenue is a feature-rich WordPress magazine theme and is suitable for almost any niche. The theme comes with an inbuilt review system and 3 post formats (videos, audio & galleries). The homepage layout is very flexible, you can built your own layout using the 3 homepage widgets. You can also easily change the skin so it fits your needs!

• Full Details | Price: $35

GamePress 3

gp3 is the ultimate in gaming themes. GamePress has been re-built from the ground up to take advantage of the exciting new features available in WordPress 3.0 and is sporting a great new clean, modern design with a hint of classic design elements.

• Full Details | Price: $30

SwagMag

This is the HTML version of the very popular SwagMag – WordPress Review/Magazine Theme. With SwagMag, you can load up your site with tons of content and then present it to your users in an organized way using one of the many page templates and layouts. SwagMag’s front page has a content-rich design to give your users the best user experience possible, and it’s guaranteed to increase both the average length of time that your users spend on your site and the average number of pages that they view.

• Full Details | Price: $16

Media Store

Media Store is a reviews and downloads theme that is ideal for people who want to review items and also allow users to download files from each of these reviews, similar to how iTunes work.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Boulevard

Boulevard is a straightforward and feature-rich WordPress magazine theme. With the built-in review system (with up to 5 rating criteria) and the 3 post formats (videos, music & galleries) Boulevard can be used for almost any niche. Furthermore you can customize the look of the site easily via the custom theme options panel.

• Full Details | Price: $35

LeetPress

LeetPress is a WordPress gaming theme with all the features you need to create a great gaming site, such as reviews, videos and screenshots. You can take a look at the video below to see how easy it is to create reviews. LeetPress also comes with 7 other help videos that will guide you through the theme.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Black Aperture

Black Aperture is an all-in-one news and reviews theme specifically catered to video games.

• Full Details | Price: $30

Backstreet

Backstreet is a modern wordPress magazine, portfolio and blog theme. With the 3 post formats (videos, audio & galleries) Backstreet can be used for almost any niche. Backstreet also built-in review system (with up to 5 rating criteria). Furthermore you can customize the look of the site easily via the custom theme options panel.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Broadway

Broadway is ThemeSector’s third WordPress magazine theme. As the last two themes, Broadway features a built-in review system with up to 5 rating criteria. However this time we also added a user rating option so the user can give their opinion on a review. Broadway also comes with 3 post formats (video, music & gallery). So with the built-in review system and post formats you have the tools to create a site for almost any niche. Furthermore you can customize the look of the site easily via the custom theme options panel.

• Full Details | Price: $35

The Times

The Times is a flexible WordPress blog/magazine theme built with latest WordPress features. This theme comes with a review system (up to 7 custom criterias) , powerful options panel, clean and modern design and etc. The homepage layout is very flexible, you can built your own layout using the homepage widgets or use a classic view style for fast blogging. You can also easily change the overall style of your site so it fits your needs (you can pick up custom color for a lot of the site elements).

• Full Details | Price: $35

Imperial

Imperial is a theme with no specific focus. It’s not sure if it wants to be a personal blog, or house an online magazine. It’s not even sure if it’s black or white, for that matter!

• Full Details | Price: $35

MovieX

Moviex – is a clear video blog, if you want to create your video blog or a gaming portal, this theme perfectly suitable for you. It is easily customizable and has many options and great support!

• Full Details | Price: $37

TinyMCE is like your regular rich text editors with lots of buttons to do different things. It is extendable just like WordPress and can be used to provide an extended user interface to users for writing posts. Most of the advanced buttons are hidden in the default WordPress Visual Editor. You can display the full range of buttons by switching to the Advanced Editor Mode.

Hint: Use Shift+Alt+Z to display all buttons in Visual Editor or click the Show/Hide Kitchen Sink button

Why Would You Want to Customize TinyMCE

As a WordPress developer or site owner, there will be times when you will have users other than yourself contributing content on your website. Not all of them will be familiar with your editorial style. Sometimes you will even have contributors who do not even know how to make a hyperlink in HTML editor.

So as a website admin/developer it is your job to make it simpler for them to follow your editorial style by providing them an interface where they can easily use the same styles as you want them to. Websites that have a lot of non-tech savvy contributors will benefit a lot if they customized their TinyMCE editor in WordPress. This will provide a consistency in style, content would look better, and the contributors will be able to focus on just writing.

In this example we will be adding a Styles drop down menu to TinyMCE, then we will add a purple button to it, and another element for writing tag lines. At WPlift we use that purple button to highlight links to external sites and downloads. So I thought it would be fun learning how it can be added to TinyMCE.

How to add Custom Styles to WordPress Visual Editor

Firstly, we are going to enable Styles dropdown menu for TinyMCE in our WordPress edit screen.

