Source: San Kloud is now available on WordPress.com.  This is really exciting news for us ... by Theme.fm

With WordPress 3.4 beta approaching in the coming couple of weeks, let’s take a look at what new features to expect and eventually be delighted by at the end of the 3.4 development cycle, which would be around mid-April. Excited?

Theme Customizer

One of the most feverishly-developed featured at the moment is the Theme Customizer. This WordPress 3.4 feature is set to provide a new way to browse themes. By providing an easy-to-use, real-time tool to effortlessly apply Header images, Background colors and patterns, Menus, the Title and Tagline and other customizable theme features, the Theme Customizer aims to save trips to the different Appearance areas and improve usability on the whole.

Multi-site improvements

WordPress 3.4 will be able to support a Multi-site environment even if installed in a subdirectory. Multi-site WordPress is aiming to get auto-complete when searching for users and sites. Searching for users on a particular site should be possible, as well as other minor usability improvements.

HTML support in captions

One of the most requested features that many are waiting for is the ability to add HTML to image captions, including links and formatting.

More XML-RPC

XML-RPC is what makes it possible for such applications as Android for WordPress to work with your site. This protocol allows for third-party apps to post content, manage comments, etc. without having to login into the WordPress dashboard. New methods allow for management of custom post types, taxonomies, and user blogs on Multi-site. This change will probably reflect itself in additional functionality in your favorite Weblog clients.

Better international support

Several important localization and internationalization features are going to make it into WordPress 3.4, including better word count for languages with one glyph per word, the possibility to translate theme and plugin headers, better RTL support.

Add Comments in Edit Post

You’ll be able to further manage comments directly from the Edit Post view, by being able to add new comments, too.

Other improvements

• Dozens of bug fixes
• Improved speed along with lower memory consumption rates
• Indefinite scrolling of Themes search screen
• A brand new Theme API, which wraps all the theme functions
• Clicking admin bar scrolls to top (super useful trick)
• Links widget shall be able to sort and filter links

What you’re not going to see

Twenty Twelve

The much-anticipated Twenty Twelve theme will not make it into WordPress 3.4, even though development has started and is ongoing. Twenty Twelve will most likely be shipped with WordPress 3.5 which should be available by the end of October.

Development has temporarily moved to Github.

Favicon upload support

Another long-awaited feature – favicon management right out of the box. There’s slim chance this feature will make it into WordPress 3.4, hopefully we’ll get to see it in 3.5 instead.

Staying informed

For those who are eagerly awaiting WordPress 3.4, checking WordPress.org every day hoping to see some updates (“Are we there yet?”), keep an eye out for daily updates on:

• The WordPress Development Blog
• Trac WordPress 3.4 milestone resolved tickets
• Dot Org News

So, which of the features are you most excited about? Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below, or shoot a tweet our way. Don’t forget to subscribe, we’ll be one of the first ones to let you know when WordPress 3.4 is finally out.

Source: What to expect in WordPress 3.4 by Theme.fm

Oh its nice to be missed!!! Many of you had been asking why Theme.fm had taken a bit of a hiatus, and yes it had been a bit of a while since we’d featured any new articles and tutorials but we can finally reveal why. Over the past few months the team had been hard at work designing and developing a bunch of new themes and also putting together the new Theme.fm Store to host our themes.

Yes we’re passionate about everything WordPress and its one thing writing about themes but its quite another thing when you get down to designing and developing your own!  Its been a lot of hard work and many months going back and forth designing the new Themes and the Store itself. We’ve probably reworked, rejected and redesigned things more times then you can imagine but although there’s been much trepidation its finally time to let the cat out of the bag!

So Theme.fm Store launches today with a selection of our Premium and free WordPress themes to kick off and in the future we’ll be adding a lot more to the store and not just themes, we’ve also got a few plugins in store too. You’ll be hearing more about each of our new themes – Maxwell our Responsive Portfolio theme and SanScrit our Tumblog style theme – but for now we thought we’d take you behind the scenes and tell you a little about how we went about designing the store.

When we look back at the stream of messages that accumulated through Basecamp it’s been a relentless case of back and forth and when putting together feature lists we’ve probably ended up stripping more away to keep the store as simple and easy to use as possible. Why complicate things when you don’t have to?

Essentially the store includes;

• Home Page with our featured Themes (as we have a small selection at launch, the home page and browse themes page are ultimately one and all.)
• Single theme Page which includes a brief description, list of features, image slider, demo and theme details.
• Support through our very own Zendesk helpdesk.

Design Implementations

The store was designed by our wonderkid Aykut Durmayaz who also designed Theme.fm. Aykut used a 16 column 960 grid to design the site and its the same grid we used for Theme.fm and seemed to work just as well for the Store.

Probably the one part of the site that we really went back and forth on was the horizontal top navigation menu. Initially we thought we could work with the existing style of the Theme.fm menu but its diagonal slant didn’t seem to fit well with the layout of the new store and we had a few tryouts before we fixed on a simple navigation menu which would also be easier to expand.

