WordPress bloggers rejoice! RocketTheme, designers of the world’s best looking Joomla! and phpBB3 templates has launched their WordPress Theme Club with a handful of WordPress offerings ported over from their renowned Joomla! Template Club.

When I began writing for the web again a couple of years ago I first used WordPress to publish my content. Coming from a background of writing html in a text editor back in the 90′s, I saw a friend working on his WordPress blog and immediately thought how accessible it was. Anyone could publish web content using this tool I thought.

So I dove in, and WordPress allowed me to have a nice looking site with an article on it after an afternoon’s worth of tweaking the design. It’s a brilliant tool that has a simple interface to a simple end, and it just works.

However, within a month it just wasn’t enough. I soon made my own WordPress theme from scratch in an effort to get my web pages to look more polished. Even then I felt handcuffed by the limitations of working within WordPress.

Before my second month with WordPress was up I had migrated to Joomla!, and I’ve never looked back.

Don’t take any of this as a slam against WordPress, because it isn’t. WordPress is a great tool that has brought the ability to publish web content to millions of users across the globe. We have a much richer web today because WordPress exists.

I had always wondered why WordPress themes looked so amateurish compared to the really good Joomla! designs. Was it some inherent limitation of WordPress, or were there simply no great designers making WordPress themes?

As time has gone by better looking WordPress designs have surfaced. A host of magazine and newspaper style themes exist, some commercial some free. WordPress design is much improved in 2009, but at the end of the day every time I see one of these new themes right after I get over my initial admiration of the layout I realize that I can identify it as a WordPress web site within about two seconds.

WordPress themes and the WordPress backend will continue to improve, but WordPress will remain WordPress, which is exactly as it should be. If the powers that be behind WordPress ever moved it into more CMS-like behavior than it already has I think they would be shooting themselves in the foot. They already have the right product. Refine it, but don’t change it to be like the other CMS solutions. They have different markets.

Ok, so WordPress is the logical choice for the vast majority of people wanting to jump in and put some content on the web. For those WordPress users who need more out of their page design than the standard two or three column blog layout there are more choices today than there were even a year ago. Many of them still look like lipstick on a pig however.

RocketTheme to the rescue.

RocketTheme has made the first seven offerings in their WordPress club available. You can demo all of them here. These are all existing designs from their Joomla! club. I’ve looked them over, and they are not exact replications, but they have come close to offering WordPress themes that look and function as great as their Joomla! counterparts.

The Mynxx theme for example has VirtueMart integration in the Joomla! version, which is absent in the WordPress theme. I don’t know whether or not if there is a plugin for WordPress that would add the ecommerce functionality back into the Mynxx theme. You can look at the original Joomla! template here to see what I am talking about.

The RocketTheme WordPress Club is $50 for a 90 day membership, gives you full access to all of their WordPress product, and allows you to implement their WordPress themes on two sites. For $75 you get the same for a year, and you get to implement the themes on three sites instead of two.

The RocketTheme Joomla! club receives a new template on the first of every month, rain or shine. The WordPress club is only five days old as I write this, so I don’t know how many of their templates they intend to port to WordPress or what their WordPress release schedule looks like. My guess would be the whole ball of wax as WordPress users represent a considerable market. Membership also gains you entrance into their support forums, where answers to problems you encounter are answered by RocketTheme members and other users with lightning speed, in my experience.

If you offer a web forum attached to your site, RocketTheme also offers phpBB3 versions of most of their designs so you can have a perfectly matched site and forum. I used to use one of their SMF templates on AV Enthusiast, and I felt pretty slick having a forum that exactly matched my main site. Of course, no one used the forum, but it looked very nice. The phpBB3 club is a separate membership and not included in your WordPress club fee, so if you want one of their phpBB3 templates you will need to shell an additional $50-$75 clams.

RocketTheme offers Joomla!, phpBB3 and WordPress designs that seamlessly plug in to your site, offer incredible flexibility with page design, produce valid markup and just flat out look better than anything you’re going to get short of paying someone to create a one-off design just for you. Take a look at their demos and see for yourself.

The bar for WordPress theme design has just been raised.

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For the people who are using wordpress as their CMS, here’s a utility that you should not let go of. The majority of us people are using free wordpress themes and yes, searching for new ones and updating them time to time. But most of us don’t know if a certain wordpress theme contains malicious or unwanted code, advertisements, links that you can’t get rid of, javaScripts inserted into legitimate themes by third party theme download sites etc.

This can surely cause you a problem in form of either getting your wordpress blog/website hacked etc.

Here’s a solution called “TAC” aka “Theme Authenticity Checker”. What it does is searches the source files of every installed theme for signs of malicious code and if there is such thing, it displays it which you can afterwards check with the author and sort things out.

Tac basically is a wordpress plugin which can be installed easily. After installation, perform a scan on all the themes installed on your blog and it will check for any kind of threats that they might have.

Download Plugin

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I’m hoping that there’s a WordPress expert out there who can help me.  As you can see my header is messed up.  Actually my whole theme is, but that’s the most visible bit.