Hint: This code goes into your theme’s functions.php file

// Add the Style Dropdown Menu to the second row of visual editor buttons
function my_mce_buttons_2($buttons)
{
	array_unshift($buttons, 'styleselect');
	return $buttons;
}
add_filter('mce_buttons_2', 'my_mce_buttons_2');

What we have done here is that we have enabled the Styles Menu. The above code will show the default style classes available. We don’t want default classes to confuse our user so we add our own classes to it with friendly titles.

function my_mce_before_init($init_array)
	{
		// Now we add classes with title and separate them with;
		$init_array['theme_advanced_styles'] = "Tag Line=tag-line;Button=custom-button";
	return $init_array;
}

add_filter('tiny_mce_before_init', 'my_mce_before_init');

Now we have added a menu with two style items in it, Tag Line and button. However, nothing happens when a user selects text and then selects these options from the menu. So we need to define these styles in our Editor Style Sheet and our Theme Stylesheet.

Since version 3.0, WordPress allows theme developers and website admins to define custom styles for the Visual Post Editor. This means that theme developers can provide the same style for the visual editor as their themes and when a user is writing a post they know how it will look when published. This feature makes the TinyMCE in WordPress truly a WYSIWYG editor.

Using add_editor_style we add these styles and tell WordPress where to look for the CSS for these styles. The default location is editor-style.css, you can create this file in your theme directory if it does not already have it. Or you can use a custom style sheet of your own.

	add_editor_style();
		// OR
	add_editor_style('custom-editor-style.css');

Now we are going to add CSS to either editor-style.css or custom-editor-style.css and we will also add the same css in our Theme’s style.css

.tag-line {

	Font:italic 14px Georgia, serif;
	color:#ccc;
}

.custom-button {

	font-size:13px;
	background: #9027A2;
	display: inline-block;
	padding: 2px  5px 2px;
	color: #fff;
	text-decoration: none;
	-moz-border-radius: 4px;
	-webkit-border-radius: 4px;
	border-  radius: 4px;
	border:none;
	position: relative;
	cursor: pointer;
	margin:10px 10px 0 0;

}

Show and Hide Buttons in TinyMCE

The default settings for the TinyMCE buttons and plugins are saved in /wp-includes/class-wp-editor.php. These settings can be over written by using the filter tiny_mce_before_init. There are several buttons in the visual editor which many people never use and you can remove these buttons if you want. Look at the following code and see if there are things that you don’t want. Also notice that you can add a third and fourth row of buttons to your Visual Editor UI.

	function myformatTinyMCE($in)
		{
 			$in['remove_linebreaks']=false;
 			$in['gecko_spellcheck']=false;
 			$in['keep_styles']=true;
 			$in['accessibility_focus']=true;
 			$in['tabfocus_elements']='major-publishing-actions';
			$in['media_strict']=false;
			$in['paste_remove_styles']=false;
			$in['paste_remove_spans']=false;
			$in['paste_strip_class_attributes']='none';
 			$in['paste_text_use_dialog']=true;
			$in['wpeditimage_disable_captions']=true;
			$in['plugins']='inlinepopups,tabfocus,paste,media,fullscreen,wordpress,wpeditimage,wpgallery,wplink,wpdialogs,wpfullscreen';
 			$in['content_css']=get_template_directory_uri() . "/editor-style.css";
			$in['wpautop']=true;
			$in['apply_source_formatting']=false;
			$in['theme_advanced_buttons1']='formatselect,forecolor,|,bold,italic,underline,|,bullist,numlist,blockquote,|,justifyleft,justifycenter,justifyright,justifyfull,|,link,unlink,|,wp_fullscreen,wp_adv';
			$in['theme_advanced_buttons2']='pastetext,pasteword,removeformat,|outdent,indent,|,undo,redo';
			$in['theme_advanced_buttons3']='';
			$in['theme_advanced_buttons4']='';
		 return $in;
		}
	add_filter('tiny_mce_before_init', 'myformatTinyMCE' );

Creating TinyMCE Custom Buttons in WordPress

Just like WordPress, TinyMCE is also extendible by using plugins. There are some tinyMCE plugins available in /wp-includes/js/tinymce/plugins directory, which you can look at if you want to write a plugin for yourself. Also look at the TinyMCE documentation on creating a plugin. These plugins can be embedded into the UI of your Visual Editor in WordPress.

However, creating TinyMCE plugins for WordPress is not a very simple task. For users who don’t want to dive into writing plugins there are some excellent WordPress Plugins that allow you to extend TinyMCE in WordPress.

Ultimate TinyMCE Plugin

The Ultimate TinyMCE plugin is a powerful WordPress plugin that extends your TinyMCE editor to the maximum level. It comes loaded with lots of buttons which will make it a lot easier for MSWord users to create their posts in Visual Editor. I particularly liked the YouTube Button, which allows users to set the width and height, along with other options. However, there are some buttons that many would find useless and these buttons can be disabled from the plugin settings page.

Ultimate TinyMCE plugin also comes with premium addons which can be bought from the plugin author’s website. These addons include Google Web Fonts, Custom Styles, Mood Icons, Advance Configuration options, etc.

Download Ultimate TinyMCE

TinyMCE Template Plugin

TinyMCE template plugin is a very useful tool for the websites where authors are required to follow a format and style guide to contribute content. TinyMCE Template plugin allows you to create template posts which you can use inside your visual editor to create new posts. The idea is so simple and beautiful and works flawlessly. You can create templates, predefine required fields which post authors can then fill in quickly and move on.

