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How to use your Wordpress blog to make great static websites with powerful information to make your Wordpress blog more efficient in operation and traffic-getting ability and explode your profits.

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Wp Easy Article Uploader - Wordpress Plgin

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Wordpress Maid Basic - Post Xml - Files to your Wp Blog

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WordPress Salesletter Websites Creator

This unique software is a WordPress Theme that users can create professional salesletters (Dan Kennedy, Michel Fortin, Yanik Silver style) as well as it has the option to expand their site to add a blog, contact us page, affiliate pages and hundreds more.

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The Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS

 Just because you didn’t get to go to that awesome conference doesn’t mean that you can’t still watch the lectures! Each weekend, we’ll feature a recommended web development lecture on Nettuts+.

This presentation, by Stoyan Stefanov and Nicole Sullivan, primarily details the huge performance benefits to using Object-Oriented CSS, as well as a crop of other common CSS hurdles.

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Roll your Own Templating System in PHP: New Premium Tutorial

 Topic: PHP Templating Difficulty: Advanced Thanks for supporting the site, feel free to download the ZIP file for this tutorial.Source files for this tutorial are available to Premium members.
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Push the limits of your PHP knowledge with this extremely in depth and advanced tutorial. You’ll learn how to implement techniques, including object-oriented programming, regular expressions, and function currying to build a templating system from scratch. Become a Premium member to read this tutorial, as well as hundreds of other advanced tutorials and screencasts.

For those unfamiliar, the family of Tuts+ sites runs a premium membership service. For $9 per month, you gain access to exclusive premium tutorials, screencasts, and freebies from Nettuts+, Phototuts+, Psdtuts+, Phototuts+, Aetuts+, Audiotuts+, Vectortuts+, and CgTuts+ For the price of a pizza, you’ll learn from some of the best minds in the business. Become a Premium member to read this tutorial, as well as hundreds of other advanced tutorials and screencasts.

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Android Update: 1.3.8

This post will be short and to the point: Dan Roundhill announced that a new version of WordPress for Android has been released, fixing numerous bugs and adding the ability to set post status from within the app. Version 1.3.8 hit the Android Market today. For more details, check out the post on the WordPress for Android blog.

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WordPress 3.1 Beta 1

It’s that time in the release cycle again, when all the features are basically done, and we’re just squashing bugs. To the brave of heart and giving of soul: Won’t you help us test the new version of WordPress? As always, this is software still in development and we don’t recommend that you run it on your normal live site — set up a test site just to play with the new version. If you break it (find a bug), report it, and if you’re a developer, try to help us fix it. (Especially you U.S. types who are taking a long weekend for Thanksgiving! )

If all goes well, we hope to release WordPress 3.1 to the world at large by the end of the year, though that is (as always) subject to change/dependent on how the beta period goes. The more help we get with testing and fixing bugs, the sooner we will be able to release the final version.

If you want to be a beta tester, you should check out the Codex article on how to report bugs. Some of the new features to check out include:

There are also some known issues: things that aren’t *quite* finished, but that weren’t worth holding up the beta release. They will be fixed before 3.1 is released for general use. Note that as things get fixed, the beta release will update nightly. What you should know:

Fatal error: Call to a member function is_page() on a non-object in /wp-includes/query.php. is_page() may be any conditional tag. This issue occurs when a theme or plugin is doing something wrong. Some code is checking the value of a conditional tag before we actually set up the Query, which means they don’t work yet. In 3.0, they silently failed and always returned false. In 3.1 Beta 1, this is throwing a fatal error. This will be handled in the final release, so use this opportunity to fix your plugins. (#14729)All known issues slated for fixing before launch are listed in Trac. Please check this list to see if a bug is already on the list before reporting it.

Remember, if you find something you think is a bug, report it! You can bring it up in the alpha/beta forum, you can email it to the wp-testers list, or if you’ve confirmed that other people are experiencing the same bug, you can report it on the WordPress Core Trac. (I recommend starting in the forum or on the mailing list.)

Theme and plugin authors, if you haven’t been following the 3.1, please start now so that you can update your themes and plugins to be compatible with the newest version of WordPress.

Note to developers: WordPress is built by the contributions of hundreds of developers. If you’d like to see this release come out on time, I encourage you to pitch in. Even if you don’t have time to do testing on the beta version, you could help us by contributing a fix for one of the many bugs we already know about.

To those of you in the U.S., have a lovely long holiday weekend, and if you’re looking for something to occupy your post-turkey hours, we hope you’ll take the beta for a spin!

Download WordPress 3.1 Beta 1

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How to Generate Noise with Canvas

Not too long ago, I noted on Twitter that it’d be fantastic if, one day, CSS3 provided support for adding noise to elements (not audio, but texture). After a bit of experimentation and Googling, I came across a solution that uses JavaScript and canvas to dynamically create noise.

The big question: is it practical to use a solution like this? Ehh — technically, sure. Browsers that don’t support canvas will simply display a solid background color. That being said, a tiny 24-bit PNG still works perfectly, and is what I’ll most likely continue to use until a more convenient solution becomes available.

What do you think? Or better yet, do you know of a better solution? Mostly, the purpose of this tutorial is mostly to work with canvas a bit, and toy around with things! Thanks for watching, and thank you to Mitch Johnson for the concept.

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Ruby for Newbies: Conditional Statements and Loops

Ruby is a one of the most popular languages used on the web. We’ve started a new screencast series here on Nettuts+ that will introduce you to Ruby, as well as the great frameworks and tools that go along with Ruby development. In this chapter, we’ll be looking at how conditional statements and loops work in Ruby.

The if statement is one of the first types of branching you learn when programming. You can guess what it means: if this is true, do one thing; if it’s not, do something else. In Ruby, these are pretty easy to write:

name = "Andrew"if name == "Andrew"puts "Hello Andrew"endif name == "Andrew"puts "Hello Andrew"elseputs "Hello someone else"end

After the keyword if, code in your conditional statement. After that comes the code to execute if the condition returns true. You close the statement with the end keyword. If you’d like, you can squeeze an else statement in there, which will predictably execute if the condition is false.

It’s not hard to check for multiple conditions. Just put as many elsif statements as you’d like between the if and else statements. Yes, that’s elsif, a marriage of else and if.

order = { :size => "medium" }def make_medium_cofeeputs "making medium statement"end#assume other functionsif order[:size] == "small"make_small_coffee;elsif order[:size] == "medium"make_medium_coffee;elsif order[:size] == "large"make_large_coffee;else make_coffee;end

As I mentioned, you can have as many elsif conditions and their corresponding code blocks as you want.

Most programming languages make a distinction between statements and expressions. A statements is a code construct that doens’t evaluate to a certain value. An expression is a code construct does return a value. For example, calling a function is an expression, because it returns a value. However, an if statement is exactly that, a statement, because it does not return a value. This means that you can’t do this in your JavaScript:

message = if (someTruthyValue) {"this is true";} else {"this is false";}

Obviously, you can’t do this because the if statement does not return a value that you can assign to message.

However, you can do this with Ruby, because statements are actually expressions, meaning they return a value. So we can do this

message = if order[:size] == "small" "making a small" elsif order[:size] == "medium" "making a medium" else "making coffee" end

Whichever block of code is executed will become the value of message.

If you don’t have any elsif or else clauses, and your if statement has only one line, you can use it as a modifier to a “normal” line.

puts "making coffee" if customer.would_like_coffee?

In most programming languages, we want to reverse the return of the conditional expression, we have to negate it, usually with the bang (!) operator.

engine_on = trueif !engine_on # meaning "if not engine_on"puts "servicing engine" #should not be put, because "not engine_on" is falseend

However, Ruby has a really nice unless operator, that keeps us from having to do that, while giving us much more readable code:

unless engine_on # "unless engine_on" is better than "if not engine_on""servicing engine"end

Just like if, you can use unless as a modifier:

puts "servicing engine" unless engine_on

If you’ve got a lot of options to work through, using if/elsif/else might be somewhat wordy. Try the case statement.

hour = 15casewhen hour < 12puts "Good Morning"when hour > 12 && hour < 17puts "Good Afternoon"elseputs "Good Evening"end

It’s kinda-sorta-maybe like a switch/case statement in JavaScript (or other languages), except that there’s no one variable you’re evaluating. Inside the case/end keywords, you can put as many when statements as you’d like. Follow that when by the conditional expression, and then the lines of code go after it. Just like the if statement, the case statement is really an expression, so you can assign it to an expression and capture a returned value.

hour = 15message = case when hour < 12 "Good Morning" when hour > 12 && hour < 17 "Good Afternoon" else "Good Evening" endputs message

If you’re familiar with JavaScript, you’ll know that the blocks of code in an if statement are surrounded by curly braces. We don’t do this in Ruby, so it may seem like Ruby is dependant on the whitespace. Nothing could be further from the truth (take that, pythonistas ).

