Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the first-ever WordCamp in Nashville, Tennessee. Nick Weaver and I took a quick seven hour road trip down to Nashville and, if I can speak for us both, had a great time. ¹

The event was organized by John Housholder and members of his development shop Ah So Designs. They did a great job, pulling off a solid WordCamp in just nine weeks with what sounded like a budget on the lighter side. There were two tracks (one for beginners and intermediate users, another for developers) and eleven sessions. I stuck to the developer track sessions, though I missed out on Mitch Canter’s presentation in the morning (that’s what I get for relying on only one alarm) and was briefly distracted by an epic 34-level game of Jenga outside one of the rooms.

The highlight of the event

The highlight for me (aside from the after party, details of which are never, ever to be published of course) was the Otto and Nacin Show, wherein they went through and demonstrated the various features coming to WordPress in version 3.4. Although it was in the developer track, I’d say a majority of the session would have been interesting to any attendee there — particularly since a lot of it was focused on what’s coming in the near future.

I liveblogged a number of my choice favorite quotes from that session, but just in case you missed them:

"How confident are you? How far back will updates work?" "Version 0.7, released seven years ago." "That's pretty confident." @nacin #wcn12

April 21, 2012 12:48 pm via TwitterrificReplyRetweetFavorite

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WPCandy

"No widgets or functions were harmed in the making of this feature." - @nacin #wcn12

April 21, 2012 12:45 pm via TwitterrificReplyRetweetFavorite

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WPCandy

As @nacin changes background color: "You have a terrible sense of color." - @otto42

April 21, 2012 12:32 pm via TwitterrificReplyRetweetFavorite

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WPCandy

"When can we download WordPress 3.4?" "When it's released." @nacin #wcn12

April 21, 2012 12:33 pm via TwitterrificReplyRetweetFavorite

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WPCandy

"If you ask a question that we disagree on, bonus points." - @nacin #wcn12

April 21, 2012 12:07 pm via TwitterrificReplyRetweetFavorite

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WPCandy

Too much fun, really.

The discussion on child themes that Ryan Green led was well received, and he covered the essentials. I also enjoyed hearing about child themes from a user experience professional’s point of view. Though, I think the session itself might have served better in an intermediate or advanced user track. As the session went on the room seemed split: half were curious about framework options, and the other half already had a workflow in place they were happy with.

Russel Fair’s Less presentation generated some interest and fit in well with plenty of code examples to show off. On a personal level I’m still unconvinced LESS is really worth all the trouble, but I certainly understand the features it brings to the table better now than before.

I started a discussion in our forums on this topic, because I’m interested in what others have to say about it.

Housholder himself held a session that I wasn’t sure about until it was underway called The Future of WordPress in Nashville. Taking up both tracks as what could be considered the keynote session of the event (and also the first time I’ve seen Google Hangouts used to stream a session into another room to accommodate seating requirements) it turned out to be a nice way for Housholder to walk through the state of WordPress meetups in Nashville and how those attending could get more involved. It’s only fitting, I think, that all WordCamps have something akin to this to help get more members involved in their regular, smaller events.

He also introduced the group to WPNashville.com, a website he and his team are working on to offer a more ideal place to organize the group, citing problems relying on Meetup.com entirely as their motivation for putting something new together.

I selfishly look forward to seeing their development and what they put together at WPNashville so I can steal their ideas for updating and improving my own city’s WordPress meetup website.

You have to criticize something, right?

Really, my only criticism of the event would be what they recognized right at the beginning of the day: rooms were a bit overwhelmed with attendees (a good thing) and a larger venue will be needed in the future (also a good thing).

Oh, and I would also vote for two-sided nametags on badges in the future. No matter what you do, the laynyard always ends up twisted the wrong way. For your consideration:

Since the information you want to see is on the left, the side you’ll always see is on the right. It’s the Law of One-sided Conference Badges. But the schedule was on the badge, which is a definite plus.

Collection of presentations from speakers

There was a great group of speakers at Nashville, and though I couldn’t see them all in person I’ll be browsing their slide decks as they are posted. These were the speakers and their presentations, linked up if they’ve posted their slides:

• Kenneth White: Categories, Tags, and Custom Post Types! Oh my!
• Mitch Canter: The Blank Screen: Overcoming Your Fear of ‘Pressing From Scratch
• Joel R. Norris: A Beginner’s WordPress Bootcamp
• Ryan Green: Child Theme Frameworks Through the Lens of User Experience
• Rick Sanders and Tara M. Aaron: Copyright and Other Legal Basics for Bloggers (and Developers, too)
• Andrew Nacin and Samuel Wood: Otto and Nacin Show
• Brad McCarty: Making the Leap: From Hobbyist to Professional
• Michael Toppa: Dependency Injection for WordPress Plugin Development (and his post)
• John Housholder: The future of WordPress in Nashville
• Anna Belle Leiserson: Search Engine Optimize Your Site in Three Easy Steps
• Russell Fair: LESS, JS & WP (and demo theme on Github)

If you see other activity, or posts relevant to WordCamp Nashville, feel free to drop a link in the comments below.