Download TinyMCE Templates

TinyMCE Advanced

Oli has previously written a thorough review of this plugin in his post How to Extend WordPress Visual Editor Buttons, so I will keep this one short. As the name says this plugin adds extra features to the Visual Editor in WordPress. One feature that I particularly found useful was the ability to load CSS classes from the theme’s style sheet and make them available in Visual Editor. The plugin settings page has a drag and drop interface to set buttons, add separators between them, and modify the editor to meet your needs.

Download TinyMCE Advanced

Conclusion

Using custom styles with TinyMCE can make it a lot easier and quicker for users to create buttons, format content, and stylize posts quickly. It does not completely eliminate the need for switching to HTML editor from time to time, but it can be great tool for users coming from desktop publishing environment who just want to write posts not code.

Watch this video to see how it works :

I installed the plugin and have a look around, its pretty basic at the moment with the home screen looking like this :

And here is the themes page, as you can see at the side is a  menu for filtering items by category or publisher :

The plugins screen is laid out the same :

Clicking on a product takes you to a details page which contains screen shots and the pricing and lets you purchase it once you are signed up.

Conclusion

I quite like the idea of this WP App Store but the implementation is a little rough around the edges at the moment – for example when you want to purchase, a popup box appears and expects you to enter your credit card details with no details of who you are supplying them to and no Paypal option. Some more information is also required, will WP App Store supply support or the vendor? How does that work?

I know this is only the very first release so I expect it will be improved and more information for the customer added as it evolves. Maybe some sort of discount would be good as well – I dont see a benefit of purchasing via this plugin over going to the original site.

What do you think? Will you be purchasing from WP App Store? Do you think in-dashboard marketplaces like this have a future ?

WP Pinner is currently in beta but the first 25 WPLift readers can get in the next round by signing up with this link:

Signup for the Beta Here »

Install The Plugin

Download the plugin, then in your WordPress admin, visit “Plugins” > “Add New” > “Upload” and upload the file.

Activate the plugin and you will see a new menu item under called “WP Pinner”

Configure The Plugin

Under the “WP Pinner” menu, the first thing to do is visit “Settings” and enter your Pinterest account details and choose whether to enable the plugin on posts or pages or both, enter a description and choose whether the plugin should post your homepage URL,the URL of the page its on or a custom URL.

Note: Make sure to enter your Pinterest username, not email here to avoid any errors

Add a Post

On your post writing screen you will see a new meta box in the sidebar with the options to “post on publish” choose one of your boards to post to, a box to enter a description and when you add any images, these appear – tick the one you want to post.

Once the post has been published – If you visit your board on Pinterest you will see the image has been added :

See Your Pins and Stats

If you visit the “Pins” link in the WP Pinner menu, you will see all your pinned images listed here along with various stats such as clicks, likes and repins.

Conclusion

This is a really easy plugin to use, I did have a small problem because I entered my Pinterest email to login and it let me login but wouldnt post – just make sure you use your username to login with. I like anything that makes life easier and this will definately do that – Im going to go add it to WPLift and go back pinning some old posts to see if I get much traffic from Pinterest – Any new traffic source is definately welcome!

WP Pinner is currently in beta but the first 25 WPLift readers can get in the next round by signing up with this link:

Signup for the Beta Here »

WordPress Wave ( Free for May Only )

The ideal portfolio or product showcase theme, WordPress Wave let’s you choose the exact colors or background patterns you want.

Features » Demo » Download »

Adapt

Adapt is a free WordPres theme created by WPExplorer.com that features a very clean and elegant business/portfolio style design that is also fully responsive. Overall the theme is very minimal and super easy to setup. It comes with built-in post types for your portfolio, homepage highlights and homepage slider, so adding your content is a breeze.

Features »  Demo »  Download »

Tint

Tint is our colorful theme that opens up some cool possibilities, its layout is simple and professional and it’s able to transform every element to predefined colors, or any color of your desire. You can adapt it for your line of business with just touch or two

Features » Demo » Download »

Zenon Lite

Zenon Lite is an all in one wordpress theme with 3 awesome fonts, slider, background image easy to use theme option panel. The Theme also includes 3 built-in widgets and 5 useful shortcodes. The theme is SEO Friendly and has plenty of user-friendly options.

Features » Demo » Download »

Lugada

Simple minimalist responsive two column theme with built in slider. Suitable for a blog-based website with custom menu, custom header, custom widget, social share button (facebook like, twitter share, google +1) to make your blog more dazzling.

Features » Demo » Download »

Panoramica

Panoramica is built with the intent of adapting to as many window sizes as possible. It has a fully fluid layout that gives it tremendous flexibility, allowing you to cater to both large and small screens alike.

Features » Demo » Download »

Target

A very neat and clean black and white business theme. The theme supports widgets. And features theme-options, threaded-comments and multi-level dropdown menu. A simple and neat typography.

Features » Demo » Download »

Gridly

A free minimal & responsive portfolio theme ideal for graphic designers or photographers.

Features » Demo » Download »

Grid Theme

Grid Theme Responsive is a WordPress Theme with mobile responsive design, featuring infinite scroll. Grid Theme is perfect for any creative to showcase their portfolio.

