Blogging Sueblimely

Work with Wordpress MU (multi user) is the reason from my recent absence from blogging. The East Coast area of a UK charity, the National Coastwatch Institution, needed a rebuild of one its website to go along with an extension of it’s activities.

Although you may not have the same needs as this organization you may consider using Wordpress MU if you want to develop more than one blog.

I had originally created the coastwatch site using the Joomla CMS system but, as the interface was complicated for them, Wordpress was my obvious choice. After working with Wordpress on various sites for a year or so, I know how flexible it can be. I was pleased to see that immediately after the new site was up and running Keef, who will be a co-author, had written a post and just needed me to tell him to hit the media button to add images. So much simpler.

As NCI East Coast now comprises of two coastwatch stations, managed by two separate committes, each needed their own unique identity, I decided on using Wordpress MU to make administration simpler. Both stations now have their own unique pages and blogs on their own virtual subdomains.

The blog and some pages on the main East Coast site are being used as a private member only area for both of the coastwatch volunteer teams. Plugins turn this section into a true community site.

The other East Coast pages are public and contain information common to both stations. By using Wordpress MU, the three blogs and three sets of static pages (NCI Eastcoast, NCI Skegness and NCI Mablethorpe) can all be managed from one admin dashboard.

I am hoping to see lots of posts written on the site to gain it speedy search engine page ranking and to raise awareness, more volunteer watchers and, hopefully more funds, for this worthy charity organization. Their volunteers man the coastwatch stations daily, making sure beach and sea goers are safe.

You may like to go along and leave a comment, joining me in congratulating them on their hard work and efforts in getting their second station up and running.

I will expand upon the advantages of and uses for MU in an upcoming post. For those of you interested in setting up an MU site I will also be talking of how to I set the East Coast site up, the plugins I used and where to find futher information.

I will also be discussing how you can use Wordpress, including an existing installation, or Wordpress MU to create a community site. As with the NCI Eastcoast example, you do not have to run your whole site as a community site – you can just have it as an add-on to a normal WP site.

Popularity: 55% [?]

If you are not confident adapting Wordpress themes but cannot quite find one that is ideal, you may like to consider using a a free flexible and customizable theme; where changes are made via an admin dashboard theme interface. There is no need for you to touch the code at all, with theme options built into the admin area. Some of these type of themes are also ideal if you want to easily take advantage of the capabilities of Wordpress to create something a little different, do not want to go all the way with a magazine type theme, or want to use your site for more than just a blog.

Here are a selection of such free WP themes. They vary in the amount of customization available; all are widget ready. Another advantage of all of these themes is that there is more help available. The theme designers have gone the extra mile to provide you with with help pages, forums, tutorials or wikis.

Dkret2

- An adaptable theme with its own options in the admin/presentation area for choosing which stylesheet to use – either one of the included styles (or if you are feeling adventurous one you have created or modified yourself.

• A dashboard theme page for making adjustments
• Up to five Sidebars including 3 “footer” sidebars.
• Choose from one of the supplied style schemes or add your own without the need for editing the base them files.
• Includes Guestbook Events and Todo templates. and the ability to have no Sidebar,
• Uses AJAX for comments and has a built in AJAX comment preview

Download from Wordpress.org
Documentation
Forum
Making Schemes Video

Mandigo

A customizable theme from onehertz which among other features allows you to choose from 7 color schemes and determine the placement of sidebars.

• Dashboard Themes Option page for easy customization
• 38 languages .
• Two widths 800×600 screen resolution or 1024 pixels.
• One or two columns, right or left side selected selected from the Theme Options page
• Per page or random header images
• 7 Color Schemes – blue, red, green, pink, purple, orange & teal.
• Schemes can be selected from the Theme Options page, or switched randomly by enabling the random scheme feature

Download from Wordpress.org
Wiki

Royale

Another customizable theme from onehertz with layout and color options and an unusual feature of changing link colors.