If we want write your statements as one-liners, have to separate the different parts of the statements … but how? Well, you can use semi-colons:

if name == "Andrew"; some_code;else; some_code; end

If you don’t like the look of that (which I don’t), you can put the keyword then between the conditional expressions and the line of code.

if name == "Andrew" then sode_code; end

This also works for a case statement.

case when x > 20; puts "<20" when x < 20 then puts "<20"end

So, those are conditional statements (I mean, expressions). How about loops? Let’s look at while loops first.

A while loop will continue to execute until the condition stated is false:

arr = ["John", "George", "Paul", "Ringo"]i = 0while arr[i] puts arr[i] i += 1end

Here we’re looping over an array; when arr[i] returns false (meaning there are no items left in the array), the loop will stop executing. Inside the loop, we print out the current item in the array, and them add one to our increment variable.

You can also use while as a modifier

arr = ["John", "George", "Paul", "Ringo"]i = -1puts arr[i += 1] while arr[i]

Just like unless is the opposite of if, until is the opposite of while. It will continue to loop until the condition is true:

days_left = 7;until days_left == 0 puts "there are still #{days_left} in the week" days_left -= 1end

And of course, it’s a modifier, too.

days_left = 8puts "there are still #{days_left -= 1} in the week" until days_left == 1

Yes, Ruby has a for loop. No, it’s not like the for loop in other languages. It acts like a foreach loop, for looping over the values in an array or hash:

arr = ["John", "George", "Paul", "Ringo"]for item in arr puts itemend

If you’re looping over a hash, you can use two variable names, one for the key and one for the value:

joe = { :name => "Joe", :age => 30, :job => "plumber" }for key, val in joe puts "#{key} is #{val}"end

I hope you’re enjoying our Ruby for Newbies Screencast series. If there’s something you’d like to see, let me know in the comments! (And if you’re not watching the videos, you should be. There’s a screencast-only bonus at the end of each one.)

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Wordpress Easy Ads

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Tuts+ Marketplace Tutorial Competition: $1500 Cash and Additional Prizes

 Want to know how you could win more than $1,000 worth of prizes for having your tutorial accepted on the Tuts+ Marketplace? We’re looking for marketplace author submitted content showing us how you made your high quality Envato™ marketplace items. We’ve got some awesome prizes lined up for numerous winners and are looking for your tutorial submissions to the Tuts+ Marketplace. Are you ready to win some top-notch prizes?

Are you an Envato marketplace member? Have you been making high quality themes for Themeforest? Are you a high selling Flash Guru on ActiveDen? Have you demonstrated your graphic chops beyond reproach on GraphicRiver? Coded up some super useful scripts on CodeCanyon? Modeled some complex objects for 3dOcean? Killed it with your tracks on AudioJungle? Or Smashed it with your video on Videohive? Well then, now it’s time to show everyone how you made it.

In short we’re looking for tutorials showing how you’ve created marketplace items. It is not required that you show how to create the entire marketplace item, you’re free to show how to make some element of the file or a simplified version. You can use one of your files as a basis for your tutorial, but it does not have to be a complete walkthrough of how to create it.

Only high quality tutorials are accepted into the Tuts+ Marketplace, and only the best of those will win this contest. So pull out all the stops. You can submit either written or screencast (video) content, or mix them together.

Wile you do need to use one of your marketplace items as a basis for your tutorial, it does not have to show how to create a marketplace item in it’s entirety. Here are a few examples:

If you’ve created a well crafted flyer or business card template on GraphicRiver, then show how you to set up a template like that or a simplified version of it. Did you use Photoshop or InDesign? Walk us through the process in your tutorial, and show potential readers how to set up high quality graphic files.Consider a popular WordPress theme on ThemeForest that you’ve made. You could show how to create a portion of that theme, such as a modified version, or less featured version. This is a tutorial that would appeal to quite a few readers. Consider what made that theme high quality and what readers could learn from it, and walk us through the creation of the main points.Or, a CodeCanyon author could write a tutorial about how to build a less-featured version of one of his most popular items. A tutorial on a topic like “How to Build a Hugely Popular Premium WordPress Plugin from Scratch,” would likely turn heads.There are some awesome items on all the marketplaces, which many readers would love to learn how to make. Before entering ask yourself, what can people learn from this? How did I make it? What workflow did I follow? What techniques did I use? And how will this really benefit others looking to grow there skills?

Quite high and the prizes we’ve lined up are great. The higher quality the item you’re showing how to create, the better instruction you provide, and the more detail you provide, the higher your chances of winning are. Even if you’re not a winner, all entrants are eligible for acceptance into the Tuts+ Marketplace, upon passing the review process.

Submit your completed tutorial to the Tuts+ Marketplace via the upload instructions between November 23rd (Eastern Standard Time) and December 7th (Eastern Standard Time).

Note: When entering be sure to leave a submission comment for reviewers noting the item you’re basing your tutorial on in the marketplaces, and include a link to it.

Tutorials showing how to create marketplace items (this includes simplified version or elements of these items) that have been submitted to any Envato marketplace prior to November 23rd, 2010 are eligible to enter.Tutorials must be submitted to the Tuts+ Marketplace between November 23rd (Eastern Standard Time) and December 7th (Eastern Standard Time) to be eligible.We will pick the winners from among accepted tutorials that pass the review process.Only existing marketplace authors who have not been part of our Tuts+ Premium program are eligible to enter. And those that are not employed by Envato.All cash prizes will be paid via PayPal.

The premier online form builder. If you need to collect information on the internet, then this is the service to use. I’ve met quite a few guys on the team at the Front End Design conference in Tampa – great group of guys. They have a top-notch product and awesome customer service.

Throughout the years, they’ve developed a large library of design elements such as vector art, textures, fonts, brushes, etc. We’ve called it our “arsenal” of design weaponry. This design agency regularly teaches on their blog GoMediaZine, is awesome to work with, and has incredible design elements available in their Arsenal.

Campaign Monitor offers everything a designer needs to run successful email marketing campaigns for themselves and their clients. You can even rebrand the interface, create sub-accounts for your clients and let them send their own campaigns.

They print custom Business Cards, MiniCards, Postcards and more. Upload your own logos and artwork or choose from our templates. They deliver to 180 countries (and counting) and we’ve used them before. The quality and flexibility of using this service is awesome.

There is much to learn about the World’s most popular publishing platform. Digging into WordPress is nearly 450 pages of taking you from your first steps of learning about WordPress all the way through maintaining a site throughout the years.

If you’re enjoying our Tuts+ sites, you’ll love Plus. For a low monthly fee you’ll get access to an exclusive members site complete with hundreds of source files from all your favorite tutorials, special Plus-only tutorials that everyone else doesn’t get and regular bonus downloads of vector and brush packs, layer styles, tools and more.

If you’re enjoying our Tuts+ sites, you’ll love our selection of Premium tutorials available for individual sale. With the same quality as our Premium tutorial program, you can buy any of our Premium tutorials individually, as well as tutorials you can only find on the Tuts+ Marketplace. You’ll be hard pressed to find a place to buy such high quality tutorials at such affordable prices.

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Falling Snow on Your WordPress Blog

Each year around this time you can have some pretty realistic-looking snowfall on your WordPress.com site – like you see here on Business Blogging 101. All you need to do is the following:

In the Dashboard, under Appearance, click on Extras and check the box next to “Show falling snow on my blog. (Only until January 4th 2009.)” Don’t forget to click the “Update Extras” button.

If you want falling snow on a self-hosted WordPress site, check out this post or visit the plugin page where Aen Tan has updated his Falling Snow WordPress plugin. Thanks, Aen!

Happy Holidays!

Filed under: WordPress Tagged: | Extras, falling snow, howto, tips, WordPress, WordPress.com

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Wordpress el Secreto "Convierte Wordpress en un Videoblog"

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Wordpress Link Cloak - An Amazing Wordpress Plugin to Increase Revenue

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But it Doesn’t Validate

 I have a small pet peeve that I’m going to share with you. On the nights when I finish up a new CSS3 tutorial for Nettuts+ — typically while listening to my favorite Biebster songs — I click publish, and then wait to see how long it’ll take before a reader leaves a comment containing the phrase, “But it doesn’t validate.”

Here’s the thing about validation: it’s a tool. Nothing more; nothing less; just a tool.

So here’s the thing about validation: it’s a tool. Nothing more; nothing less; just a tool. At first glance, though, it makes sense, doesn’t it? We equate validation with best practices, much like JavaScript and JSLint. Along that line of thinking, why wouldn’t we want a perfect 100% score? Well that’s the thing: we do; however, problems ensue when the score takes precedence over our own logic.

To test your markup and style sheets, you can visit:

Alternatively, you can install the helpful Firefox add-on, Web Developer, which, among other things, offers the handy-dandy “Validate HTML” and “Validate CSS” links, as well as the option to validate even your local files.

At this point, a report will be generated, which lists any errors that the validator comes across. But herein lies the rub.