Liveblog, duh

I also maintained a liveblog here on WPCandy for the duration of the event, which I recommend checking out if you want to experience a bit of the day for yourself.

Recommended food and drink

What would a WordCamp weekend be without an awesome bar or two? Nick knew his way around Nashville better than me, so he gets kudos for the couple of spots we enjoyed.

• Patterson House is one of the coolest bars I’ve ever been in. Pricey, but the cocktails were worth it.
• Sitar: I’m not normally crazy about Indian food, but this was a nice little restaurant.

What did you think of WordCamp Nashville?

I enjoyed my time in the Music City, and look forward to heading back soon. My next visit might not be until there’s another WordCamp in town, but hey, I’m comfortable planning my travel around where WordCamps are happening any given weekend.

If you attended WordCamp in Nashville last weekend, share your thoughts on it in the comments below.

Anyone in the field marketing will know half the battle with launching a new website is creating a buzz about it. “Coming soon” pages are well and good, but what about a truly viral WordPress theme?

In steps Launch Effect, a WordPress theme by the guys over at Barrell a NYC based creative digital agency. In Launch Effect they have created a WordPress theme specifically for that purpose. It’s their answer to the question: “how do I attract my potential audience and get them to spread the word, all before launching a site?”

Launch Effect review gallery

In addition to the screenshots above, and especially if you are after an in depth look at Launch Effect, you can check out my video review of the theme below. Otherwise, feel free to skip down and catch my thoughts in good old fashioned text.

Video: A first taste of Launch Effect

Click here to view the embedded video.

Firstly, as you will no doubt have seen from the video I used a WAMP install of WordPress so certain elements of the theme will not work, such as sharing on social media sites. See this earlier post for a guide to install WAMP & WordPress.

Installing Launch Effect is the same as any other WordPress theme install, simply download from the Launch Effect site and the tough work is done.

Upon installation of Launch Effect you will notice a new addition to your WP admin sidebar entitled “Launch Effect”.

This is quite simple and gives some options such as Designer, Stats & Export CSV.

Using the Designer tab

Delving a little deeper into this admin sidebar and clicking on “Designer” brings up a nice user interface with a number of expandable boxes for you to edit the look and feel of the site.

As you will see from the image above we have a number of configurable options that allow us to change elements displayed on the front end.

Lets start off with the Head section, This expandable option gives us a number of user input fields to change elements within it like page title, meta description and keywords, favicon and so on. This section also gives us the option of uploading a social media thumbnail to display on Facebook, as well as options for TypeKit and MonoType support to change fonts.

The Page section gives us options such as background color and the ability to set a background image of your choosing.

Container gives us the ability to set the scene for the main section of the site where your message will be displayed for all and sundry to see.

Here, in addition to controlling the box size, position, and color, we can enable an effect like a dropshadow or a glow.

Launch Effect also gives us the ability to embed a video into the page, which it specifies should be a YouTube or Vimeo video.

Then there’s another background image button, which will override your background color you selected earlier in the container section if used.

As well as all of the above points the bottom half of the container section gives us URL input boxes at the base of the container for various social links, with options to disable them.

The Title section is well laid out with plenty of options. Launch Effect also gives you access to Google WebFonts, and you can simply select the font of choice and watch a preview come up of your selected font. There are also predefined font options if you’re not a fan of Google WebFonts. Similar options are available in the Sub-Heading section.

The next couple of options sections allow for control of the text that will show up within the theme. The section after that, though, called Signup Settings, is what really caught my attention.

This section is what really makes this theme stand out, with the real kicker being the unique URL generation for tracking purposes.

What I created with Launch Effect

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. My example doesn’t look amazing — no offense Ryan — but then again if I spent move than twenty minutes on it I’m sure I could create something really quite special. With a nice background image and tinkering with the text you could create a real unique presence for your business or promotion.

It was after I tweaked the content and the colors that I got quite excited with this theme. This is when I turned my attention to just how visitors will interact with the site, and what they will see when they arrive.

Once an interested party submits their email address, the message we’ve defined in the options greets them.

Here they can share the link socially, or if they want to link it on a blog article they can copy and paste their own unique URL specific to them. A returning user also has the ability to check their own effect on your launch by entering the same email address they originally signed up with.

Our user now has insight into how many referrers and how many clicks they have on their own unique URL. This is incredibly handy for end users, especially if you are running a competition based on traffic driven to the site.

Launch Effect comes packaged with its own stats tab, which gives information such as amount of visits a user refers, conversions, and conversation rates.

Have a high referring user? Why not email them directly and gain insight into why they are successful. Build a relationship and give them more incentive’s after all they may have a large social following who takes what they say as verbatim.