Theme.fm had a freestyle approach about divs’ corners and to match the diagonal top bar we had diagonal title boxes and sharp edged boxes for smaller titles. When it came to the Theme.fm Store we used divs and buttons with 3px round corners and tried be more persistent on this for a modern look and a more serious stand.

For the web font we had used PT Sans Narrow in the titles for Theme.fm and Lato as the text font, but Lato didn’t impress us as much in smaller sizes. For the Store, we decided to change the dominant font from Lato to PT Sans for better usage in smaller font sizes (all of them are Google Web Fonts).

The theme single pages are actually my favourite ones design-wise, the huge laptop slider creates a good simulation on the site for the themes; the eye-candy and catchy theme title part gives a landing page look  to all of the single theme pages.

All in all, we finally feel we’re ready to launch the store. Of course there are a few more features we’d like to introduce in the future and have a few tweaks already in mind that we’ll be rolling out shortly.

No doubt more than anything else, all your feedback and suggestions will feature widely in our plans for the future and we’re very interested to know if there’s anything you think we could do better or something you’d like to see featured in the Store.

Source: Theme.fm Store Now Open! by Theme.fm

The ever popular WordPress, is now powering over 5 million (yes, 5,000,000+) websites and steadily growing, and is becoming more and more attractive to those who use other content management systems, such as Drupal or Joomla and blogging/publishing platforms, such as Blogger and Tumblr.

So, you’ve finally decided that it’s time to switch to WordPress. Be it because of the abundance of WordPress themes and plugins available, its ease of use, or maybe you’re just following a trend (and a good one, for that matter) – its likely you’re going to begin with having a few concerns, the gravest of them being whats going to happen to the content that you’ve already created, and perhaps accumulated over a number of years.

Its nothing to worry about, really! Remember the plethora of WordPress plugins I mentioned? There are literally dozens of plugins that help move content from one platform over to WordPress.

Moving from Tumblr to WordPress

Tumblr Importer is the plugin that does a seamless job (can’t expect anything other than seamless from the people behind it – Automattic and WordPress core developers). Tumblr Importer imports media as well as text content (including drafts, pages, posts) as soon as the necessary credentials are supplied. It may take a while for your blog to be imported, depending on its size, but once the content is in it’s in for good. Tumblr Importer will even update you on the progress of the import at any time.

Moving from Blogger to WordPress

Blogger Importer imports users, comments and, of course, posts into WordPress. You’ll probably not lose any piece of information and should be able to continue writing and publishing without any difficulties.

LiveJournal, MovableType and TypePad to WordPress

LiveJournal Importer downloads posts along with LiveJournal-specific metadata, comments (with metadata) and even takes care of moods.

The MovableType and TypePad WordPress Importer plugin imports authors and posts.

Both plugins are written by the WordPress core developers, are well-maintained and will work perfectly in most cases. If some piece of data is imported incorrectly you can always reset and start from the beginning, having made the necessary adjustments for WordPress to better understand the structure of the content.

Moving from Posterous to WordPress

The Posterous Importer plugin imports posts, comments, tags, attachments and images.

Moving from elsewhere to WordPress

The WordPress plugin repository hosts three pages of various WordPress importers. There’s everything from Twitter timeline import plugins to less known blogging platform importers.

Moreover, this Codex page contains an endless list of importing plugins for platforms you didn’t even know existed.

What about Joomla? Drupal?

The Codex entry stated above gives some great links to plugins that help to move from Joomla and Drupal in most cases. Other cases may require additional setup and conversion, but ultimately, almost everything can be translated into WordPress.

Universal importing

What if there is absolutely no plugin for importing? Maybe you had a custom CMS that nobody has ever used or heard of. There are several advanced techniques that can help transform content to be imported by WordPress:

• RSS Importer – is a general RSS feed parser that can be setup to parse almost any XML feeds.
• The Importer API – an undocumented part of the WordPress core that can be extended and used to import absolutely anything with the right amount of knowledge and skill. All of the Importers by the WordPress theme make use of this class.
• Manual importing – involves a lot of patience and determination, works best with a little amount of content.

Have you recently moved or helped someone move over to WordPress? Share your thoughts and experience. Don’t forget to subscribe and follow.

Source: Switching to WordPress using Importer Plugins by Theme.fm

So, you’ve installed a new WordPress theme and set it up in a way that looks quite good, sifted through the mass of extra options and plugins that a premium WordPress theme might offer and come bundled with, yet some functionality is still amiss. The basics are there alright, blog all you want, write, insert photos, attachments. Yet, once you start thinking beyond the blog, beyond what the theme offers already you’ll find yourself looking for plugins in the Free Plugins Directory that WordPress.org hosts, offering a little short of 19,000 plugins.

Many simple WordPress plugins, like social bookmark links, related posts widgets, lightboxes, etc. usually come bundled with a premium theme. However, even the most expensive WordPress premium themes out there will lack some of the core features that are simply indispensable.

Caching

Caching drastically improves the speed of your WordPress theme, reducing server load and memory usage. If your theme is in the heavyweight class (a huge amount of Theme Options usually tells you that it is), has been coded to satisfy time limits and budget, has never undergone any performance testing, and your site is on shared hosting – caching will be a savior.