Absolutely not. I’d imagine that, particularly for those who are just breaking into this industry, the phrase, “websites don’t need to pass validation” confuses the heck out of them.

“Validation is your early-warning system about introducing bugs into your pages that can manifest in interesting and hard-to-determine ways. When a browser encounters invalid HTML, it has to take an educated guess as to what you meant to do—and different browsers can come up with different answers.”
– Opera Developer Community

That said, the final score is, in fact, irrelevant.

Remember the days when we (or at least some of us) pasted those validation buttons to the footer of our websites? How funny; who were they for? The site visitors? Haha; I hope not! But here’s the thing: back then, validation wasn’t really a standard. Nope; in fact, if you even bothered to validate your HTML and CSS, you were a standards-embracing, cutting edge dude! Sometimes, it’s easy to forget that web standards is a relatively new concept.

Years ago, when I used to participate in CSS forums, it never failed: every time a new member requested help on a strange layout issue, our first response was typically something along the lines of, “Your website doesn’t validate. Fix the errors, and then come back to us if there are still issues.” Many times, odd layout issues are the result of unclosed elements, like a div. In these cases, validation can be of tremendous help.

So what changed? Is validation no longer necessary? Does HTML5 allow us to write terrible mark-up without a second thought? Is the new HTML5 doctype magic-infused? Not at all. Validation is a helpful tool that allows us to pinpoint missed closed tags, extra semicolons, etc. That said, the final score is, in fact, irrelevant. It’s not a magic number – that, at 100%, contacts The Architect behind the scenes, and instructs him to apply bonus points to your website. This score serves no higher purpose than to provide you with feedback. It neither contributes to accessibility, nor points out best-practices. In fact, the validator can be misleading, as it signals errors that aren’t errors, by any stretch of the imagination. The HTML4 validator has quickly become out-dated, but luckily the W3C has a new HTML5 validator (still experimental) that’s much improved.

Now, keep in mind that well-formed markup can boost SEO; however, there’s no specific correlation between SEO and a validation score.

HTML5 standardizes many of the features that some browsers have supported for years, such as custom attributes (via the data- prefix), and ARIA attributes, which fail the W3C’s HTML4 validator.

When testing new designs, be sure to check the experimental HTML5 validator option. With this option set, you can use the supported CSS3 properties, custom data- attributes, and more.

Never, ever, ever compromise the use of the latest CSS3 techniques and selectors for the sake of validation.

What if we strive for at least a 75% score? I understand the thinking, as I thought that way too at one point; though, again, it’s irrelevant. When validating, your primary focus should be on determining where you’ve made mistakes. Validation isn’t a game, and, while it might be fun to test your skills to determine how high you can get your score, always keep in mind: it doesn’t matter. And never, ever, ever compromise the use of the latest doctype, CSS3 techniques and selectors for the sake of validation.

The dirty secret of browsers is that they never perform HTML validation against a DTD. The doctype you put at the top of the document switches the parser into a particular mode of operation, but no operations involve downloading the doctype and verifying that the code matches. What does this mean? It means that a basic syntax parser handles HTML, with exceptions specified for self-closing tags and block vs. inline elements (and I’m sure other situations as well).
– Nicholas Zakas

Dependent upon the options you specify before checking your designs (HTML4 vs. HTML5), the validator will scream like a baby when it comes across:

Browser hacksVendor-prefixesCustom attributesGenuine errors, such as unclosed elementsARIA roles

Ahh, browser hacks… should you use them? The answer to that question has been debated to death, and it certainly exceeds the scope of this tutorial; however, keep in mind that, for instance, usage of the IE6-underscore-hack will fail validation.

For this reason, many designers prefer to use non-breaking techniques instead.

So:

/* Fails validation */#myElement { _position: relative; /* targets only IE6 */}

Becomes:

/* Passes validation */* html #myElement { position: relative; /* targets IE6 */}

The reason behind this line of thinking is, what if, in the future, say, Internet Explorer 10 will also render properties that are prefixed with an underscore? In cases such as that, your IE6-only (so you thought) styling will also be applied to IE10 and beyond, presumably. Now, the truth of the matter is that this would never happen, as it’d break a large number of websites. That said, this method of browser-targeting is indeed a hack. Except in smaller or rare cases, it’s better to use a conditional stylesheet, or a form of feature detection to target specific browsers.

While we can all agree that applying multiple vendor prefixes to properties, all for the sake of achieving, say, rounded corners, is incredibly tedious, you should thank your lucky stars that the browser vendors experimented with these technologies before they were officially recommended.

Had webkit not experimented with CSS gradients, and had Mozilla not improved upon their suggested syntax, gradients would not be as widely supported in the current generation of modern browsers as they are today. You see, browsers have a huge hand in shaping the future of the web.

.box { -moz-linear-gradient(top, black, white); - webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, from(black), to(white)); linear-gradient(top, black, white);}

With all that said, the use of these vendor prefixes will cause your style sheets to fail validation. But that’s okay; don’t let that worry you one bit.

Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

Unfortunately, even now, many designers elect to use, in our example above, images to create gradients — if only for the purpose of pushing their validation score back to 100%. If you fall into this camp: you’re doing it wrong.

To test for unclosed HTML elements To check for typos To ensure that you haven’t omitted any semicolons For piece of mind A game. Don’t waste time achieving a 100% score, when you know exactly what you’re doing. However, do use it to point out your mistakes. An all-encompassing checker. While it does test for errors, it does not point out bad practices, accessibility issues, etc. To be used as an excuse for not embracing the latest CSS3 techniques. The longer you say to yourself, “I’ll use this in a few years…” the further you’ll fall behind.

If you only take one thing from this article, remember that validation is simply a tool. As soon as you compromise your own logic and techniques for the sake of appeasing a validator and achieving a meaningless score, it ceases to be a tool. That said, use it, and use it often!

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30 Kick-Ass Premium WordPress Plugins and Themes

 The WordPress platform is an integral part of the Envato™ ecosystem. Regardless of whether you need a hand with design or development, the Envato™ marketplaces have you covered! You can purchase premium WordPress plugins and templates to hit the ground running with each new project.

Today, we’ll review only a handful of the newest and most popular templates and plugins on sale at CodeCanyon and ThemeForest.

FLER combines what’s best in usability with its modern and elegant design and its administrator panel features.

Synergie is a powerful WordPress theme that can be use for everything. With a really innovative system, the home page can be modified to really fit your need. You can turn on/off any of the 5 modules and stack the the way you want in 10 seconds. Give it a try!

Hundreds of hours in development, WP Pro Real Estate 2 is the most advanced real estate theme for WordPress on ThemeForest if not in the industry.

Prestige is an unique and advanced WordPress theme. It comes with a big pack of various skins, shortcode
s, widgets and fonts. Thanks to massive CMS options panel you can fully customize this theme to your needs. Prestige is the ultimate package with functional and powerful features.

Jing is the flexible portfolio, business or photography template (WordPress version). With 12 possible style variations, built-in slider inside portfolio page, 2 blog styles and more

Alchemist is a powerful wordPress solution for you Portfolio or Blog. Various content objects as well as interesting ways to showcase your portfolio are integrated into the theme. You can use shortcode
s to generate a slideshow or thumbnail galleries through the content editor using shortcode
s The theme is designed to showcase your products focusing on a front page that can easily act as selling point and lead to various product showcases.

Striking is a Powerful Professional Premium WordPress theme made for your Blog, Portfolio, Business or almost any other kind of website. It is incredibly easy to use with the admin panel, and give you full control over every major design element throughout your site. With the color and font options page, you can customize you website more than you could ever imagine.

As you may expect from a premium WordPress theme, Screen delivers an extensive package of features with which you can design your website quick and easy. Most features and options are built directly into the Edit page, for great ease of use. Screen offers lots of possibilities to present your business or brand. Screen also includes SEO options on the Edit page, where you can enter a title, description and keywords for each Page or Post, without needing to install an additional plug-in.

PowerPhoto – A clean, powerful WordPress theme for photographers and other creative professionals looking to showcase their portfolio.

KIN is a minimalist magazine style photography template (WordPress version). With 2 style variations and support both image gallery and videos

PhotonWP features everything that Photon already offered but now with the option to be managed with WordPress

Stuff is a horizontal-oriented WordPress theme created mostly for portfolios and blogs.

“Xero WordPress theme is one of the most powerful WordPress themes on Themeforest.”

Pushed is a highly functional WordPress theme that has a custom homepage with a featured area powered by jQuery, and lovely homepage design as well as many other page templates.

Dandelion is a Powerful Premium WordPress Theme. This theme provides all the main functionality you will need to present your products, work and yourself in an elegant and professional style.

The Events Calendar Premium plugin for WordPress enables you to rapidly create and manage events using the post editor. Features include Google Maps integration as well as default templates such as a calendar grid and event list for streamlined one click installation.

DDSliderWP features EVERYTHING that the jQuery plugin already offered PLUS a custom admin panel, with total management of slides.