The emails here can also be exported in CSV format and imported into the mail program of your choice.

The Launch Effect Theme Roadmap

I had a quick look through the Launch Effect site, and noticed that in addition to a support forum they also have a development roadmap that includes:

• Mail Chimp integration for automatically adding sign-ups to a list as well as powering post-signup notification emails.
• Mobile version.
• Ability to export and import theme options.
• Add color-calculation to “Go” button text color to work against lighter button backgrounds.
• Previewing Google Webfonts within dropdown.
• Test and reselect integrated Google Webfonts faces that work best with both Mac and Windows font-rendering.
• Expand to include a blog.
• Add slideshow embed field to theme options panel.
• Provide error messaging.
• Switch to color picker used by Twenty Eleven theme or similar.
• Provide theme as a plugin that can work as part of an existing site.

Two things that would improve this Launch

I noticed that the options box triggers were sometimes temperemental, and would quickly close then open again on click. The save button also could have been located at both the top fo the option box and at the bottom, but really these are relatively pedantic in the grand scheme of things.

Also, do you know what would make this a killer viral launch theme? The ability to use this theme as a front facing client site, while a secondary WordPress theme is viewable by the administrators until site launch. Then, when you’re ready, you can simply swap over the theme.

This may not be entirely possible and I may well be in la la land with this idea, but I think it would make it a standout theme for sure.  However the development roadmap does state that in the future they will “provide theme as a plugin that can work as part of an existing site,“ so hopefully it might become a reality.

Final Thoughts

What we have here is a solid viral WordPress theme that has a massive potential to attract and promote your business, service or product.

As a company looking to promote you could do a hell of a lot worse than Launch Effect. It’s a refreshingly different WordPress theme and one that does it’s job amicably. Its ability to promote using unique URL generation, login, and tracking really do make this a standout launch theme.

I have used a range of platforms during my last five years in the e-commerce industry. From initial setup and product selection to writing product specs and content for the web, I’ve nearly done it all. And in my time I’ve always been a big believer in using e-commerce platforms for e-commerce and blogging platforms for blogging.

Of course WordPress is an incredibly powerful platform in its own right, with even more on the way with WordPress 3.3 on the horizon. E-commerce is still a growing field within the WordPress community, though, and the question remains: is WordPress really a smart way to manage online shops?

WooThemes think it is, and earlier this week officially released WooCommerce, their free e-commerce plugin for WordPress. WooCommerce is a fork of Jigoshop, which has caused a bit of controversy in the community.

Irrespective of that issue, right now let’s just focus on what WooCommerce has to offer.

Getting a shop started

To start things off I’m going to use the current WordPress default theme, Twenty Eleven. It comes bundled with every downloaded copy of WordPress, so it’s common and most should recognize the theme while we test things out.

Downloading WooCommerce is a matter of visiting WooThemes and signing up for a free account. You’ll want to do this anyway, since the WooCommerce documentation will require you to login to view it.

WooCommerce Options

Upon installation, which is as simple as installation any normal plugin, you will immediately be greeted with the WooCommerce options panel.

It’s a standard WordPress tabbed interface (which Ryan would no doubt like) with a number of options. The screens live under a new top level menu called WooCommerce.

The WooCommerce main options panel gives you the opportunity to select your base country and the countries you are willing to ship to. You can select whether you want USA only, UK only, or all but a certain country, and so on.

You also have the option to allow for guest checkout, which will remove the cumbersome need for your customers to register for yet another website. Force SSL is a worthwhile addition if your store grows and you want to give customers peace of mind via an accredited SSL certificate.

The WooCommerce CSS option will add the WooThemes CSS styling to the theme you’re using. See the screenshot below to see the difference between the CSS off and the CSS activated.

Without WooCommerce CSS

With WooCommerce CSS styling

If you cannot do without social media, Woo has you covered with ShareThis. Simply sign up at ShareThis and paste in your ShareThis publisher ID to enable your potential customers to do your marketing for you. The same goes for your Google Analytics ID.

Working with Pages

The Pages tab lets you define the pages for various functions of your store. WooCommerce actually creates all of these needed pages upon installation, which is a time saver. Also next to each shop page listed is a shortcode, which can be used at will to integrate certain shop functionality into a blog post or page.

Speaking of shortcodes, I would really like to see shortcodes generated for each product created on the back end. Imagine how powerful it would be to write an informative blog post in your niche, and then hit the user with a couple of related products right in your post.

Catalog

The catalog section allows you to select whether or not you wish to display fields for SKUs and the weight for products. If enabled, these in turn show up on the product pages themselves.

Another useful feature is the “Cart redirect” option, which will redirect customers to the cart after adding a product to it. To be honest I have seen some e-commerce platforms built from the ground up that didn’t have this option. For me, this is a must have feature. Others may disagree, but I think showing end users the cart after purchase deters them from searching for more interesting items. It gives the impression that you have filled your cart, so you should pay for it and leave.

