Take a look at the website of the restaurant Chez Panisse in San Francisco.
The site is built very nicely in WordPress. Don’t you think it looks classy?
Just shows how flexible WordPress is. And the only image in the page is the favicon.
Neat.
Here is the link to Chez Panisse.
Whenever I see a website that appeals to me for its layout or design, I want to know how it was constructed.
And whenever I see a WordPress website that looks like I ought to know what theme it is built on, but I don’t, I want to know what theme it is.
Today I was looking at Colorful Foosteps and I didn’t recognise the theme on which is is built. So I checked out the page source and found that it is built on the Weaver WordPress theme. That’s a free theme available in the WordPress repository and is described on the Weaver homepage like this:
For a long time Weaver 2.2.x has been one of the highest rated themes on WordPress.org, and includes many options to customize your site. Now, a new, even better version, called Weaver II, is available. Weaver II has many new features, including second-to-none automatic mobile device support.
And a couple of days ago I was looking at Dear Crissy which is a WP design by Purr Design. It’s very classy and well designed – an well worth seeing.
I have put together this curated list of sites that offer free and/or premium WordPress themes.
I have no financial interest in any of these themes or the individuals or companies that make them.
Please bookmark and/or link to this page if you find it useful.
I have not included Thesis or themes built on the Genesis framework, or WooThemes because they are so well known. These are themes that are not so well known.
One of the things you will discover as your surf the web is that there are a lot of sites that produce free WordPress themes and a lot of companies and individuals that produce premium WordPress themes.
Finding them is not simply a question of googling for WordPress themes, because there is a lot of repetition.
I tend to find themes when I am looking at a site and I notice something about the design or the layout that appeals to me. Then I will look at the footer or the page source to find out whether it is a WordPress theme.
After finding a theme that appeals to me, the question is whether the theme is any good from the point of view of whether it presents problems using it.
I have a test site with a WordPress installation and if I like a theme, I install it on the test site and start using it.
I always run any themes that I have uploaded to my test site through TAC.
If you want to know whether your theme had problems, I suggest you try the Theme Authenticity Checker (TAC) plugin from the WordPress directory and run the theme through that. Here is the blurb from the TAC plugin page:
TAC stands for Theme Authenticity Checker. Currently, TAC searches the source files of every installed theme for signs of malicious code. If such code is found, TAC displays the path to the theme file, the line number, and a small snippet of the suspect code. As of v1.3 TAC also searches for and displays static links.
Sometimes I give up on themes because the menus are not easy to work with, or because parts of the page don’t load correctly. The list of things that can and do go wrong is endless. One the other hand, a well-coded theme is a pleasure to use.
It’s easy to link it up.
First, make sure that you are signed in to WordPress.com or Gravatar.com
Then just go to your gravatar page and click on My Account and then Edit My Profile and it will bring up a list including ‘Verified Services’
As long as you are logged in to WordPress.com first, you can get there by clicking here.
and then add your blog.
I came across something when manually updating WordPress, that I would not have noticed had I updated WordPress automatically.
I should explain that I have several sites, including this one, running on WordPress.
However, one of the sites is on a subdirectory of a parent site and it is set so that I cannot update WordPress or plugins automatically.
Instead, I update manually via FTP. It is a bit of a pain, but the upside is that it prompts me to look into the new WordPress folder when I download it from the WordPress repository.
One thing I noticed is that there were several files in my site that were not in the new WordPress folder.
These are the files:
wp-atom.php
wp-commentsrss2.php
wp-feed.php
wp-rdf.php
wp-rss.php
wp-rss2.php
I wondered what this meant, so I googled for wp-atom.php WordPress 3.3 and I found What you need to know about WordPress 3.3 in a site named NSpeaks.
That explains that a number of old feed files (the ones above) can be removed. There is a link to Ticket #18384 in the WordPress trac.
This states:
These files can all go:
wp-feed.php
wp-rss2.php
wp-rss.php
wp-atom.php
wp-commentsrss2.php
wp-rdf.phpWe can keep them in the rewrite rules (in compressed form) and then catch them in canonical, and continue to redirect them there.
Additionally, we will not add these files to $_old_files, so they won’t be removed on upgrade. Of course, they are safe to remove, but it’ll minimize breakage of lame use of these files.