Lightbox Evolution is a tool for displaying images, html content, maps, and videos in a “lightbox” style that floats overtop of web page. Using Lightbox Evolution, website authors can showcase a wide assortment of media in all major browsers without navigating users away from the linking page.

uBillboard is a slider for WordPress We have been developing sliders for our WordPress themes for over a year now, and all that experience has been distilled into this one slider plugin. It is a premium quality jQuery-based slider with a nicely polished WordPress admin.

With WordPress 3.0 a new feature was introduced called custom backgrounds for WordPress themes. This feature gives you the ability to add custom backgrounds on your site, which will your site a unique touch.

Have you ever wanted to show different Widgets on Pages or Posts or even inside your content?

The plugin lets you create your own widget areas, configure them by adding widgets, and then place them directly inside the content of Pages and Posts by simply using shortcode
s

The Avia Feedback Box is a feature request system for visitors and customers. They can suggest new ideas, vote on existing ones, and track your work progress.

Dynamic Step Process Panels is a lightweight plugin for WordPress. It allows that any content can be represented in any number of tabs / steps. Can be used to:

presentation of bulleted content,multisteps forms,provide a description of products,viewing photos,loading content from files via AJAX ,anything that comes to your mind.

If you’ve always fantasized that WordPress would fix their search results and return something actually relevant (not ordered by date), but are let down on every new release. You’ve found the plugin to make that dream come true.

The Simple WordPress Gallery plugin overrides the standard WordPress gallery with a film-strip style one. Our goal here is to finally present a version of the WordPress gallery that’s useful and not a pain in the butt. This plugin installs in a minute and is a breeze to use; it’s as simple as it it awesome!

Jigowatt’s WordPress Premium Content plugin allows you to easily set up a web site with content which is only accessible to users registered with an active PayPal subscription. You can easily manage your subscribers, change subscription prices and set up custom membership renewal options (annual, bi-annual or just month by month).

A WordPress Plugin which enables you to show your registered users locations on a frontend map from Google Maps.

The WP Geo Tagger plugin can be used to add your current location to posts or to add an event location, so your readers can get directions in a snap. It even integrates Google Maps right on your posts!

This WordPress Gallery Plugin gives you a simple and extremely customizable way to create a gallery on any post or page. You have the option to use widgets or shortcodes to insert your custom gallery into your web site. As well, the look of your gallery is fully customizable through the WordPress admin interface.

This is a jQuery based AJAX powered HTML / PHP contact form with Twitter Direct Messaging, easily integrated into WordPress via shortcodes and functions.

If that still doesn’t quench your awesomeness thirst, be sure to check out our sister-site, Web.Appstorm for fifty-eight more killer themes.

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5 Free Copies of Test-Driven JavaScript Development

 In addition to donating an excerpt of his excellent new book to Nettuts+, Christian and Pearson books have also been generous enough to provide us with five digital copies of the book to give away.

Despite the fact that the JavaScript language has grown in leaps and bounds over the last few years — in both features and popularity — it’s still one of the most least tested languages. Why do you think that is? Leave a comment and let us know your honest opinion. On November 22nd (EST), we’ll choose five winners, and send them a free copy of the book! That’s all there is to it.

Tired of console.log-ing your way out of trouble? Weary from constant fear of cross-browser issues? Scared of making even the slightest change to production code? Test-Driven JavaScript Development teaches you how to solve those issues and more using unit tests and TDD. Rich with examples, the book provides a solid foundation on automated testing, a test-driven walk-through of JavaScript’s unique qualities, and five practical examples of building solid, reusable, cross-browser JavaScript using TDD.

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100 Million Plugin Downloads and Counting

WordPress 3.0 Thelonious passed 3 million downloads yesterday, and today the plugin directory followed suit with a milestone of its own: 100 million downloads.

The WordPress community’s growth over the years has been tremendous, and we want to reinvest in it. So we’re taking the next two months to concentrate on improving WordPress.org. A major part of that will be improving the infrastructure of the plugins directory. More than 10,000 plugins are in the directory, every one of them GPL compatible and free as in both beer and speech. Here’s what we have in mind:

We want to provide developers the tools they need to build the best possible plugins. We’re going to provide better integration with the forums so you can support your users. We’ll make more statistics available to you so you can analyze your user base, and over time we hope to make it easier for you to manage, build, and release localized plugins.

We want to improve how the core software works with your plugin and the plugin directory. We’re going to focus on ensuring seamless upgrades by making the best possible determinations about compatibility, and offer continual improvements to the plugin installer. And we also want to give you a better developer tool set like SVN notifications and improvements to the bug tracker.

We’re also going to experiment with other great ideas to help the community help plugin authors. We want it to be easy for you to offer comments to plugin authors and the community, including user reviews and better feedback. We may experiment with an adoption process for abandoned plugins as a way to revitalize hidden gems in the directory. I’m not sure there is a better way to show how extendable WordPress is and how awesome this community is at the same time.

As Matt said in the 3.0 release announcement, our goal isn’t to make everything perfect all at once. But we think incremental improvements can provide us with a great base for 3.1 and beyond, and for the tens of millions of users, and hundreds of millions of plugin downloads to come.

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Wordpress PPC Theme: Create Salesletters, Cpa, PPC Landing Pages

Perfect for all marketers. Create conversion boosting salespages, presells, Cpa, PPC and Landing Pages in Wordpress quickly and easily. Complete with a tutorial video library. Generous 50% Commissions for Affiliates. Earn $23.50 per sale.

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50 Ways to Get Your Site Noticed

This article aims to show you how to attract users and make them hungry for more. Who is this post for? Anyone with a website. Not all of the items listed below will apply directly to you and your business; however, they are, at the very least, an excellent source for inspiration.

If you have good content, people will always come back for more. One of the most important things about content is to keep it fresh and up-to-date. But, just like Smashing Magazine, make sure to archive your content for people to refer back to.

If you are already lucky enough to have a community—even just some regular users—listen to them. You can do this by emailing your users directly, setting up comment forms, live chat, or even user feedback systems such as UserVoice, which allow users to vote on site issues and functionality. By listening to your community, you can determine exactly what they want.

Knowing how users use your site is vital. This allows you to target their needs better. The best way is to keep a close eye on your analytics data; check what country/area your users are coming from, what search terms are working well for you and what sites are giving you the best referrals.

Find out how users navigate your site via heat maps. These help you alter your site so that it is easier for your visitors to use and find what they want. This keeps your users happy and more likely to return.

When you read your favorite blog or read an article of interest, leave a comment with your name, email address and website link. Ensure you are an active member of a relevant forum discussion or networking group. Of course, make sure you are an active member of your own site’s online community sector.

Smashing Magazines commenting system making it easy to take part.

This should be an ongoing process since there are many local, national and worldwide directories. Your first stop should be DMOZ.org. Following this, submit to the local directories and those specializing in your site’s business sector.

If you are designing web sites and are proud of your work, submit your site to web design galleries. These directories—such as CSS Beauty and CSS Elite—feature beautiful and creative designs and ask users to comment on and rate each design. Once people see your work, they may become your visitors.

Whenever you send out an email, make sure you have your URL in the email signature. It’s a simple idea, but it’s effective.

Ensure you always have business cards to hand out. If you meet someone needing your services, it always pays to have a striking and memorable business card to exchange. It is worth spending time on your business card to make it creative and memorable, otherwise you may just be left at the bottom of the pile with the rest.

Put your website address on everything: pens, letterheads, flyers, and anything that represents your company. Make sure it is clear and pushes people to visit your web site. For example, you could say, “For more information on our new product, check ourwebsite.com”

Winning an award is not easy, but it can lead to a flood of new visitors for your site. Even if you are a runner up, people will be curious and want to find out who you are. The winner of the .net magazine Interactive Site of the Year in 2009, www.ecodazoo.com, received huge amounts of visits from the www.thenetawards.com site. Choose your competition wisely and remember, winning is not everything, but getting your URL in front of as many readers as possible is.

Ecodazoo pushes the boundaries of 3D design on the web

On the flip side of winning an award, running a competition can be just as beneficial to your analytics stats. This could be as simple as coming up with a new name for your latest product, or as complex as designing a new logo. Either way, this will attract more users to your site and show that you are giving back to your users as well as taking.

The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet.

Effective SEO, common sense and web standards go together. The idea is to create semantic, valid code that uses the right tool for the job. This means using the right HTML tags and having a unique title and appropriate meta data for each page. Ensure search engine spiders can correctly index your site. And don’t forget that good content is a must. Remember, the most important way to climb the search engine ranks is through quality links. For more information on this, visit the Google Webmasters/Site owners guidelines.

Pay per click advertising can drive a great deal of traffic to your site, if you correctly target your keywords. Placing your banner or link on relevant sites will vastly improve the chance of you getting noticed.

The most effective advertising gets your message to a relevant audience.