Features » Demo » Download »

Silesia

Clean style and elegant theme based on HTML5 powered by NattyWP Framework and advanced Theme Options. You can adjust Colors (more than 15 options), display Twitter and Flickr feeds, Upload logo, Favicon, Backgrounds, etc. without editing code.

Features » Demo » Download »

Andrina Lite

Andrina is Elegant and beautiful Theme with Easy Customization Options built by InkThemes.com. The Andrina Theme features a uniquely curved designed feature section. Andrina Theme is perfect for all kinds of business and personal sites.

Features » Demo » Download »

Danko

Danko WordPress Theme is ideal for charity organizations. It’s focused on raising funds for your charity. Use our free theme to do as much good as possible.

Features » Demo » Download »

Skirmish

An elegant, HTML5 WordPress theme

Features » Demo » Download »

Zircon

Free Magazine style WordPress theme

Features » Demo » Download »

Nova

This is a complete wordpress theme perfect for business and corporate sites, it has a lot of features that can be manage at the “Options panel”, also you can display the blog posts on several post formats such video and galleries. Additionally you can have a special post type for the portfolio/work.

Features » Demo » Download »

Triton Lite

Triton is a all in one wordpress theme with awesome 3 fonts, 1 slider, 1 layout & easy to use theme option panel. The Theme also includes 3 built-in widgets and 5 useful shortcodes.

Features » Demo » Download »

Desire

Desire is a unique  and minimal Free WordPress theme . A perfect canvas for business , small business, techers , personal blogs , designers , photo graphers and car blogs.

Features » Demo » Download »

Stumblr

A free Tumblr style WordPress theme ideal for Microblogging photos & video.

Features » Demo » Download »

Hyperspace

Clean blog oriented theme with smart gallery feature and exclusive UFO widgets. Give your blog a new shiny look today.

Features » Demo » Download »

Monokrome

First in Monokrome family and our most favourited theme to date. Strength lies on the unique main gallery that utilize jQuery Smart Column plugin. Not only it’ll display photos from Flickr but also stay fullsize as the screen increase.

Features » Demo » Download »

Galaxy

Galaxy is a professional WordPress theme which is perfect for corporate business websites and blogs. It features a modern design, post excerpts with thumbnails, header, background, fixed-width, widget-ready and threaded comments.

Features » Demo » Download »

Livewire

Live Wire is about rocking your blogging. It was designed with Mobile first attitude, it supports post formats, it’s translation-ready and what else.

Features » Demo » Download »

Smartbiz

SmartBiz is a stylish and professional theme perfect for business websites and blogs. Highly customizable, it allows you to manage your site look with the easy options menu.

Features » Demo » Download »

Basic

Basic is a new free theme suggested by many users. The purpose of the Basic theme is to give you a starter theme ao you can be your own designer. It only contains the basic layout styling so you can customize the theme with your own perferences using the Themify option panel.

Features » Demo » Download »

Elegant

Elegant is clean and simple yet professional theme, it has 2 color schemes, black and white. It’s best suited for business and portfolio sites, but you can also use it for blog etc

Features » Demo » Download »

• You can purchase Vantage for yourself for $99
• Use Coupon code to get 10% off : WPLIFT – Get it for $89.10

Installing The Theme

Upload the theme you receive after purchase and then visit “Appearance” > “Themes” to activate it :

Once the theme is activated, you will see two new menu items – Vantage and Listings so lets take a look at those.

Settings

The Vantage tab has 3 options – Dashboard, Importer and Settings. Dashboard is just the latest news and updates from AppThemes, Importer is used if you want to import a .CSV file into the site. Lets take a look at settings, the first tab is general.

General

The General tab has your basic options for picking the color of your site ( 8 options ), Google Maps options, Menu Options and Page options :

Payments

The Payments tab is where you configure which currency to use and how much to charge for listings or featured listings. To maximise your content and potential traffic I would make the normal listings free and just charge people to be featured on either the homepage or category page.

Paypal

The final tab is for Paypal and here is where you can enter your Paypal account details and test your site using the Sandbox :

Listings

The Listings in this theme use custom post types and the “Listings” menu item is where you can control these. You can create categories or tags like for normal posts and you can manually add listings or manage existing listings here. You can also create custom forms and view your orders :

Here is what a listing looks like on the front end :

And the form that businesses can use to submit their info :

Conclusion

This is another solid theme from AppThemes – the front end is functional and has all the features you’d expect from a business directory. The back end seems a lot simpler than themes Ive reviewed before from them – its uses the native WordPress styling for the options panel and the use of custom post types for the listings is easy to use for someone familiar with a normal WordPress install.

• You can purchase Vantage for yourself for $99
• Use Coupon code to get 10% off : WPLIFT – Get it for $89.10

WPtouch

WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress website into an application-like theme, complete with ajax loading articles and effects when viewed from the most popular mobile web browsing devices like the iPhone, iPod touch, Android mobile devices, Palm Pre/Pixi and BlackBerry OS6 mobile devices.