Image options are configurable here as well. The sizes here will depend on your WordPress theme; just pick something that will tie in appropriately. Other options such as currency for prices and decimal placement etc are all configurable here as well.

Inventory

The inventory options allow you to select whether or not you wish to enable tracking of stock, display notices of low stock and so forth. This won’t really be necessary if you decide to sell digital products, but if you have a shop or warehouse full of stock and you want to give notice or warning when they are low this is a must have. The option to hide products that have low stock or have reached a threshold is a nice plus that puts WooCommerce up there with some dedicated e-commerce platforms.

Shipping section

Quite simply: this section gives you the option of enabling shipping calculations, as well as a shipping calculator.

Note: The shipping calculator is a fantastic feature for any e-commerce platform, let alone a WordPress e-commerce plugin such as this. However to get the most out of it you will need to pay for an extension via WooCommerce called Table Rate Shipping.

The ship to billing option will only allow shipping to the billing address. This is handy if you’re concerned about fraud, but would I use it? Probably not. People like to pay for goods and have them delivered to a variety of addresses, whether it be their work place or a friend’s house as a gift. Of course it’s just an option, and it’s always good to have options.

Tax options

Tax settings, for me, will make or break any e-commerce solution. The companies I have worked for in the past have had exacting requirements on taxation. Shipping to the US, EU, UK and other countries each have their own taxation rules.

The added benefit of this section is you can allocate tax rules based on the designated country. For example US has different tax rules for different states, same as the rest of the world. This option really is one less headache; trust me I have been there and the fact this is part of the system is a great addition for anyone thinking of creating an online store with WooCommerce.

The option to display prices inclusive of or exclusive of tax is useful if you are a business to business company, since It gives them a clearer indication as to what their cost will be, and what they will get back from the tax department on business purchases.

Shipping methods

Love them or hate them, WooCommerce has a number of configurable shipping options. I for one am glad to see care has been taken with this section. Shipping methods can be a pain. Also worth noting: you do have the option of enabling free shipping as well, site wide.

So we have flat rate shipping which is useful if you have struck a deal with a delivery company or are just trying to compete with other online stores.

There is also a per order charge or per item charge (drop down selection) you can also choose whether to have your shipping taxable or not, whether to charge handling fees, etc. To get the most out of the individual producing shipping options you will need to pick up the Per Product Shipping extension from WooThemes for $50.

Method availability is an excellent feature, since if we allow everyone to have the same level of shipping then things could get messy. By clicking on method availability this opens up the drop down whereby you can select specific countries to give a certain shipping method too.

My reservation with the system in it’s current format is that every online retailer is different and has different needs. It would have been nice to have a way to charge different amounts depending on a locale / country by default. This is not a deal breaker though, and a paid for extension is available (see above image) called Table Rate Shipping which extends this section significantly for $50.

Payment gateways

Gateways could make or break WooCommerce; thankfully we have options. BACS payments are supporting, which can be useful for those looking to deal with business to business customers for large orders. This isn’t the first time I have seen this method, but it’s still a welcome addition. PayPal support is there, though only standard PayPal, as well as Cheque payments.

Payment methods in WooCommerce

Again, other payment options are available as commercial extensions Paypal Pro, webcash, 2checkout, Payson, Paygate and Authorize.net, each for $50 from WooThemes.

Adding products to the store

So those are the options we have. What next?

This is where the fun starts: time to add products. Adding a product is a relatively simple affair. First, we’ll add a category.

After you added a new product category it’s then on to adding a new product. This is where things get really interesting.

Clicking on Add a new product throws up a screen similar to what you will see when creating a new post on a standard WordPress install. You will, though, have a few new options.

Product Entry

I’m a bit picky when it comes to e-commerce, so this is where I got excited. It’s nice to see a useful selection of tabs and configurable options. First up is product type, which you can select from options that include Simple, Downloadable, Variable, Virtual and Grouped.

Simple quite literally means simple, or an easy-to-configure product with minimal options.

Select Downloadable and your greeted with these product type-specific options:

Product Options for Digital Downloads

Upon first review the “Upload a file” button here didn’t actually work. It has been fixed with the 1.0.1 update, however. Good thing it works now, since it will no doubt win favor with those who wish to set up a digital download store, such as (for example) selling WordPress products like themes and plugins.

Each respective product type carries its own range of options, so if you are looking to set up downloadble products WooCommerce has you covered, and if you have products with options you are also covered.

The “Up-Sells & Cross-Sells” section allows you to manually input a product and then allocate it to your current product, in a similar vein to Amazon’s “Customers who bought this, also bought this” feature. Initially this option was giving me trouble, but that problem seems to have been fixed in the 1.0.1 update as well.