Writing articles for other sites as well as your own is a fantastic way to get noticed. If you work with web technologies, consider writing a tutorial for Nettuts+. If you sell power tools, consider writing an article about the best router for making coffee tables. Target the niche that you’re after. Just make sure you add your URL next to your name. If it’s well-written, people will want to know more about you.

As you know, blogs are big and they are continuing to thrive as people want quick, useful information about a product, service or general news. WordPress has been at the forefront of blogging and gives us the tools to make rich, search engine-friendly blogs with beautiful designs. Of course, it is up to you to fill your blog with fresh and catchy content.

In the past year, we have seen the social web boom and many sites have reaped huge benefits. Creating your own Facebook page, uploading your work to Deviant Art or creating your own Squidoo page all help build your online presence.

We all know the power of Twitter by now, and much has been said on the subject of using Twitter as a marketing tool. But the fact remains: it is a very effective way of getting noticed. Get the most out of Twitter by choosing one of the many tools available. Keep inside your niche area, follow people that matter to your website, and make it personal. Do not just spout marketing spiel or you will quickly lose followers. If you are part of a niche area consider setting up your own Twibe (a group of Twitter users) or use Twitter’s list feature.

If you have something to say and you think others will be interested, then consider making a podcast or videocast. Boagworld.com has been a leader in this area for the web design field and Paul Boag has said that the majority of his new clients have come through the podcast. Here are eight tips to remember when thinking about podcasting:

Invest in a good microphone.Reduce background noise.Prepare, but do not read a script.Follow a consistent format.Invite guest speakers.Have regularly-scheduled podcasts.Enjoy the process and relax!

Users sign up for your newsletter and you have your captive audience. If used properly, newsletters can be very effective tools for driving people to your site. Check out Smashing Magazine’s best practices article before embarking on your campaign. When you are ready, use a service like MailChimp to monitor your success.

Similar to newsletters, having an RSS feed of your content is another way to keep users noticing your web site. They are easy to set up and a good way to keep your users up-to-date on your website. Make sure you keep your feeds relevant, interesting, informative and easy to find.

Send out cards to your clients either by snail-mail or email. This is not only a nice gesture but also keeps your website address firmly imprinted in their mind. Using services like Cards Direct is a quick and easy way to spread the holiday cheer with your website address attached to it.

Running an event is a fantastic way to both market your business and connect with your customers, clients and experts in your sector. For example, the Future of Web Design events are run all around the world featuring many professionals from the web design community. Your event does not have to be about web design; it can be focused on your site and your business’ sector, in order to to raise awareness of you and your site.

Alternatively, you can be one of the speakers. This form of marketing has worked very well for people like Brett Welch, Danny Somekh and Folkert Gorter who spoke at the FOWD London 2009.

Do your own marketing: have t-shirts, bags, folders and other items sporting your website address clearly.

Can your service be provided via a mobile app? Would customers want to purchase your product on the go? If so, consider creating your own mobile application. If you want to tap into the vast iPhone / iPad market, you can consider selling your app on the iPhone app store. You can create the app yourself or use a company like Siruna to create the mobile application for you.

You can donate directly to a charity or run a charity event. There are many charities out there, so choose wisely and carefully.

Many courses require a student to get a set amount of work experience or do a final year project. Contact your local college and/or university and offer them a project that you would like their students to help on. My final year project was to create a new search engine-optimized template for a local business directory. The directory benefited from the new template tremendously and we learned a great deal as a team.

Submitting proposals for college and university projects not only supports your website, but it also helps students gain real-life experience in their chosen field. Here are a few examples:

Your website is not the only place to put your content. If you sell a product, you can also list it on eBay. If you are a band, why not put your songs on Last.fm? If your site publishes tutorials, you can also submit a tutorial to other sites, like Nettuts+. Once people notice your content they will be more inclined to visit your site, hungry for more.

In the case of Vista Print, they offer free business cards; the cards have your logo and details on one side and theirs on the other. Here is a list of ideas you can give away:

Sponsorship can be a remarkable way of getting your website in front of hundreds or thousands of eyes. When choosing a sponsorship project, keep to ones that will reflect well on your company as well as being relevant. For more information check out the following sites in the UK and North America. You can also place advertisements stating that you or your company is looking for sponsorship proposals from individuals or companies. When you receive the proposals, have a set criteria of what you’re looking for in mind.

The news takes many forms in today’s media; one of the most beneficial ways to increase awareness of your site is to get it featured on a popular news website. One of the top five news portals is Google News. You should concentrate on having original content, multiple authors, proper attribution, and good response time. For more information, check out the Website Magazine article “Get Your Website Included in Google News“.

Do you have web site that people are interested in on a national or local level? Why not submit a press release informing the public about your new site? Simply place an ad in the local paper or a sector-specific magazine.

Do you have a product that you think will sell? Why not try your hand at merchandising? If you are new to all this, you can use services like 50below.com to help setup your online store. If you do have a number of products, list them on various other platforms like eBay, Froogle, and Amazon with links back to your site within the product descriptions.

Find a problem that affects your website’s sector, create a fix, and publish it. A good solution to a difficult problem is a surefire way to get people flocking to your website. One example is the PNG fix for Internet Explorer; this simple site received thousands of hits as it helped solve a problem with image transparencies in IE6.

Give your site a boost by adding news feeds, blogs, tweets, widgets, Delicious links, Diggs and StumbleUpon links to your site. For the most comprehensive list of widgets, try the netvibes ecosystem. When adding widgets to your website, keep in mind that they should enhance the user experience and not clutter your website. Less is more!

We all know that YouTube is massive. One of the biggest ways that websites get noticed is by uploading or creating creative, fun, shocking, interesting, or downright weird videos. Setting up your own channel will allow users to subscribe to it, thus giving you more eyes on your content and website URL. Making a short introduction, or a series of clips like Expert Village is a cost-effective way of driving traffic to your site, as well as climbing the search engine results ladder.

Having a specific free service that is useful and intuitive could attract a plethora of users. Here are some examples of sites with free tools and services:

If you are a specialist in your field, consider offering consultation services. A consultation service can be done via the internet, over the phone, or in person. You can provide this service to individuals, groups, or businesses; and with the power of Skype and a web cam, it can be just as though you are standing next to them. You could even offer alternative consultation services, like usability testing.

What tools are the professional online consultants using? Many online consultants use Skype because it is cheap, effective and well-supported. When using any peer-to-peer communications service, make sure you set-up a separate account for your consultation service so you keep your private messaging private. Skype offers a Skype Prime account where you can register as a trainer and people can contact you for one-on-one or group learning.

As a business, you offer rewards to affiliate marketers for every visit or consumer brought to the site using affiliate marketing techniques. This method allows you to attract more customers to your site by letting someone else do the hard work. You can offer different types of schemes such as co-branding, white labeling, loyalty schemes and many more.

There are hundreds of thousands of schemes available, so make yours attractive to marketers by offering high rewards for sales.

The Affiliate Programs forum contains information about hundreds of schemes and—most importantly—user feedback from people using them.

If you have a marketing budget, spend some time attracting users with goodies. Maybe you could offer 10% off their next subscription, or a free trial to your service for 30 days. Vouchers can also attract users as you can post your voucher on one of the many voucher sites.

Make your special offer loud and proud so people notice.

A reselling service is where you sell an existing product or service such as hosting and domain names. Reselling is a way to gain passive income by offering a quality product or service you would not be able to develop alone. This ability to give a better service will attract customers. If you ensure good customer service you might benefit from word of mouth recommendations.

The internet has been a veritable breeding ground for creative people and ideas. This creativity has given birth to some amazing ideas that make people flock to the site. If you think you have a great idea, harness it. Turn your idea into a reality, like Google’s originators Larry and Sergey, who created a fast and simple search environment called Backrub in 1995. Don’t forget the student who sold pixels to put himself through University in 2004!

"The main motivation for doing this is to pay for my degree studies."

A widget or plug-in is a design to enhance a platform. It is designed to entertain or make life easier for users. Keep this in mind when developing. For example, you can make a WordPress plugin or Joomla template. Make sure people know who made it and where they can find your website.

If you are an expert in your field and you know what your talking about, choose a subject and write a tutorial on it. You can then make the tutorials available on your own site (to capture your audience), or submit your tutorial to sites such as Nettuts+.

Writing a book is time-consuming and it is a labour of love, but it can reap so many benefits as a product in its own right. It will raise awareness for its topic and author. Books like Elliot Jay Stock’s Sexy Web design, Steve Krug’s Don`t Make me Think or even an audio book like Chris Anderson‘s “The Long Tail” have brought brand awareness and visitors to each of the authors’ respective websites.

Blogging is a simplified version of creating an online magazine. Your online magazine should be much more by concentrating on different types of content, building a community of readers, and exploiting various revenue streams.

When creating an online magazine make sure you know your CMS inside out. It will be the foundations of your business and web site and should allow you to make publishing the content painless. Think about how you will make the money to help you grow your site. Newsletters, RSS, and forums will help you keep your readers up-to-date and talking.