I think the problem is that my theme has a settings section within the WordPress dashboard and none of the changes I make there are getting saved.  I believe that this settings file is created by the functions.php file, but I don’t know where it stores the changes I make, and I think the ‘storage’ location has the wrong file permissions so the changes aren’t getting applied.

Can anybody help me fix?  Thanks in advance for any help.

Update: It seems to have fixed itself as I’m sure it wasn’t me!

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Two days ago on One Tip A Day, Umar wrote a post that caught my eye about Wowzio Widgets and how they could increase page impressions.  Wowzio widgets provide an easy way to add interactive, eye-catching content to sites.  After reading the post I immediately fired off an email to Wowzio asking for an invite, which I received very quickly, and I’ve since added two Wowzio widgets to this site and to Windows 7 News.

You can see one Wowzio Widget in the sidebar displaying recent posts and one underneath all posts showing a live feed of what other readers have just read.  I choose these two widgets because I believe they will have the biggest impact.  I love the recent posts widget, as I think it works a lot better than (yet another) long list of links.  The Wowzio widget showing what posts have just been viewed is quite addictive to watch, particularly over on Windows 7 News where there is a lot more traffic.

There are other Wowzio widgets that can be created:

The Wowzio Widgets were very easy to setup and don’t seem to have increased my server load.  It’s too early for me to tell whether they’ve increased page views per user, but I think they definitely will, even if they only create ‘curious’ clicks.

What do you think of the Wowzio Widgets?  Have you tried them on your site?

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I’ve been through many WordPress themes over the last 4 years, but the one I added last night is definitely the best ever!  It’s very clean and simple to use, and more importantly, very, very fast even with all my many plugins and tweaks running.

The feature I love the most is the featured posts carousel, which once I have time to play with more, will really help drive users deeper into my sites.  On Windows 7 News for instance, a high proportion of our traffic is to the homepage, thanks to people searching for ‘Windows 7′ and ‘Windows 7 News’ where we are 2nd only to the Microsoft pages on google.  This theme once I add to Windows 7 will definitely help drive users to the best sections of the site.

I’m also happy that I’ve gone back to a 2 column theme, which improves the site’s readability.

If you see any bugs or just want to let me know what you think, then please leave a comment.

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I’ve been using the theme on this site for over a year now, so I’ve decided it’s time for a change as I need something new to fiddle with!  There are so many good wordpress themes out there so to speed up finding a newA theme I thought I’d enlist the help of my readers.

If you know of a good 3 column wordpress theme, both free and premium, then please leave a link in a comment.  The theme needs to have:

• High readability
• A good location for the search box – I think the field on this theme is too low
• 3 columnns – one at least 160 wide and the other at least 300
• Update: A 2 column theme with a good footer is an option
• Space in the header for a 728 banner
• Better integration of RSS subscription options
• Space to show at least one featured article
• A customisable hompage layout
• A high fold for single.php pages
• Widget support
• good support for 2nd level cat pages in the header
• fast – don’t want tonnes of js

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I’m looking for an image gallery plugin that will display images in a similar way to engadget, which the image carousel is part of the page and not contained within a lightbox popup.:

I also like the way that engadget has a page that shows all available galleries:

Any ideas how I can do this?  Thanks in advance.

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The theme I’m currently using on The Beta News is from WooThemes it’s called Fresh News. It’s probably the best theme I’ve ever owned and tried.

The support is great, it’s easy to set-up and customise and according to experts (Thank you Dan) it’s validated and everything is peachy.

This Halloween they had a sale, buy 1 theme and get 2 for free. Unfortunately I missed it, because I was on my way home from the States. Luckily WooTheme now have an even better offer. You can buy 1 theme and get 3 free themes.

It’s a $210 discount if you buy single licenses and $450 discount for developer licenses!

The offer runs from December 17 (midnight GMT) until December 24.

* Buy a Single License for $70 USD and get any 3 other themes (on Single Licenses) of your choice; or
* Buy a Developer License for $150 USD and get any 3 other themes (on Developer Licenses) of your choice.

It’s difficult to pick four themes, they are all so damn good, but I think I’ll buy Abstract, Busy Bee and Snapshot. I’m not sure, which one I should pick as the fourth one, but let me know if you have any ideas.

You can see the entire WordPress theme portfolio here.

(Disclaimer: This is not a paid post, I’m writing this because I honestly think this is a great offer. I am an affiliate though, so I’ll earn $14 if you decide to buy a theme)

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I’ve had a lot of requests from users of my TypoXP Reloaded WordPress theme for the header navigation that I added a few weeks ago on my site. My plan was to add it into the next version, but I haven’t made much progress so I’ve posted instructions in the forum.

The TypoXP Reloaded theme continues to be popular with over 3.5K downloads in the last 3.5 weeks. It’s no longer number 1, but that’s only because everyday new themes get added where the author gives their own theme a 5, whereas my average is around 4.9 something now. I hope that it continues to do well, as it is the main reason why my Technorati rank has fallen from 17,000 a few weeks ago to currently the low 2000s.