Your visual store

Now let’s look at what your customers will actually see and experience. WooCommerce includes breadcrumbs for navigation as well as some rather excellent sidebar widgets like the price filter (love this), top products and a handful of others.

Product page in all it's Twenty Eleven Glory

Product pages are handled very well in the Twenty Eleven theme, and demonstrating that it can be used with this theme highlights the helpful nature of WooCommerce.

Product reviews

Having worked in e-commerce for a while now, and having heard various social media gurus state that sharing on social media is where it’s at, I remain old fashioned. I’m old fashioned in the sense that I believe a decent review of a product can affect the opinions of an undecided buyer.

Add a review to a product

WooCommerce has us covered in this respect, using a simple ratings system built on top of the WordPress comment system and using a handy star rating.

Reporting and figures

Everything so far is lovely. But what about the hardcore store owners? I want facts and figures. I need store reporting.

This, again, is taken care of.

If you have installed WooCommerce by now you will have noticed that on your Dashboard you have some new widgets:

• monthly sales overview,
• recent orders, and
• recent reviews, which you can amend, trash, publish and so on.

WooCommerce Reporting

Beyond the widget, your WooCommerce menu also provides a link to a full reporting screen (shown below) that’s similar in structure to the WooCommerce settings pages. A tabbed interface with a number of options for each tab which gives you better granularity in terms of drilling down to what you need.

WooCommerce Reporting Tabs

From this tabbed interface we can get an overview of daily sales, monthly sales, product sales, top sellers, and top earners. All of these options can be chosen from under the sales tab.

Clicking on customers gives us better insight into total sales, as well as total guest sales. Total guest sales is a nice feature that shows all of those who have purchased without signing up. The stock tab gives you an overview of what is running low and what is out of stock.

Final thoughts

There is an awful lot to WooCommerce, and if you read this whole review you’re likely on your third or fourth coffee. By now you might have even downloaded the plugin and formed your own conclusions, which I encourage.

This is what it’s all about: feature rich for the store owner and easy to use for the customer.

The front-end user interface that WooCommerce provides is pretty darn good, with a smooth easy to use system. From a store owner’s perspective, an interface that’s easy for customers to use will lead to more sales, to a degree.

Would I recommend WooCommerce to others? Yes I would. Your store can be set up on its own or bolted to your existing blog in a relatively short period of time. It has a great user interface and above all else it’s easy for the customer to use it and make purchases. From a WordPress administrator’s point of view it is relatively easy to utilize add products and, well, administrate the shop.

In the end that’s what it’s all about: feature rich for you, the store owner, and easy to use for the customer.

Before the 1.0.1 update I would have given WooCommerce a 3, but with the update it’s a solid 4 out of 5 mints. With paid extensions and plenty of themes to choose from the first week it’s availble, it would seem that WooThemes is investing quite heavily into this side of their business. And it could end up paying dividends for them. WooCommerce is one to watch.

This review was completed using only the free download of WooCommerce and the Twenty Eleven theme.

Sometimes the line between hobbyist and professional can be a blurry one. And regardless of your chosen niche, whether it be cooking, knitting or coding, there are the essential readings, books, magazines and, nowadays, websites that everyone reads. The WordPress Bible, 2nd Edition is just that book for WordPress.

While reading it I was constantly reminded of the Haynes Manuals for car enthusiasts.

Where the Haynes manuals shows you how to disassemble and rebuild an entire car, Aaron Brazell shows you how WordPress works and how to work with it. Every aspect of WordPress is coverd and is done so with little fanfare or flourish.

But this is in no way a complaint.

Explanations are clear and concise with lots of tables, screenshots and code samples. Narratives for the most part are left completely out. The book seems to be written with the assumption that the majority of readers will not read it starting at page one. Instead, I imagine it sitting on people’s desk ready to be referenced when a new solution or knowledge of a particular aspect of WordPress is needed.

There are also some truly standout sections that go beyond WordPress, including BuddyPress, caching and backing up. Additionally I have found myself flipping to Appendices A (WordPress Hook Reference) and B (Template Tags) rather than going to the WordPress codex site or doing a Google search. It might be my personal tastes but I find the simple descriptions and tables easier and faster for referencing.

I imagine the WordPress Bible sitting on people’s desks, ready to be referenced…

Living in Austin I had the benefit of meeting with Aaron Brazell at a local coffee shop to pick up our review copy of the book in person. We spoke for a short time about himself and the book. He explained some of the many changes he had to make between the first edition (which came out around the time 2.9 was released) and the second edition. These include adding custom post types, custom taxonomies and totally rewriting Chapter 22 which covers multisite functionality.

Aaron has worked with WordPress since 1.2 and as one of the founders of WP Engine he works daily with optimizing, scaling, and protecting WordPress sites and his expertise really shows in the WordPress Bible.

While it doesn’t feature an iconic Terry Davey cut-away cover illustration like the Haynes series did, the WordPress Bible goes just as deep into the nuts and bolts of what makes WordPress work as the series of automotive manuals does for cars.