If you need help with content you can look at purchasing content or invite other authors to help you get started.

Subscription services can help you gain a constant stream of visitors to your site as they download the latest news, music or tutorials.

If you are planning on charging for subscription, use an integrated payment system like Spreedly to take the pain of setting up payment gateways and storing credit card details away.

Networking events can be a fun and effective way to promote your website. Armed with your business cards and an approachable smile, you are sure to meet someone who is interested in your services or who knows someone else who will be.

The key is in choosing the right event for you and being prepared. Networking events are normally based around certain types of businesses or they target professionals in specific areas. Choose what is best for you. Check online event sites like Facebook,Meet-up or the local paper. If you can`t find one in your area, run your own!

Offering regular updates to your product can attract a consistent stream of users wanting to benefit from the new update. You should notify your users when a new update is available; this can be done via the software itself or via your website. Consider making your updates a regular attraction and remember to make them easy to download and install.

FireFox makes it simple to update by making it part of the software. The user does not have to go away, download and install the update, but simply click “OK.”

Be proud of your work and put your logo and web site address on it. For web designers, write in your contract that the finished site must feature a back-link to your site. This may not always be possible, but anyone enjoying the site you built will be intrigued to see the company who built it. For photographers, put a water mark on all your site samples; if you are a producer, have your website address on your packaging. No matter what sector you are in, there is always room for a label on your work.

Links to a sites design company can normally be found on the footer.

A lot of sites, especially in the hotel and leisure industry, use what is called a “White Label” site. This enables a successful brand to offer a service without having to build the functionality and databases itself. You can go about this two ways:

Use a white label service such as white label dating, social networking, holiday and leisure to create a site. For more information on white labeling check out this article. Allow users to use your functionality and database to create their own white label site. Lastminute.com , has created a very successful net of sites that utilize their data and functionality.

Sites using Lastminute’s database / functionality can be seen on.

A new sensation on the web is the addition of hidden code; when users press a sequence of keys, they get a hidden surprise (this is called easter egg code). Sitepoint and many other sites have done articles on this “blast from the past” way of entertaining your users. For more information go to http://konamicodesites.com/; you will need the code to access it: up, up, down , down, left, right, left, right, b, a. Enjoy!

You’ll need quick reactions to score on this Konami game!

The last tip is also one of the best and easiest. Stemming from the simple idea of having a "Tell a friend" form on your website, allow users to bookmark your site on the many social bookmark sites. That way, you are letting other popular sites do the hard work for you. Social bookmarking meta-services like AddToAny are a simple way for users to publish your site to their accounts on Facebook, Delicious, StumbleUpon and many more with one click. Copy and paste their code on to your pages and you’re away.

That wraps it up for this article; I hope you have enjoyed the read. Some of the ideas are a little wacky, but they will all help you get your site noticed.

I look forward to reading your feedback!

This article was originally posted on the ThemeForest blog. We are currently porting over some of the more popular articles to Nettuts+.

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HTML5 JavaScript APIs

Just because you didn’t get to go to that awesome conference doesn’t mean that you can’t still watch the lectures! Each weekend, we’ll feature a recommended web development lecture on Nettuts+.

In December of last year, Remy Sharp spoke at CODEBITS about the various new HTML5 APIs. In the talk, he covers the video element, canvas, web storage, and other techniques.

“HTML5 is all the rage with the cool kids, and although there’s a lot of focus on the new language, there’s lots of interesting new JavaScript APIs both in the HTML5 spec and separated out. This presentation will take you through demos and code and show off some of the outright crazy bleeding edge demos that are being produced today using the new JavaScript APIs.”

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WordPress Wins CMS Award

I was just informed that WordPress, in head-to-head voting against Joomla and Drupal, has won this year’s Open Source CMS Hall of Fame award.

We have to be careful because if this trend continues people might think WordPress is a real CMS, useful for more than just a blog. This would ruin our stealth campaign and might bring dozens of new users to the WordPress community. If you could keep this on the DL we’d appreciate it.

We don’t want WordPress to develop a reputation.

View the original article here

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10 WordPress plugins I use all the time

A frequent question that keeps coming up when I tell people I work with WordPress is “What plugins do you use?” At the present rate I set up a new WordPress site every two weeks and over time I’ve compiled a list of 10 plugins I install on pretty much every one of those sites.

This list is by no means complete – there are other plugins I install in addition to these, and there are also sites that don’t have all of them – but overall I’d say these are plugins you should seriously consider installing on your site or blog because they will make it safer, easier to use, easier to find and more functional. All the plugins featured here are available directly from the WordPress Plugin Directory and thus can be installed from within WordPress.

Quite possibly the most important plugin you will ever install on your site. The WP DB Backup plugin by Austin Matzko lets you run complete backups of your WordPress database including plugin tables and other external content. You can even choose what tables you want to backup and what tables to ignore.

Using WP DB Backup you can either do instant backups that are saved to your computer, schedule hourly, daily, weekly or monthly backups to be stored on your server or schedule backups to be sent to an email address. I set up scheduled backups on all the sites I work on and send them to a dedicated GMail address I’ve set up for just this purpose. That way if a site goes down, a database is corrupted or hacked I have backups to revert to.

Get the WP DB Backup plugin now.

WordPress comes with two plugins installed out of the box: Akismet and Hello. I activate Akismet right away and delete Hello. So should you.

Akismet serves one very important function and does it exceedingly well: Saving your WordPress site from being overrun by spam comments. For reference Akismet catches close to 3000 spam comments each day on DesignIsPhilosophy.com. Yes, that’s right. THREE THOUSAND spam comments every day. Needless to say without that plugin my site would be unreadable.

Get the Akismet plugin now.

What’s the point of a site if noone can find it? The key to SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) is to give your site, pages and posts a descriptive title, a short description and the right keywords.

By default whatever title you give your pages or posts in WordPress becomes the title attribute for that page or post (the text you see at the top of your browser window or tab). The problem is this title is prefixed with the name of your site, so the title attribute for this post would be “Design Is Philosophy – 10 WordPress Plugins I Use All The Time”. This is not good for search engines as people are unlikely to search for the name of my site when they want info on WordPress plugins.

Likewise the description attribute for the page or post remains empty by default leaving the search engine to index the first part of your article. If that part happens to be an image then the description will be an image. Again not very good for people wanting to find your article.

The All in One SEO Pack plugin adds a new field to your post and page edit areas inside WordPress where you can set separate title, description and keyword attributes for your articles. That means you can give your article a normal title and then set the title attribute to something more descriptive. And you can set a short description for your article that is more likely to grab the attention of people trying to find content on a particular topic.

With the introduction of the new WordPress 3.0 custom menus the All in One SEO Pack plugin added two more fields for pages to set a ScreenTip and the menu label for individual pages featured in menus. That means you can change these from within the page itself rather than having to go muck around in the menu settings. Very useful.

Get the All in One SEO Pack plugin.

With the introduction of smartphones and other mobile devices web developers have a whole new problem to deal with: Sites that look great on regular computers usually look terrible on mobile devices, especially if they have a lot of sidebars and other wide content. What you need is a mobile theme for your site. Fortunately if that site runs WordPress all you need to do is install a mobile theme plugin. And of those, the WPTouch plugin from Brave New Code is by far the sleekest and easiest to manage.

If you don’t care about customization WPTouch can be a set-it-and-forget-it type thing. That said you can do a lot of customization if  you want to and there is also a premium version available with even more options if you so desire. Bottom line is if  you think anyone is going to visit your site with a mobile device, install WPTouch.

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Although WordPress outputs clean text just fine, if you want to be nitpicky about it there’s a lot left to be desired. “Proper” typography means you use custom “pretty” ampersand symbols, em-dashes, elevated fractions and a whole range of other typographic elements. And let’s not even mention all the code standards like properly class-wrapped abbreviations and definitions. I’ll be frank with you: Writing proper typographic markup for the web is a total pain and it’s something very few people do. And now you don’t have to: There’s a plugin that does it for you.

The WP Typography plugin takes all your content and marks it up with proper typographic settings. Out of the box it’s a bit overzealous so I urge you to play around with the settings until you find something you’re happy with, but the end result is quite impressive. The plugin has more options than you can figure out what to do with and is very easy to understand, so my best advice is install it and start experimenting.

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The WordPress.com Stats plugin brings the same kinds of visitor stats you’d get on a WordPress.com site to your self-hosted WordPress site. For the plugin to work you need to have a WordPress.com API (which requires a free account) and you can run stats for multiple sites under that one API.

The stats are fairly basic but give you a clear picture of how many people visit your site, where they come from and what they read. It also lists out sites that link to you but I find that list to be quite wonky and hard to trust. Nevertheless WordPress.com Stats gives you a quick and easy overview of what’s going on with your site.

Be advised that WordPress.com Stats adds an annoying little smiley face to the bottom of your site. The easiest way to get rid of it is to install the WordPress.com Stats Smiley Remover plugin. Stupid and unneccesary, but that’s the way it is.

