50 Staggering WordPress Video Blog Designs!
WordPress is a state-of-the-art platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. It has been powering millions of blogs for quite some time now, and has been truly appreciated for that. As for the WordPress-based video blogs to be featured today, these websites are built around videos to eventually constitute impressive multimedia design frameworks seamlessly wrapped in WordPress.
Being created with the video blogger’s needs in mind, quite often such video blog designs bring entirely new elements to the way people browse and interact with video on a website. WordPress video blogs, maintaining an ongoing chronicle of information, usually feature diary-type entries including videos as posts alongside with the regular blog posts. They can have a traditional linear layout as well as an optional gallery style layout with a primarily thumbnail based navigation. For sure, videos in this case help to fine tune and enhance the process of blog posting. Currently, we’ve compiled the 50 staggering WordPress video blog websites for you:
http://blog.templatemonster.com/2010/03/26/wordpress-video-blog-designs/
Optimize Your Blog SEO With The Wpseo Plugin
Have you ever wondered why some blogs ranks really good in search engines while others are barely findable? This depends of many factors such as url rewriting, keyword density, etc. The process of optimizing a website for search engine is called SEO: Search Engine Optimization.
I recently had the chance to get a new plugin for WordPress which aim to improve your blog SEO. This plugin is called WpSeo and I tested it for you.
http://www.catswhoblog.com/optimize-your-blog-seo-with-the-wpseo-plugin
WordPress functions.php Template with 15 Essential Custom Functions
When designing WordPress themes, I always add a common set of custom functions to the theme’s functions.php file. This speeds up development time because I don’t have to hunt for and individually copy the same slew of functions for every theme. I just drop in a copy of my functions.php template and build up from there. This takes care of all those little things that always need to be done:
- Include jQuery
- Enable threaded comments
- Add feed links to the header
- Disable unused widget areas
- Adding Google Analytics to the footer
- Stop the “Read More” link from jumping to the middle of the next page ;)
One of the things that I like about these functions is that they’re all so concise, simple, and effective. The functions.php template file currently contains 15 different functions and is a continual work in progress. Not everyone is going to need or use everything in the file, but the idea is to modify this template into something that works for you. It’s a starting point with some really useful functions.
In this DiW article, we first provide an explanation of each of the 15 functions and then bring them all together into the working functions.php template. Just copy and paste the template code at the end of this article or grab a copy of the zipped functions.php file and enjoy a custom collection of functions that will help you optimize your development process while enhancing WordPress with essential functionality.
http://digwp.com/2010/03/wordpress-functions-php-template-custom-functions/
GET TO KNOW THE WORDPRESS HIERARCHY
WordPress’s popularity and usefulness as a multi-purpose content management system, continues to grow, and the more people flock to using this CMS the more anunderstanding of some of the basics of how it operates becomes necessary.
In that vein, I have put together this post that examines the WordPress template hierarchy and the use of conditional statements. Technically you only need two files for a WordPress theme to work, index.php and style.css.
However, if you would like to make your theme a bit more unique and have some variance in the way different content is presented, you will want to use some other template pages. Now this is where the hierarchy comes into play, because WordPress runs off a Template Hierarchy.
What this means is that it will automatically look for a particular file when retrieving a page in the active theme directory. If, for whatever reason, it cannot find that file, WordPress will then look for the next filename in the hierarchy and so on until it finds a match.
Below I will go over different additions that can be made, that will not only add to the complexity of the overall site, but each one will also impact the site’s hierarchy. With each entry below, I will tell the benefits of having that particular template page as part of your site and how each will alter the hierarchical structure of your WordPress theme.
http://www.problogdesign.com/wordpress/wordpress-template-heirarchy-conditional-statements/
10 Blank/Naked WordPress Themes Perfect for Development
If you have to develop WordPress themes on a regular basis then I have no doubt that you too have experienced the tedium that goes with re-writing the same code over and over again. It doesn’t matter how excited you are about a new project or even how much you love web design, having to repeatedly do the same basic coding for every single theme can be really, really annoying.
Of course there are frameworks that you could use that will take the pain away, but these may offer too much functionality. What if you want just a basic nuts and bolts theme with everything unnecessary stripped out and leaving only WordPresses base structure with some basic CSS styling? Then you will need a WordPress Blanktheme.
Some developers call them blank, they can also be called naked, starter, base, framework (not in the same vein as Hybrid or Thematic) or even just basic. Regardless of what you call them, they will all do the same thing: Bring the enjoyment back to WordPress development. You will find ten such themes below:
http://speckyboy.com/2010/03/22/10-blanknaked-wordpress-themes-perfect-for-development/