This review was completed with a copy of WordPress Bible, 2nd Edition, provided to WPCandy for review purposes. It is the publisher’s custom to request an Amazon review in exchange for the copy which the Author has done from his personal Amazon account.

It has been my experience that even experts in a field sometimes need a refresher in the basics. Either the fundamentals have changed since they were students or there are minor details that they never need to know before. Sometimes you just need to go back to school.

Just as important are the subjects it doesn’t cover.

WordPress For Dummies, by Lisa Sabin-Wilson is the perfect primer for WordPress. Between the iconic yellow covers are the integral basics everyone should know but maybe didn’t learn. I have never had the need to really dig in and learn about WordPress.com, setting up a MU network or importing a site from Blogger, but it’s all in there. And I know I’m not the only one who has had a client ask a basic question that just stumped them. This is the perfect go-to resource for those situations.

This is also a great book to suggest to clients. It can turn a novice into a capable user pretty quickly without going into advanced topics that might result in a 3am phone call because they broke their site. Advanced users might scoff at the sections on “Uploading and using images…” or “Setting your profile…” but these are important basics that one might gloss over when introducing a newcomer to the world of WordPress.

Just as important are the subjects it doesn’t cover. There are no advanced chapters that will make your clients eyes haze over. It seems the author, Sabin-Wilson, intentionally kept PHP references, and any mention of editing files to a complete minimum.

No one wants to be caught buying or reading a “For Dummies” book that deals with their profession but this one might be worth the risk. Because it is a “For Dummies” book the writing is very lighthearted, instructions are listed step by step and there are heaps of screenshots and URLs. WordPress For Dummies holds your hand and shows you the fundamentals rather than lecturing you.

It makes you comfortable learning, even if it is something you feel you should have known already. Because of that it deserves a place in your WordPress library.

This review was written using the Kindle version of WordPress for Dummies 3rd Edition.

You might remember Ronald Huereca as our WordCamp Austin ticket “winner”. I had the pleasure of talking with him at the event and quickly realized he knows his stuff, so much so that he was a presenter at WordCamp Philly last year. It is a good thing then that he has put some of his knowledge down on virtual paper.

“WordPress & Ajax” is not a book for the casual WordPress user. It is an informative read on using the power of Ajax to make websites more dynamic and user friendly so a working knowledge of PHP and jQuery is needed to follow along. The book would probably most benefit WordPress developers who have an idea what Ajax can do, but not how to implement it in their own work.

In my opinion, the quality and expertise in “WordPress & Ajax” is up there with any O’Reilly or Wiley book.

While Ronald’s writing style is conversational and at times quite funny (an unfortunate rarity in tech book), he dives right into his subject with enthusiasm. He offers lots of examples and not only explains the “how” but goes into the “why”, which helps the reader understand new concepts and connect them to what they already know.

The original version of “WordPress & Ajax” was released in April of 2010. This 2nd edition, released January 1st, now uses the latest WordPress functions and WordPress’ built-in admin-ajax.php file. Ronald also went through and reorganized chapters, even adding a couple, and formatting the images and diagrams to look good on a variety of ebook readers (it looks great on my Kindle) as well as in print.

In my opinion, the quality and expertise in “WordPress & Ajax” is up there with any O’Reilly or Wiley book. Add in the value you get from free updates when new editions come out, and it is really a no-brainer for anyone interested in utilizing Ajax in their WordPress repertoire.

This review was completed with a digital copy of WordPress & Ajax, provided to WPCandy for review purposes.

I have spent the last several days reviewing WordPress Top Plugins by Brandon Corbin and all I can say is WOW – why didn’t I know this was available!

This valuable book provides an overview of some of the best WP plugins you could ever use including WP-DBManager, BuddyPress, WPTouch, NextGen Gallery, and more.  Brandon methodically lays out a road map on understanding how to install plugins, how they work, and managing them.

Plus I really like how he breaks down each plugin review by:

• Why It’s Awesome
• Why It Was Picked
• Manual and Automatic Install Directions
• Geek Level – Perfect for me!
• Configuration Location
• Used In (what it’s used for)

While I know the saying “There’s a Plugin for that!” is so true, WordPress Top Plugins opened my eyes to some excellent tools I never knew about and provided me with a better understanding of plugins without having to search all over the web.

I recommend this book for designers and developers alike as a handy resource for their client projects or personal work.

You can find the book at Packt’s website.

This review was completed with a digital copy of WordPress Top Plugins, provided to WPCandy for review purposes.

Opaline is a new hotel and business focused theme by Viva Themes. WPCandy gave away a copy of Opaline in our post about its release last week. Before we gave it away, I took it for a test drive on my local install of WordPress.  I wanted to see just how Opaline works behind the scenes, and whether I think it’s worth the $47 price tag.