• Full Details | Price: FREE

WordPress Mobile Theme

This is a minimalistic theme that can be used by bloggers who want to target mobile phone users. This theme will fit perfectly in all the mobile phones (any resolution) and because of its light weight, will also reduce loading times.

• Full Details | Price: FREE

Handheld

Today, more and more people are visiting your website on a mobile device. Due to small screen sizes, the viewing experience when visiting a normal website can be awkward. HandHeld solves this problem by serving your mobile visitors an alternate design that has been optimized for the small screen. HandHeld works in tandem with your normal theme, and is only used when the plugin detects that your visitor is using a mobile phone.

• Full Details | Price: $39 for access to all Elegant Themes

WP Mobile

WP Mobile: A Premium WordPress 3.2.1 Ready, eCommerce / Free Downloads Theme that looks the same across all browsers & mobile devices!

• Full Details | Price: $32

Mobius

Möbius — is a popular free mobile optimized WordPress theme made by our team in 2010. It has attractive mobile and desktop design useful for entertainment, news and personal blogs. It can also be used for the mobile view only along with WordPress Mobile Pack plugin.

• Full Details | Price: FREE

Tap News

Tap News is an iphone-app style mobile plugin/theme package that instantly converts your wordpress site into a mobile web-application experience. It is specially designed for iPhone/iPod touch, Android, and Blackberry touch mobile device. The theme features elegant iPhone-style sliding layout, and it will truly turn your site into a mobile application. Other features include thumbnail pictures, full support for twitter, social bookmarking, and email.

• Full Details | Price: $49.99

On Demand Mobile

This is the first mobile video theme/plugin that WPtap developed in collaboration with Press75. Tailored to Press75’s On Demand theme, On Demand mobile provides a fully featured video solution on mobile platforms.

• Full Details | Price: $49.99

Video Elements

Coupled with Press75’s Video Elements theme (V2.5), Video Elements mobile allows you to run video centric websites on both PC and mobile platforms.

• Full Details | Price: $49.99

Videly Mobile

Tailored to Press75’s Vidley theme, this is another quality video centric theme on mobile platform built with the modern video blogger in mind.

• Full Details | Price: $39.99

On Demand iPad

Coupled with On Demand mobile theme, WPtap On Demand iPad provides a fully featured video solution on mobile platforms.

• Full Details | Price: $49.99

TV Elements Mobile

Coupled with Press75’s TV Elements, TV Elements mobile will bring an entirely new element to the way you browse and interact with video on a mobile platform.

• Full Details | Price: $39.99

Sofa iBlogger

Sofa iBloggr is the very first WordPress theme made exclusively for iPhone and iPod touch devices. It perfectly fits to 320px wide screen without the need for screen orientation switch. All other desktop computer Browsers are capable to run this theme with no issues as well!

• Full Details | Price: $15

Simple Mobile

Simple Mobile is a WordPress theme designed for mobile devices, especially iPhone. It can be used parallel with another theme and presented to mobile users only (read FAQ ).
Or you can use it traditional way – present it both to desktop computers and mobile devices users.

• Full Details | Price: $20

iWorld

iWorld is a wp theme designed exlusive for iPod Touch and iPhone, Can be use for corporative site, portfolio, blog.

• Full Details | Price: $25

DotMobi

dotMobi is a mobile theme for WordPress. It can be used either as a standalone blog OR in conjuction with one of the many plugins that offer theme switching according to the users platform (See FAQ ’s for more info). Although compact in design, this theme offers all the features to the user that a normal WordPress blog theme has to offer, in other words it doesn’t cripple the users browsing experience by hiding archives and categories selection and other browsing options.

• Full Details | Price: $15

My Mobile Page

My Mobile Page WordPress Theme is a minimal mobile wordpress theme. With a modern look and a lot of cool features this can be the perfect pesonal mobile website for you. This theme can be used for personal mobile pages, web designers mobile pages, artists mobile pages and many other.

• Full Details | Price: $20

My Mobile Page V2

My Mobile Page V2 WordPress Theme is a unique wordpress mobile theme with some amazing new features, 100 % customizable, fluid layout, automatically resized to every mobile resolution, auto device orientation resizable, custom admin panel.

• Full Details | Price: $20

My Mobile Page V3

My Mobile Page V3 WordPress Theme is the third version of “My mobile page” wordpress mobile theme series. The WordPress version comes with a custom ajax powered admin panel, from where you can setup the theme and his features. You can customize the home navigation menu, adding and editing the icons and the numbers of pages to display. Also you can create blog pages, photo galleries, portfolio sections with flexible images and videos. Using the allready 12 smart editor shortcodes you can manage your content easily.

• Full Details | Price: $20

1st Giant Leap

1stGiantLeap Mobile is a HTML5 /CSS3 template tuned to look perfect in mobile browsers. The markup is device orientation (landscape/portrait) sensitive, so when you change device orientation by rotating it 90 degrees CW or CCW this template will look nice.

• Full Details | Price: $15

Mobile Pro

MobilePRO is a beautiful professional WordPress theme for mobile devices. However, it looks great on any computer screen.

• Full Details | Price: $20

Touch Mobile & Tablet

Touch Mobile & Tablet is a WordPress theme built with HTML5 and CSS3 for mobile and tablet devices. It is a fluid design that will adjust to screen size and orientation of the device and is suitable for business and personal sites.