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If you are running a WordPress site and you intend to have people contact you through the site, you need a contact form. Under no circumstances should you ever leave your email addres in plain text on a site – it’ll get you on all sorts of spam lists and your inbox will be flooded with crap. There are tons of contact forms out there, all with pros and cons, and these are the ones I’ve landed on due to their relative ease of use:

If you need just one contact form, go with Clean-Contact. This form is by far the easiest to manage and the style code makes sense and is easy to customize (ie you can make the contact form look like pretty much anything). In general the style code for contact forms is unneccesarily convoluted and hard to work with but Clean-Contact is very clean and logical just like the name implies.

Get the Clean-Contact plugin.

Although not as easy to style and manage as Clean-Contact, Contact Form 7 lets you set up multiple contact forms on your site and style them the way you want. If you need more than one contact form this is the option you should go with, pure and simple.

Get the Contact Form 7 plugin.

If you have photos on your site and you want to give visitors the option of seeing them in a bigger size you should display them in a modal box or lightbox. These are basically small JavaScript applications that open the larger version of the image in a box that hovers over your main content. Not only do they look cool, but they can be very useful.

Of all the lightboxes I’ve tried, Fancybox is by far the best one, both in terms of visual appeal and functionality. Up until about a year ago there were no Fancybox plugins, but now there are several. The one that works the best, and has the most options and functionality is Fancybox for WordPress.

To get it to work all you have to do is install it, and it comes with customization options and the ability to scroll from photo to photo built in. Very sleek and very easy to use. We use it both right here on Design is Philosophy and on the 12×12 Vancouver Photo Marathon site if you want to check it out.

Get the Fancybox for WordPress plugin.

Getting your content featured on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook is becoming more and more important, and the easiest way to make this happen is to add social sharing buttons to your posts and pages. There are a myriad of otions available here as well, but my current favourite is the new ShareDaddy plugin straight from Automattic – the creators of WordPress.

ShareDaddy comes equipped with all the standard social networks and sharing buttons (Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon email, RSS and so on) and also has the option to add new buttons. What’s cool about this plugin though is that you can choose to use the fancy interactive buttons the different services offer rather than the dull standard inactive buttons. That means you can add Twitter and Facebook buttons that actually count how many times your article has been Tweeted or Liked. Very cool if you want to show people how popular you are.

Get the ShareDaddy plugin.

This last plugin is one I don’t install everywhere and that doesn’t work everywhere. Nevertheless it is a great plugin you should consider.

WP PageNavi adds pagination to your index and archive pages. In simple terms this means rather than just having the standard “newer posts” and “older posts” buttons at the bottom of your pages you get an actual paginated list so people can jump from page 1 to page 8 without having to click 8 times.

This functionality makes a lot of sense for sites that are updated frequently and feature a lot of the same type of content, but may be a little weird for other sites. You’ll have to make up your own mind if it’s right for you. That said it works better than most other options and is easy to install.

Get the WP PageNavi plugin.

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A Beginner’s Introduction to HTTP and REST

The HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the life of the Web. It’s used every time you transfer a document, or make an AJAX request. But HTTP is a relative unknown among web developers. This introduction will demonstrate how the set of design principles, known as REST, underpin HTTP, and allow you to embrace its fullest power by building interfaces which can be used from almost any device or operating system.

REST is a simple way to organize interactions between independent systems.

REST is a simple way to organize interactions between independent systems. REST has been growing in popularity since 2005, and inspires the design of services such as the Twitter API. This is because REST allows you to interact with minimal overhead with clients as diverse as mobile phones and other websites. In theory, REST is not tied to the web, but REST is almost always implemented as such, and was inspired by HTTP. As a result, REST can be used wherever HTTP can.

The alternative is building relatively complex conventions on top of HTTP. Often, this takes the shape of entire new XML-based languages. The most illustrious example is SOAP. You have to learn a completely new set of conventions, but you never use HTTP to its fullest power. Because REST has been inspired by HTTP and plays to its strengths, it is the best way to learn how HTTP works.

After an initial overview, we will examine each of the HTTP building blocks: URLs, HTTP verbs and response codes. We’ll also review how to use them in a RESTful way. Along the way, we’ll illustrate the theory with an example application, which simulates the process of keeping track of data related to a company’s clients – through a web interface.

HTTP is the protocol that allows for sending documents back and forth on the Web. A protocol is a set of rules that decide what messages can be exchanged and what messages are appropriate replies to others. Another common protocol is POP3, which you possibly use to fetch email on your hard disk.

In HTTP, there are two different roles: server and client. In general, the client always initiates the conversation; the server replies. HTTP is text based; that is, messages are essentially bits of text, although the message body can also contain other media. Text usage makes it easy to monitor an HTTP exchange.

HTTP messages are made of a header and a body. The body can often remain empty; it contains data you want to transmit over the network in order to use it according to the instructions in the header. The header contains metadata, such as encoding information; but, in the case of a request, it also contains the important HTTP methods. In the REST style, you will find that header data is often more significant than the body.

If you use Firefox with the Firebug extension installed, click on the Net panel, and set it to enabled. You will then have the ability to view the details of the HTTP requests as you surf. For example:

Another helpful way of familiarizing yourself with HTTP is to use a dedicated client, such as cURL.

cURL is a command line tool that is available on all major operating systems.

Once you have cURL installed, type:

curl -v google.com

This will display the complete HTTP conversation. Requests are preceded by >, while responses are preceded by <.

URLs are how you identify the things that you want to operate on. We say that each URL identifies a resource. These are exactly the same URLs which are assigned to web pages. In fact, a web page is a type of resource. Lt’s take a more exotic example, and consider our sample application, which manages the list of a company’s clients:

/clients

will identify all clients, while

/clients/jim

will identify the client, named ‘Jim’, assuming that he is the only one with that name.

In these examples, we do not generally include the hostname in the URL, as it is irrelevant from the standpoint of how the interface is organized. Nevertheless, the hostname is important to ensure that the resource identifier is unique all over the web. We often say you send the request for a resource to a host. The host is included in the header separately from the resource path, which comes right on top of the request header:

GET /clients/jim HTTP/1.1Host: example.com

Resources are best thought of as nouns. For example, the following is not RESTful:

/clients/add

This is because it uses a URL to describe an action. This is a fairly fundamental point in distinguishing RESTful from non-RESTful systems.

Finally, URLs should be as precise as needed; everything needed to uniquely identify a resource should be in the URL. You should not need to include data identifying the resource in the request. This way, URLs act as a complete map of all the data your application handles.

But how do you specify an action? For example, how do you tell that you want a new client record created instead of retrieved? That is where HTTP verbs come into play.

Each request specifies a certain HTTP verb, or method, in the request header. This is the first all caps word in the request header. For instance,

GET / HTTP/1.1

means the GET method is being used, while

DELETE /clients/anne HTTP/1.1

means the DELETE method is being used.

HTTP verbs tell the server what to do with the data identified by the URL.

HTTP verbs tell the server what to do with the data identified by the URL. The request can optionally contain additional information in its body, which might be required to perform the operation – for instance, data you want to store with the resource. You can supply this data in cURL with the -d option.

If you have ever created HTML forms, you’ll be familiar with two of the most important HTTP verbs: GET and POST. But there are far more HTTP verbs available. The most important ones for building RESTful API are GET, POST, PUT and DELETE. Other methods are available, such as HEAD and OPTIONS, but they are more rare (if you want to know about all other HTTP methods, the official source is IETF).

GET is the simplest type of HTTP request method; the one browsers use all the time when you click a link or type a URL in the address bar. It instructs the server to transmit the data identified by the URL to the client. Data should never be modified on the server side as a result of a GET request. In this sense, a GET request is read-only, but of course, once the client receives the data, it is free to do any operation with it on its own side – for instance, format it for display.

A PUT request is used when you want to create or update the resource identified by the URL. For example,

PUT /clients/robin

might create a client called Robin on the server. You will notice that REST is completely backend agnostic; there is nothing in the request that informs the server how the data should be created – just that it should. This allows you to easily swap the backend technology if the need should arise. PUT requests contain the data to use in updating or creating the resource in the body. In cURL, you can add data to the request with the -d switch.

curl -v -X PUT -d "some text"

DELETE should perform the contrary of PUT; it should be used when you want to delete the resource identified by the URL of the request.

curl -v -X DELETE /clients/anne

This will delete all data associated with the resource identified by /clients/anne.

POST is used when the processing you wish to happen on the server should be repeated, if the POST request is repeated (that is, they are not idempotent; more on that below). In addition, POST requests should cause processing of the request body as a subordinate of the URL you are posting to.

In plain words:

POST /clients/

should not cause the resource at /clients/, itself, to be modified, but a resource whose URL starts with /clients/. For instance, it could append a new client to the list, with an id generated by the server.