I’ll share with you what I found.

Opaline theme review gallery

First Impression

Opaline is a nice looking theme that provides a welcome break from what has become the standard “business” theme layout: a huge image slider and 3 column widget area. Instead, Opaline greets the viewer with a nice slider, but not too big, and a well placed widget area on the left hand side.  The black banner under the main sidebar and slider is for the home page only and consists of two widget areas.  The content area of the home page displays posts in two columns with a second home page sidebar on the right side.

The theme’s font is sans serif throughout, using Arial for body elements and Trebuchet MS for headlines.  The logo font is Amerika, a free font provided in the theme by the Viva folks in .ttf format.  Content is displayed at 12 pixels throughout the sight, which is fairly small, but it wasn’t a problem because the line height was tall enough for a comfortable read.

Installation and Setup

The instruction manual is well written and nicely styled. It walked me through the essential elements of setting up Opaline.

After activating the theme, I went to set up Opaline’s custom options. For the slider, I was allowed to choose from plenty of transition methods, animation speeds, and delay times.  I had an opportunity to specify my logo url, or disable using the image logo at all. I could also choose whether to enable the theme search box and specify what category to pull posts from for the front page.

Setting up the theme’s four widget areas was simple enough.  Each of the WordPress default widgets were nicely styled to fit each place I tried them.  I was slightly disappointed not to have any custom widgets available considering the price of the theme.

Getting the slider going was probably the most time consuming thing to do, although the output was very flexible.  To make a post or page show up in the slider, I had to use custom fields within each post or page’s editor. I had an option to customize the feature image, or use the default WordPress featured image meta box. I could also enter custom fields to create a custom title, caption, and link if I didn’t want to use the defaults for the post or page.

Room for improvement

Nothing bothered me too much about the theme, but a few things did leaving me wishing for more.

• While the enhanced slider options were nice to have with the custom fields method, if I changed my featured posts a lot it could become a pain. Granted, most hotels or businesses would probably keep the same pages featured for some time.
• I was slightly disappointed that when the custom logo image option was disabled, the site description wasn’t enabled under the title.
• Also regarding the title, the space allowable for the image is pretty limited, so I would have to use a pretty small logo (under 70 pixels tall) to have it fit properly in the header.
• One shortcoming that could be easily fixed was the lack of future proofing.  Specifically I noticed when viewing the theme in IE 9 that border-radius for div elements was not defined.  The theme uses -moz-border-radius and -webkit-border-radius many times to achieve rounded corners, but didn’t use border-radius for forward compatibility.  I’m sure this will get taken care of in the first update though.
• The theme has built in shortcodes to use for different colored buttons. This was great, but it took me a while to get them implemented because the shortcodes are only styled to “a” elements, and I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong until I actually included the link.  A brief note mentioning that in the documentation may save at least one other person a headache.  Also, a full list of the available shortcodes in the documentation, rather than a link to a demo, would be preferred.
• Maybe it’s the framework fan in me, but I wish Opaline had some hooks built into the template files to let me take control of the theme a bit via my functions.php file rather than having to edit core theme files.

Overall impression

All in all I think Opaline is a nice theme. The design is unique and very fitting for the target audience.  A person unfamiliar with editing code could get it up and running for their site with the provided documentation in very little time.

For a standalone theme the price is reasonable, and could be used right out of the box by an end user or customized relatively quickly by a developer to use on client work.

More information

View the Opaline demo.

Viva Themes Opaline release post.

Themify is a new theme shop brought to you by Nick La of webdesignerwall.com and Darcy Clarke. Themify has seven themes for sale and one for free at the time of this writing. They’re all very attractive themes, and include an advanced options panel: the Themify framework.

Themify’s description of the Bloggie theme:

“Bloggie features a beautiful slideshow on the homepage that makes your site stand out from the crowd. It has multiple widget areas for displaying banner ads. It is a clean theme that works well with any background images and content.”

So what stands out?

Bloggie theme review gallery

Theme options

The backbone of every Themify theme is the Themify framework. This is a slick options panel that lets you control a lot of the theme’s elements without opening a code editor.

Visual CSS Editor

The most impressive part of this feature set is the visual styling editor. Every element can be customized from this panel. Think of it as a front-end to a CSS editor. The selectors are grouped together much like a well-organized style sheet, so everything is easy to find. The properties and values match the syntax of CSS. Very powerful and easy to use if you know even a little CSS.

If you want to go further and add some of your own CSS, just create a new style sheet named custom_style.css in that directory and hack away.

Widgets

There a six custom widgets including one for Flickr and one for displaying your latest Tweets. There a six widget areas plus up to four extra footer widget areas.

Slide show

The homepage feature box lets you display a slide show of featured images from a chosen category. No plugin needed, the theme has a built slider that uses the jQuery cycle plugin.