• Full Details | Price: $20

iKon

iKon is WordPress theme designed exclusive for Iphone and Android devices. In case if you want to use this theme on the same WP installation with your main desktop theme the ikon-option plugin will allow you to set all the options of the iKon theme without to activate it.

• Full Details | Price: $20

Breathe

Heavily themed jQuery Mobile based template which suits the best for your blog or portfolio page and it’s easy customizable via Theme Options.

• Full Details | Price: $20

Obox Mobile

Obox Mobile is a Mobile Framework that will seamlessly convert your WordPress site into a mobile friendly experience when people visit it via their phones.

• Full Details | Price: $50

Video Flick Mobile

Tailored to Press75’s Video Flick theme, Video Flick mobile is the perfect all-around video and blogging solution on mobile platforms.

• Full Details | Price: $39.99

Massive News Mobile

Coupled with Press75’s Massive News theme (V2.5+), Massive News mobile provides you perfect solution for news, blogging, and media.

• Full Details | Price: $49.99

WPtap Pages

WPtap Pages mobile theme features WordPress Pages, and only Pages on Home page. With features like elegant slideshow and thumbnail images, it makes a perfect choice for directory listing and product showcases. Three different theme styles are included in this theme/plugin package.

• Full Details | Price: $49.99

Video Tube

Video Tube theme is specifically designed for video blogging and content sharing on your mobile site. It fully supports iPhone/iPod Touch, Android, and touch-based Blackberry devices.

• Full Details | Price: $49.99

News Gallery

News Gallery theme is designed with the photography blogger in mind featuring frontpage slideshow, thumbnail picture, and gallery style layout options. It is the perfect choice for image-centric and magazine style WordPress websites.

• Full Details | Price: $49.99

News Press

News Press theme is a simple and elegant solution for creating an iPhone-friendly News, Blog, and other text-centric WordPress sites. come complete with all the standard WordPress blog features: search, login, categories, tags, archives, photos & more. It also offers many customization features through a user-friendly WordPress admin panel. It will instantly turn your WordPress site into a mobile application experience.

• Full Details | Price: FREE

Retro

“Retro Portfolio” is a WordPress Retro-style theme. It consists on a one-page portfolio with a blog and a contact section featuring a ajax contact form.

• Full Details | Price: $30

Woop

Woop is a single page portfolio template, perfect to promote your work. It uses the latest WordPress version and a full control of backgrounds and colors.

• Full Details | Price: $30

Ability

Ability is a responsive, one page WordPress theme powered with AJAX magic & the slick Swift Framework.

• Full Details | Price: $35

ShapeShifter 2

ShapeShifter is well organized. Take what you love, leave what you don’t, customize the rest. It’s completely in your hands – turn it into the next big thing, or just as your little personal projects, it’s up to you.

• Full Details | Price: $35

In-Motion

IN-Motion WordPress Theme is a one page RESPONSIVE template that is great for all types of pages (business, personal, agency, … ). The design is very clean and contains all features of a modern web page.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Carbon

Clean & easy to use theme for your portfolio needs. It is just one page and has a smooth scrolling animation between sections.

• Full Details | Price: $20

Slicer

The slicer wordpress theme finally makes it painfully easy to showcase your Product / Service / Portfolio. A small one page website or a full blown website – Slicer fits it all. A unique concept for developing your website lets you build your page slice by slice each with a unique styling and appearance. This lets you tailor the layout of each section to the needs of your content. The theme is perfect for featuring your company’s services, sell your products (real books, e-books, learning courses, icon sets, downloadable products, etc.) showcase your company’s profile.

• Full Details | Price: $30

PhotoGrid

PhotoGrid is a unique one page ajax WordPress Theme for photography. PhotoGrid was pure photography portfolio theme, so no blog functionality for now. 100% ajax! – the URL hash was inspired by twitter, use ”#!/” – you also can use previous or next browser button to navigate the previous content, this is also support SEO – everytime pages or image sets open, the title of site will change dynamically.

• Full Details | Price: $40

WordPress HUD

The ideal portfolio or product showcase theme, WordPress HUD let’s you choose the exact colors, patterns, or background images you want!

• Full Details | Price: $30

Hypax

Hypax is a premium template and it is great for portfolio and personal websites. Hypax is a hybrid because it can be used as a simple site or long “One Page” site. We have built a special system based on custom posts, which allows for easy management posts on the homepage.

• Full Details | Price: $35

Da Vinci Theme

Da Vinci Theme is an One Page Portfolio WordPress Theme, best suited for business and portfolio sites. This theme comes with 12 color variations.

• Full Details | Price: $30

Great Portfolio

Great Portfolio is a one page portfolio and a very clean WordPress theme. It also includes a full blog functionality. This theme is perfect for anyone looking to launch a site right away. It’s perfect for businesses, creatives, and individuals who want to quickly publish their portfolio. It has 2 color options to choose from namely, dark grey and dark brown. It also has a smooth scroller to each menu of the page.