/clients/some-unique-id

PUT requests are used easily instead of POST requests, and vice versa. Some systems use only one, some use POST for create operations, and PUT for update operations (since with a PUT request you always supply the complete URL), some even use POST for updates and PUT for creates.

Sometimes POST requests are used to trigger operations on the server that do not fit into the Create/Update/Delete paradigm; but this, however, is beyond the scope of REST. In our example, we stick with PUT all the way.

Safe and unsafe methods:safe methods are those that never modify resources. The only safe methods, from the four listed above, is GET. The others are unsafe, because they may result in a modification of the resources. Idempotent methods:These methods achieve the same result, no matter how many times the request is repeated: they are GET, PUT, and DELETE. The only non idempotent method is POST. PUT and DELETE being considered idempotent might be surprising, though, it, in fact, is quite easy to explain: repeating a PUT method with exactly the same body should modify a resource in a way that it remains identical to the one described in the previous PUT request: nothing will change! Similarly, it makes no sense to delete a resource twice. It follows that no matter how many times a PUT or DELETE request is repeated, the result should be the same as if it had been done only once.

Remember: it’s you, the programmer, who ultimately decides what happens when a certain HTTP method is used. There is nothing inherent to HTTP implementations that will automatically cause resources to be created, listed, deleted, or updated. You must be careful to apply the HTTP protocol correctly and enforce these semantics yourself.

We can sum up what we have seen so far in the following way: the HTTP client and the HTTP server exchange information about resources identified by URLs.

We say that the request and response contains a representation of the resource. By representation, we mean information, in a certain format, about the state of the resource or how that state should be in the future. Both the header and the body are part of the representation.

The HTTP headers, which contain metadata, are tightly defined by the HTTP spec; they can only contain plain text, and must be formatted in a certain manner.

The body can contain data in any format, and this is where the power of HTTP truly shines. You know that you can send plain text, pictures, HTML, and XML in any human language. Through request metadata or different URLs, you can choose between different representations for the same resource. For example, you might send a webpage to browsers and JSON to applications.

The HTTP response should specify the content type of the body. This is done in the header, in the Content-Type field; for instance:

Content/Type: application/json

For simplicity, our example application only sends JSON back and forth, but the application should be architectured in such a way that you can easily change the format of the data, to tailor for different clients or user preferences.

To experiment with the different request methods, you need a client which allows you to decide which method to use. Unfortunately, HTML forms do not fit the bill, as they only allow you to make GET and POST requests. In real life, APIs are accessed programatically, through a separate client application or through JavaScript in the browser.

This is the reason why, in addition to the server, it is essential to have good HTTP client capabilities available in your progamming language of choice.

A very popular choice of HTTP client library is, again, cURL. You’re already been familiarized with the cURL command line over the course of this tutorial. cURL includes both a standalone command line program, and a library that can be used from many programming languages. In particular, cURL is very often the HTTP client solution of choice with PHP. Other languages, such as Python, offer more native HTTP client libraries.

Our example PHP application is extremely barebones. I wanted to expose the low level functionality as much as possible, without any framework magic. I also did not want to use a real API, such as Twitter’s, because they are subject to change unexpectedly, you need to setup authentication, which can be a hassle, and, obviously, you cannot study the implementation.

To run the example application, you will need to install PHP5 and a web server, with some mechanism to run PHP. The current version must be at least version 5.2 to have access to the json_encode() and json_decode() functions.

As for servers, the most common choice is still Apache with mod_php, but you can use anything that you are comfortable with. There is a sample Apache configuration which contains rewrite rules to help you setup the application quickly.
All requests to any URL starting with /clients/ must be routed to our server.php file.

In Apache, you need to enable mod_rewrite and put the supplied mod_rewrite configuration somewhere in your Apache configuration, or your .htacess file. This way, server.php will answer to all requests coming from the server. The same must be achieved with Nginx, or whichever alternative server you decide to use.

There are two keys to processing requests the REST way. The first key is to initiate different processing, depending on the HTTP method – even when the URLS are the same. In PHP, there is a variable in the $_SERVER global array, which determines which method has been used to make the request:

$_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD']

This variable contains the method name as a string, for instance ‘GET‘, ‘PUT‘, and so on.

The other key is to know which URL has been requested. To do this, we use another standard PHP variable:

$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']

This variable contains the URL starting from the first forward slash. For instance, if the host name is ‘example.com‘, ‘http://example.com/‘ would return ‘/‘, while ‘http://example.com/test/‘ would return ‘/test/‘.

Let’s first try to determine which URL has been called. We only consider URLs starting with ‘clients‘. All other are invalid.

$resource = array_shift($paths); if ($resource == 'clients') { $name = array_shift($paths); if (empty($name)) { $this->handle_base($method); } else { $this->handle_name($method, $name); } } else { // We only handle resources under 'clients' header('HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found'); }

We have two possible outcomes:

the resource is the clients, in which case, we return a complete listing there is a further identifier

If there is a further identifier, we assume it is the client’s name, and, again, forward it to a different function, depending on the method. We use a switch statement, which should be avoided in a real application:

switch($method) { case 'PUT': $this->create_contact($name); break; case 'DELETE': $this->delete_contact($name); break; case 'GET': $this->display_contact($name); break; default: header('HTTP/1.1 405 Method Not Allowed'); header('Allow: GET, PUT, DELETE'); break; }

HTTP response codes standardize a way of informing the client about the result of its request.

You might have noticed that the example application uses the PHP header(), passing some strange looking strings as arguments. The header() function prints the HTTP headers and ensures that they are formatted appropriately. Headers should be the first thing on the response, so you shouldn’t output anything else before you are done with the headers. Sometimes, your HTTP server may be configured to add other headers, in addition to those you specify in your code.

Headers contain all sort of meta information; for example, the text encoding used in the message body or the MIME type of the body’s content. In this case, we are explicitly specifying the HTTP response codes. HTTP response codes standardize a way of informing the client about the result of its request. By default, PHP returns a 200 response code, which means that the response is successful.

The server should return the most appropriate HTTP response code; this way, the client can attempt to repair its errors, assuming there are any. Most people are familiar with the common 404 Not Found response code, however, there are a lot more available to fit a wide variety of situations.

Keep in mind that the meaning of a HTTP response code is not extremely precise; this is a consequence of HTTP itself being rather generic. You should attempt to use the response code which most closely matches the situation at hand. That being said, do not worry too much if you cannot find an exact fit.

Here are some HTTP response codes, which are often used with REST:

This response code indicates that the request was successful.

This indicates the request was successful and a resource was created. It is used to confirm success of a PUT or POST request.

The request was malformed. This happens especially with POST and PUT requests, when the data does not pass validation, or is in the wrong format.

This response indicates that the required resource could not be found. This is generally returned to all requests which point to a URL with no corresponding resource.

This error indicates that you need to perform authentication before accessing the resource.

The HTTP method used is not supported for this resource.

This indicates a conflict. For instance, you are using a PUT request to create the same resource twice.

When all else fails; generally, a 500 response is used when processing fails due to unanticipated circumstances on the server side, which causes the server to error out.

Let’s begin by simply fetching information from the application. We want the details of the client, ‘jim‘, so let’s send a simple GET request to the URL for this resource:

curl -v http://localhost:80/clients/jim

This will display the complete message headers. The last line in the response will be the message body; in this case, it will be JSON containing Jim’s address (remember that omitting a method name will result in a GET request; also replace localhost:80 with the server name and port you are using).

Next, we can obtain the information for all clients at once:

curl -v http://localhost:80/clients/

To create a new client, named Paul…

curl -v -X PUT http://localhost:80/clients/paul -d '{"address":"Sunset Boulevard" }

and you will receive the list of all clients now containing Paul as a confirmation.

Finally, to delete a client…

curl -v -X DELETE http://localhost:80/clients/anne

and you will find that the returned JSON no longer contains any data about Anne.

If you try to retrieve a non-existing client, for example:

curl -v http://localhost:80/clients/jerry

you will obtain a 404 error, while, if you try to create a client which already exists:

curl -v -X PUT http://localhost:80/clients/anne

you will receive a 409 error, instead.

In general, the less assumptions beyond HTTP you make, the better.

It’s important to remember that HTTP was conceived to communicate between systems which share nothing but an understanding of the protocol. In general, the less assumptions beyond HTTP you make, the better: this allows the widest range of programs and devices to access your API.

I used PHP in this tutorial, because it is most likely the language most familiar to Nettuts+ readers. That being said, PHP, although designed for the web, is probably not the best language to use when working in a REST way, as it handles PUT requests in a completely different fashion, than GET and POST. One of the most popular PHP REST libraries is the one included in the popular Zend Framework.

Beyond PHP, you might consider the following:

Among the applications which attempt to adhere to REST principles, the classic example is the Atom Publishing Protocol, though it’s honestly not used that much in practice. For a modern application, which is built on the philosophy of using HTTP to the fullest, refer to Apache CouchDB.

Have fun.

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