The two most well-known caching plugins are WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache. Both are very advanced, but quite easy to use and setup. There’s no winner here, most of the time you will not notice any difference or require any of the additional functionality that one may have over the other.

Lots of WordPress.com Goodies

Jetpack, developed by a huge team of Automattic developers and WordPress core contributors, brings all sorts of WordPress.com extras like a URL shortener (wp.me), e-mail subscriptions, statistics, enhanced spell-checking and lots more.

Jetpack requires you to have a WordPress.com account (no need to have a blog there, just an account). On-going development ensures that Jetpack is always ahead of the game (if updated), with new features, fixes and improvements. The plugin integrates well with all standards and conventions compliant themes and should be considered the swiss-army knife of WordPress Plugins.

Best of all, it’s free.

Spam or Ham?

New websites are not in the immediate danger of coming under mass spambot attack. However, spambots find out about it in a matter of weeks and add it to their lists. Very quickly you’ll find yourself removing dozens of spam comments per day. And if you’re not vigilant enough, they’ll even trick you into thinking it’s a legit comment. Akismet, is another must-have. Developed by Automattic and WordPress core contributors, Akismet is actually bundled with every installation of WordPress by default. This further proves how important Akismet is.

Akismet filters your comments and adds them to the spam queue driven by the contents of the comment and comment fields, the IP and other data. Akismet’s servers do all the hard work of deciding whether a comment is spam or not. In the end, this saves you an enormous amount of time.

So next time you find yourself with a brand new WordPress theme and thinking about what plugins you need to additionally install and use, these three must-haves should probably make the top of your list. WordPress themes can be beautiful, flexible, highly functional, yet they will never offer vital core features as the ones mentioned above. In the end it’s up to you to make your WordPress theme comfortable and happy.

Are there any other vital plugins you would recommend? Like SEO-enhancing plugins? Anything else that themes alone cannot offer? Security? Mobile versions? Let us know by leaving a comment below. Don’t forget to subscribe and get more plugin tips and recommendations.

Source: 3 WordPress Plugins Your Theme Shouldn’t Live Without by Theme.fm

Source: WordPress 3.3 Release Candidate 1 is out for one last final check before the ... by Theme.fm

Another Friday, lots of interesting news and updates from the world of WordPress this week which we’ll go over right about now.

Jake Goldman, Mohammad Jangda, and the folks over at Automattic have released a great free WordPress plugin yesterday called Lazy Load. Lazy Load uses jQuery.sonar to hold off loading images till when they are in the viewport of the browser, which drastically improves page loading times when a WordPress page contains lots of images. You can check out a lazy loading example outside of WordPress here. Installation is simple, upload, activate and enjoy.

WordPress 3.3 Beta 4 is now available for download, which takes us closer to the much anticipated release. The Beta 4 version boasts jQuery 1.7.1 and lots of fixed bugs. Milestone 3.3 is at 99% with 5 active tickets. And an interesting widgets issue has been raised a few days ago in which WordPress developers ask your opinion thereon (poll and discussion is here).

Slobhan McKeown provides some tips on How To Improve Your WordPress Plugin ‘s Readme.txt in a fantastic Smashing Magazine article. No more one-liners, confusing readmes without an English translation, please. The article contains simple examples of how to do it right, goes over the markdown involved, and how a readme is parsed for the plugin directory. A must-read, must-bookmark, must-return-to article that is filled with crucial information for every WordPress developer out there.

Jeffro over at the WordPress Tavern spotted the WordPress Game Show as featured at WordCamp Detroit 2011. What is fun?

WPCandy’s Nick Ciske tell us about the Newly Launched PressBooks that turns WordPress content into a book. The launch has been announced on the official website. If you don’t know what PressBooks is all about check out this SlideShare presentation and a live demo of PressBooks.

Lisa Sabin explains WordPress to her mother in her 40-minute WordCamp Philly 2011 presentation.

Google Knols Move to WordPress and encourages participants to do so as on May 1, 2012 Google Knol will be discontinued in favor of Annotum as their FAQ explains.

And last, and most definitely not least: Thanks WordPress: 50 Things To Be Thankful For is a little something Joe from WPMU.org has prepared for WordPress – a list of 50 things that we should thank WordPress for this Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving!

See you next Friday with more news from the WordPress communities around the world. Don’t forget to follow us on twitter and subscribe.

Source: Theme.fm Weekly Roundup #14 by Theme.fm

Source: WordPress 3.3 Beta 4 Available Now! Of course we all were expecting things a ... by Theme.fm

Source: 12 Lorem Ipsum Generators that Make Dummy Text More Fun is a great list ... by Theme.fm

In this video from WordCamp Chicago, Dre talks about security when working with WordPress. He starts from securing your local computer, using safe passwords and the good ways to securely connect to the Internet and WordPress. Dre then mentions a great deal of techniques on making your WordPress installation more secure, file permissions, SSL certificates, checking your web hosting providers and more.

If you’re running a website on WordPress and especially if you’re making a living out of it (brand or business), then make sure you watch Dre’s presentation before you get into any trouble. And of course, “update, update, update”!

Source: WordPress End-User Security by Dre Armeda by Theme.fm