• Full Details | Price: $30

Jumper WP

Jumper WP is a single page (with an additional blog page) scrolling WordPress theme, best suited for those creatives who want to show their work in a simple and interesting way. Ideal for a web and graphic designers, photographers etc.

• Full Details | Price: $30

Personality

Personality is a premium one page portfolio WordPress theme, ideal for powering a small presentation website for both businesses or individuals. There’s no blog functionality (the posts are used to power the portfolio) and the main focus is on the pages.

• Full Details | Price: $30

Identity

Identity is new pretty WordPress theme for personal or business blog/portfolio. All in “one page”.

• Full Details | Price: $30

ExcelsiorWP

Excelsior is a clean and professional one page template, perfect for all types of business, companies and personal web sites. This template is tested in all common browsers: Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, IE7 and IE8.

• Full Details | Price: $30

Temptation

Temptation is a single page portfolio template with a minimal and clean design with strong typography, well suited for personal and professional use.

• Full Details | Price: $25

Glider

If you are looking to re-invent your personal website, then Glider just might be the theme for you. Featuring a contemporary style and a unique javascript layout, this theme is sure to leave your visitors impressed. Along with looking cool, Glider is also versatile, and includes a fully featured blog and portfolio section in addition to the basic page-based homepage.

• Full Details | Price: $39 for access to all Elegant Themes

Cocoon

Cocoon is a great minimal one page wordpress theme for business or portfolio.

• Full Details | Price: $30

Locus

Please note that with the latest update 3.0 all the theme files have been revised including the options framework. So if you are planning on updating the theme, you will need to do create your posts and pages from scratch. The help documentation explains all the steps thoroughly with video screencasts. You may choose not to update to the latest version, we will still be supporting the old version. (The new version only supports Vimeo and YouTube videos in the portfolio.)

• Full Details | Price: $30

Solo

A clean, single page portfolio theme with a sleek style and smooth jQuery effects. Automatic scrolling and expanding project display are just some of the features that will help make your work look even more amazing.

• Full Details | Price: $49

Coalition

Coalition is a minimal business and portfolio Theme that is created to be used as a One Page Template. With the help of a Template Builder you can create a single page which holds all your content. The theme can of course also be used as a “normal” WordPress theme. In that case Coalition will behave like any other WordPress theme with a blog, posts, pages etc

• Full Details | Price: $35

Mojo

Mojo is a slick and stylish, one page portfolio theme built with simplicity and ease of use in mind. Beautifully emphasize your work, social profiles, personal and contact details in one stunning page, with the featured fading slider, and elegant light-boxed thumbnails.

• Full Details | Price: $20

Box One

Box One is a brand new WORDPRESS theme developed exclusively for Mojo Themes. It’s perfect for business or a personal users. It’s incredibly powerful, flexible, and easy to use!

• Full Details | Price: $32

Auzora

Auzora is One Page Portfolio WordPress Theme. Comes with massive admin features. Are you tired to see a lot of one page wordpress theme use scrollable effect when change the page? Then check the auzora live preview..

• Full Details | Price: $35

Nanica

Nanica is a great one page wordpress theme with 8 page templates, 3 custom widgets, keyboard navigation, psd files included, and highly customizable options.

• Full Details | Price: $25

Box Two

Box Two is a brand new Responsive Single Page WordPress Theme developed exclusively for MOJO Marketplace. It’s perfect for business or a personal users. It’s incredibly powerful, flexible, fun and easy to use!

• Full Details | Price: $37

Volemo

Volemo – is a modern and attractive one page template, best suited for those creatives who want to show their work in a simple and interesting way. Ideal for a web and graphic designers, photographers etc.

• Full Details | Price: $25

Zipfolio

Zipfolio is a single page portfolio WordPress theme made for designers, photographers, illustrators, video producers and other creative freelance types who need an easy, attractive and effective way to share their work with clients and fans. First, the theme boldly shows the visitor your name and what you do. It then displays your complete portfolio with controls for category filtering and pagination. Large versions of your images and videos are shown in a lightbox with descriptions.

• Full Details | Price: $30

Slide One

Slide One is the most awesome one page theme. It makes your online presence more stunning with Super Cool Parallax background and Ajax post loading

• Full Details | Price: $35

Butterworth Sullivan

The Archer Group

Gioia

WP Explorer

Creative Spark Design

Dr Ian Webster

Dtailed

Xpert Design

ThemeFurnace

The Floating Frog

Nice Hair

Peaxl

HockeyShift

Red Monkey Goo

Earph

Posterrrs

Avant Garden

TEDxTrondheim

Ethan Hackett Design

Ernestus

Love & Luxe

Anthony Calzadilla

Fringe Development

Webcode Builder

EDP Renovaveis

Fancy Rhino

Blind Pig Design

Hoboken Mommies

Fat Smack

Themezilla

Then there are programmers and coders, these individuals who create beautiful things for computers and the web, are perhaps the least needy of all users. Most of them want a simple clean theme for their website, with good functionality, nice user experience, and plugins that make it easier for them to show off their skills.

I am not saying that coders and programmers don’t need sophisticated tools, they need a lot of those tools, but the objective of their website is to remain clean on the front. See Smashing Coding for example, it is clean with beautiful typography and it is responsive to mobile displays.