I looked at another of my sites that I had upgraded automatically, and yes – these files are still there.
It occurs to me that for those people who are neither automatic upgraders (for whatever reason) nor developers, finding these six files in their site structure might be confusing unless one is aware of the discussion in Trac.
This is the other plugin from Mark Jaquith that I consider to be an essential part of any WordPress installation.
It is extremely useful because it enables you to make any of your pages or posts link to a location you choose.
That means that, for example, you could have a page in your navigation menu and when someone clicks on it, it takes them to where you want to take them rather than to that page.
Here’s a concrete example of how I have used it. We have a site that is built in Ruby On Rails. The blog is at ~/blog/ and one of the items in the navigation menu on the blog is Contact Us.
The thing is that we have a Contact page on the main site and there is no sense in having yet another contact page on the blog.
So, I made an empty page on the blog and named it Contact Us and linked it to our main contact page using this plugin.
Now, when someone clicks that item on the navigation menu, instead of going to that WordPress page they are taken to our main Contact page. It makes sense and it’s easy to do with this plugin.
You can find the plugin on Mark’s site and also on the WordPress repository.
Mark Jaquith makes two plugins that I consider to be an essential part of any WordPress installation, and subscribe to comments is one of them.
You will find it in the WordPress.org repository here.
You can also find it on Mark’s site Tempus Fugit, where you will find other plugins he has designed.
Other coders have made similar ‘comment’ plugins, but I have not needed to explore them because I have found Mark’s plugin to be reliable.
What subscribe to comments does is to enable commenters to check off a box to receive e-mail notification of subsequent comments.
You can see it below this article, and it looks like this:
What The 'Subscribe To Comments' Plugin Like To A Visitor
When you think about it, this is very attractive from the commenter’s point of view. The commenter has taken the time to comment, and he/she most probably wants to know what else is being said subsequently on this topic.
For example, maybe another commenter has something to say about his/her comment or the author of the article has replied to the comment.
And it is good for site owners, because it encourages people to come back to the site.
As Mark says on his site:
The plugin includes a full-featured subscription manager that your commenters can use to unsubscribe to certain posts, block all notifications, or even change their notification e-mail address!
Once you install the plugin, you will find the options under ‘Settings’ in the sidebar, and one of the settings that you might want to change is the ‘From’ e-mail addresss for notifications – that is the address that sends emails to commenters to notify them of new comments.
By default it will be the email address that you set up as the admin for the WordPress installation when you created it. But that is not necessarily the address from which you want notifications to be sent.
When you set up your site with a web host, you will have access to a mail server as well as a web server. That enables you to set up email addresses from which you can send and at which you can receive email.
You might set up an address like david @ dbwordpress.com. However, you might have set up your WordPress installation using your ‘regular’ Yahoo or Gmail address.
Like other plugins, Subscribe to Comments will ‘read’ your default email address, but you won’t necessarily want to use that address to notify commenters of new comments.
So change that in the Subscribe to Comments settings.
I host a lot of sites with Dreamhost, and one of its features is that it enables you to switch easily to using Gmail rather than the mail servers built into Dreamhost.
I prefer to use Gmail accounts for the admin email for most of my sites and that is what I have done here on DB WORDPRESS.
It means therefore that I want my comment notifications to go from that Gmail address, which in my case is david @ dbwordpress.com
Mark Macdonald over at Content Converts has made a free Thesis skin and I have installed it here on DBWordpress.
Mark describes the theme as:
“… a clean, simple skin that lacks clutter and gets you past the ‘out-of-the-box’ Thesis look and feel”
It has:
“… a custom styled Feedburner opt-in box, custom styled landing pages, a widgetized footer for your own copyright text, and built in styling for Gravity Forms.”
I am just getting to grips with the theme. I have changed the footer copyright text – very easy to do – and the next thing will be to investigate Gravity Forms.
Update:
I removed the Kickstarter theme. It was interesting to experiment with, including adding a new customs css folder, but in the end I decided that I prefer to work with the out-of-the-box version of Thesis and tailor that to my needs. There was no magic ‘uninstall’ button for the Kickstarter child theme, so I had to delve into the back end via FTP to remove it. Not recommended if you are just starting out with WordPress.