Other Useful Features

Bloggie includes an XML file that imports dummy content so you can get right to work on customizing the site before creating content.  There are three page templates: a default with content + sidebar, a full width template and Site Map template that automatically populates all your categories, posts and pages. The code is well commented. There are comments that explain where you should and shouldn’t edit, and a few funny warnings.

My Conclusion

I’ve used quit a few themes for various projects, mostly starting with plain and simple themes then adding layers of stuff and tweaking it until it’s done. Usually this involves creating a child theme and overwriting a lot of CSS, installing a slide show plugin, and adding a bunch of code snippets to functions.php. Lather rinse repeat.

Bloggie and the other Themify themes would reduce a lot of this because the options panel is so powerful and easy to use. I would still need to edit CSS to change layouts, use embedded fonts, or trick stuff out with CSS3. That’s all still possible with Bloggie, just drop your styles in a new CSS file named custom_style.css.

If you want an easy to customize WordPress theme, I would suggest checking out this theme. It would be best to know a little CSS for the options panel to make sense. Even if you were just starting out, this would be an easy way to learn some of the properties and values of CSS without having to wrangle with specificity and inheritance.

This review was completed using a review copy of Bloggie provided to WPCandy by Themify.

More Information

The Bloggie Theme page at Themify: http://themify.me/themes/bloggie

Documentation: http://themify.me/docs/bloggie-documentation

The Theme Foundry’s latest tumblog theme, Shelf, was designed by Jon Hicks and sports a photo-real, 3D design. Attempted by the wrong people, the words “photo-real” and “3D” used together when describing a website design could lead to disaster. In this case, the end result is very pleasant and just works.

But a quality theme is more than just looks. It’s about how it functions, how easy it is to use, and what purpose it can have for the blogger. In other words: is Shelf worth taking off the shelf and putting to use?

Let’s dig in and find out.

Shelf Theme review gallery

A theme like this is tough to describe, because it is very different. So before we get started, check out The Theme Foundry’s demo, or our quick hands on video with the theme right here:

Okay, so now we get it, right? Cool.

Easiest time installing a Shelf I’ve ever had

I have one of those homes where I assembled 90% of the furniture in it. I assembled my desk, my coffee table, and my bed. Take my advice: assembling beds will melt your face off.

I only bring this up to say that the process of setting up Shelf is much, much more pleasant. I installed Shelf on my local WordPress installation, and set to work playing with it.

Shelf uses a custom options screen which is the first thing you’ll see upon activating the theme—a nice touch actually, and one that more theme developers should consider. Forwarding someone over to your options page after activation might not be right for every theme out there, but for themes more heavily dependent on initial settings it’s a nice little push in the right direction.

Custom “Tumblogs” taxonomy

Shelf employs a custom taxonomy system for the tumblogging feature, allowing you to tag and categorize your posts freely. This is a great example of doing it right. Let’s run down the six tumblog types that Shelf supports out of the box:

• Article
• Image
• Link
• Audio
• Video
• Quote

Each of these tumblog types can be entered in a custom QuickPress-like box from the Dashboard. I actually didn’t notice this box until I was almost finished playing around with it. I don’t feel qualified to speak on it, though, since I don’t think I’ve ever actually used the standard QuickPress box. It’s cool that they thought of it though.

Tumbling Microblogging Tumblogging
Posting with Shelf

The actual posting process is pretty straightforward. Check the box for the type of content you’re adding, then jump straight to their custom meta box called “Tumblog Custom Settings”. There is an entry field for each type of content you can add.

It seems unnecessary to say it, but I will: this theme looks very good. I mean, it’s a Jon Hicks design. Game over.

This was actually one of the things I was most interested in seeing executed. Adding special kinds of content is always a fun challenge, because without some instruction to the user on how they should enter their content, all sorts of formatting issues could pop up on the front end. These fields take care of that problem, and using them I always felt like I knew what was going to end up on the blog.

One quick side note: Since the bulk of the content you’re adding here will be in custom fields (although you can also add content as a normal post) keep in mind that switching themes in the future might mean that some of your content won’t display anymore. Just a heads up.

Classy, beautiful tumblog design

It seems unnecessary to say it, but I will: this theme looks very good. I mean, it’s a Jon Hicks design. Game over.

Just look at this:

Yup. It’s good. See our gallery for more on the design of the theme.

Themes that give you ideas

Some of the most interesting WordPress themes anymore are the ones that are serving niches, things that likely weren’t thought of back in the days when weblog was slowly becoming blog. Niche themes really shine when they offer an idea you hadn’t considered before.

Shelf is a theme that gives ideas, but in a different way than some themes. It’s so interesting, so intriguing, that you want to find a reason to use it. There has to be a justification for grabbing this theme, you think. Whether there ends up being a great reason for using it or not, at least your content will look great sitting on this particular Shelf.

This review was completed using a pre-release copy of Shelf, provided to WPCandy for review purposes.