Programmers and coders are not writers, so basically a lot of them don’t have blogs and many of them don’t like writing long posts. However, all of them like to show off their coding skills and that’s how some of them end up writing blogs with tips on programming and coding.

To many programmers and coders the first problem they face when setting up a website to share their skills is to find a nice clean theme. Then there is the problem of adding code into posts, and then getting some attention from the readers.

WordPress Themes for Programmers and Coders

We are selecting themes that have these three qualities:

• Clean uncluttered design
• Typography that makes reading easier.
• Loaded with features on the backend.

Responsive Theme

As the name suggests that the main feature of this theme is that it is responsive. We are listing this theme here because we think that it has a nice clean look and feel that programmers and coders would find easy to work with.

The theme comes with custom logo and background features has a themes options page where you can create a beautiful landing page with a call to action. Or simply let the visitors land directly on your blog posts. The options page also allows you to add verification code for Google, Bing and Yahoo webmaster tools.

You can also provide social icon URLs which it will display at the bottom of each page. The theme supports Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, Instagram and Pinterest. It does not have an icon for Dribble or any coding community yet. But it is fairly easy to add new icons there.

Download Responsive »

Busine

Busine is an elegant theme from our new theme shop Themefurnace. It made into this list on merit because it is simple and elegant, the two qualities which I thing programmers and coders would want to see in their website’s design. Busine is basically a business website theme with built in features to showcase portfolios and products in sliders and stuff.

It has built in options to disable any features you don’t want. For example, sliders, but if you are a web developer then you might want to use it on homepage to showcase your projects. Another good aspect of Busine is that it uses a comprehensive options panel so you don’t need to get messy with the code. It also allows you to choose fonts you want to use. Typography is an important aspect that programmers should look out for because when you are sharing code and tips you want to make it easier for users to read and understand your tips and typography plays a big role in the readability of text.

Busine comes with built in templates for homepage and blog. To enable blog template you would need to create an empty page and select Blog as the template for that page. Then add this page into menu from Appearance > Menus.

There is plenty of widgets that come built in with Busine. There are also lots of widgetized areas on the homepage, on the blog, in the sidebar footer, etc.

Busine Demo »   Busine More Infov

Annotum Base

Annotum is basically a scholarly authoring platform for WordPress. However, due to its simple layout, good functionality and an elegant feel, I thought some programmers with a little scholarly aptitude towards writing and teaching might find it more useful.

There is a lot of detail available on the official annotum website, but in our scenario we just want it to be used to publish programming tips and code samples. Due to its simplicity and good typography, annotum is a good choice for publishing text content.

It is based on Carrington Theme Framework, and comes with a theme options page of its own. There are Four widgetized areas and some specially built in widgets for the theme. It has three menus two in the header and one in the footer. Annotum comes with four color schemes and you can also choose your own colors to create custom color schemes.

Annotum has an enthusiastic and friendly community behind it to offer community support. It has its own knowledge base and you can also ask questions to other community members.

Download annotum »

WordPress Plugins for Programmers and Coders

Once you have chosen a theme for your website, the next step is to equip yourself with the tools that you would need to share your programming and coding skills with your reader.

Syntax Highlighter for WordPress

The first and the most important tool you would need is the Syntax Highlighter plugin. WordPress has many syntax highlighter plugins available in the official repository. But the one we are reviewing is called Syntax Highlighter for WordPress. It is based on Alex Gorbatchev’s Syntax Highlighter and supports code highlighting for (X)HTML, CSS, PHP, SQL, C, C++, C#, Python, Perl, Ruby, among many others.

This plugin is really easy to use and we use it here on WPlift and some of the most popular coding blogs use either this plugin or something else based on Alex Gorbatchev’s syntax highlighter.
The syntax highlighting is done on the client side using Javascript, so this plugin is easy on your server and causes no extra load on your php processes. Once activated you just need to use shortcodes for the language you are coding in and paste your code between it. Like this [ php ]<?php echo “Hello World”; ?>
[ /php ].

Download Syntax Highlighter »

Buy Me a Beer or Coffee Plugin

There used to be this plugin that allowed you to add a paypal donation button on the sidebar or below the post with a graphic of a beer glass or a coffee mug. I couldn’t find a suitable alternative for that plugin. But that does not mean that you cannot ask your website visitors to buy you a beer, coffee or something else.

You share valuable knowledge on the web that people find useful. You certainly spend a lot of time and effort to put this information on your website. So people would definitely love to buy you a beer or just donate you money to spend on your website. WordPress comes with lots of plugins that can help you collect donations on your website. One of the easiest of these is “WordPress Awesome Donations” plugin. Also have a look at Konstantin Kovshenin’s beer page for inspiration and if you like his idea you can buy him a beer as well.

WordPress Awesome Donations Plugin »

More Tools

Once you start blogging and sharing code, you would come across various needs. Like for example if your website grows and lots of people show interest in your work then you can start offering online classes, or may be offer digital downloads of your ebooks. You would learn a lot more about plugins and I hope that you develop enough interest in WordPress that you end up contributing your own plugins or code to the community.