Although Google doesn’t work in quite the same way I’m hoping that the additional links will help me get a higher page rank at the next update, as I’ve been stuck on 5 for nearly 2 years now.

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I almost forgot to announce that my very popular TypoXP Reloaded theme as of version 1.1 now supports WordPress widgets. The theme has been downloaded over 1300 times, and is in fact currently the most popular theme on the WordPress Theme browser.

I’m very happy about supporting WordPress Widgets as I didn’t have to lift a finger to achieve this, Ibrahim widgetized the theme and sent me the zip without me even asking (thanks mate!). Hopefully by providing full support for WordPress widgets my TypoXP Reloaded theme will be used by even more users.

To Download TypoXP Reloaded Version 1.1 then please click here. If you are using any previous versions I would recommend doing this as I have corrected a few errors in the template.

To learn more about the theme itself and the plugins supported click here. As always, support is available in the forums.

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Well, we finally made it. I’ve just uploaded version 1.0 of my TypoXP Reloaded WordPress Theme, which is proving to be very popular with over 500 downloads in the last 3 days. The theme now passes XHTML validation, and the html code and the images have also been optimised for faster loading.

To read more about the theme and all the cool plugins supported click here. As always, if you are using the theme and need support then please use the forum.

A big thank you goes out to Matt who spent endless hours fixing my server and database, and also helping to speed up the template.

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There was a silly mistake in the initial release of my TypoXP Reloaded WordPress Theme (V0.9). I’ve fixed this in V0.91 which is now available, and the tabbed navigation also works. A richer release is expected in the next 7 days.

To update your theme or to TypoXP Reloaded Theme or to read about the theme click here.

Theme Support

If you have installed the theme and you have any technical questions then please use this thread in the forum. No support will be given on the site.

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Update: The theme is no longer available in Theme Viewer and can be downloaded here

I spent a lot of time in the week with Ajay performance tuning this site. One of the things we worked on was making it easy to switch my plugins on and off, which has made it easy for me to release my theme. So without further ado, here is the new TypoXP Reloaded Theme for Worpress 2.x.

The theme is a heavily modified version of the popular TypoXP theme. In addition to several new features, it also supports several plugins out of the box. But, more importantly in my view it includes optimised Adsense placement, as well as several tweaks to the theme to improve the CPM of ads through Adsense targeting, as well as theme tweaks to improve the positioning of pages in search results.

Update: As of version 1.1 the TypoXP Reloaded WordPress theme now supports WordPress Widgets.

Plugin Support

Supports out of the box my Latest Comments With Avatars Reloaded plugin (recommended), as well as the following plugins:

• Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro (recommended)
• Comment Quicktags (recommended)
• Extended Live Archives (recommended)
• Fold Category List (recommended)
• Gregarious
• Lightbox 2.02 Plugin
• MyAvatars
• Math Comment Spam Protection (recommended)
• Optimal Title (recommended)
• Paged Comments
• Related Posts (recommended)
• Subscribe To Comments (recommended)
• Text Link Ads v2
• Ultimate Tag Warrior (recommended)
• WordPress Widgets (optional)
• WP-PageNavi (built-in)

Demo

This site is currently running the theme, although it has several other tweaks included. A ‘clean’ version is available for viewing on WordPress Theme Browser. Update: The theme is no longer available in Theme Viewer and can be downloaded here

Installation Instructions:

• Download the latest version below
• Unzip the whole folder to ‘Wp-content/themes’
• Place the tabber.js file in your blog home directory e.g if your blog is is installed in www.blogurl.com then copy the file to this folder
• Go into your dashboard and enable the theme
• Important: Included within the theme are the optimal Adsense adverts. To ensure that your account is credited for any clicks you must put your publisher id between the speech marks in the following line ‘google_ad_client = “”;’ in each of the files below:
  • adsensensecontent.php
  • adsensemiddle.php
  • adsenseskyscraper.php
  • adsensetop.php
  • adsenseupdates.php
  • New! linkad.php
• Optional: It is also advisable that you give each of the ads below a unique channel ID to improve performance monitoring
• If you wish to remove the ads then this is quite simple to do.

Releases

• TypoXP Reloaded V.0.9 (Released 13/1/07)
• TypoXP Reloaded V.0.91 (Released 27/1/07: Fixed sidebar issue and tabber script)
• TypoXP Reloaded V1.0 (Final Release 03/02/07)
• TypoXP Reloaded V1.1 (Released 10/02/07

Known Issues

• For some reason I haven’t been able to get the tabbed navigation in use on this site working in the download. As soon as I do, I will release a new version. If you want to have a go at incorporating the tabs yourself then here are some good instructions.
• Error with sidebar not displaying properly on single pages
• Theme doesn’t validate – will be fixed in next release

Theme Support

If you have installed the theme and you have any technical questions then please use this thread in the forum. No support will be given here.

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