• A fluid-width layout
• Two or three-column
• 3 column layout – side by side or right/left sidebars
• Choose the accents (link) color from a 360-color palette or make colors cycle automatically, which means that the color of links will change smoothly as your visitors read your blog.
• Translated into thirty-eight languages.

If you do not like the black background color this is reasonably easy to change.

Download – Wordpress.org
Theme Homepage

onehertz also has a customizable theme based on Nintendo’s Mario Bros although you could change the background image to your liking – smw theme

Starscape

This theme has a large range of customization options and the creator MillaN has added more and more features over time. StarscapeII in the pipeline.

• Theme Control Panel
• Inbuilt ready to use themes of different colors.
• Customize header logo and background
• Control the rendering of menus and sidebars,
• Sidebar customization – left and right or just one -
• Sidebar width options
• A footer ’sidebar’ for 3, 4 or 5 widgets.
• Icon customization
• Date Button for Posts and Pages
• plus even more features

Theme Control Panel

A selection of the built in styles

Download - Wordpress.org
Theme Homepage
Tutorials

Tarski

by Ben Eastaugh and Chris Sternal-Johnson.

This theme comes with different styles and layouts and a choice of stock header images.

• Tarski comes with a choice of several stock header images but you may prefer to add your own.
• You can choose from with three alternate styles, which tweak the theme’s colours slightly or add your own custom style.
• There are a number of different sidebar options

Theme Homepage
Download – Wordpress.org
Documentation and Help
Forum

Ikarus

Finally one with over 2,000 options configurable from your admin dashboard area. Here is but one example of the layout and colors available.

• Theme options page and help page in admin
• Live theme preview in admin area
• 4 homepage layouts to choose from, Blog, Magazine, List or Magazine List
• Content Gallery (on or off) Slideshow or static header image with link
• Featured Sidebar post (on or off)
• Many sidebar features built in without the need for additional plugins – popular content rating, recent posts, comments and feedback, tagcloud, Social bookmark tools
• 6 125×125, 1 header 468×60, 1 footer 468×60 banners all managed from theme admin area
• 10 color variations to choose from for header bar, widgets, post titles, links and footer
• 3 Columns, Widgets 2 columns
• CSS multi-level drop down page menus across header
• MooTabs slider box
• Featured YouTube Video post
• Custom typography styles
• and more …,..

Download - Wordpress.org
Homepage and Demo

I have created a list on diigo for this type of theme and will add to the list and this post as I find more of interest. I will be continuing with this series of posts to bring you details of unusual themes, niche themes; free and premium.

Please let me know if you use any of these themes or know of more themes that allow for easy customization.

Popularity: 33% [?]

Premium Wordpress themes and theme sites have been springing up over the last couple of years, often catering for the increasing popularity of magazine style themes. Free themes have not always measured up to premium themes in design complexity and, at times, in their coding accuracy. The additional support offered with premium themes is also a draw card.

Theme Directory

For personal bloggers the cost of buying themes tends to outweigh their advantages. For those who are making money or promoting a business with their blog the price is less of a factor. The good news for those who do not want to spend money on themes is that the new Wordpress theme directory not only has a huge repository of themes but, to be eligible for inclusion, themes have to meet certain standards. This means that anything downloaded from the directory will work, without any coding glitches. That is the theory; although I would have thought that there are bound to be the odd few that fall through the net. Despite this we can feel much more confident downloading themes from the WP theme directory than from sites we don’t know and trust.

If you do want a magazine style layout you may still have to consider paying for a premium theme. The WP Themes Directory only has two tagged as “magazine”. There is however more good news, hence the title of this post. The site that brought us the premium Revolution Theme is going open source (under a GPL licence) as from 1st November. The themes will all be new (as it is not fair to offer the Revolution Theme itself after many have already paid for it). There will be an option to purchase packages which include support, tutorials, access to customization and a few other things (not yet specified) but the themes themselves will be free. More details can be found on the site of Revolution’s creator Brian Gardner – Revolution Going Open Source.

WP Limits is following the lead with some soon to be released free themes, including a “never before created knowledgebase theme”.

I have spent some time researching magazine style themes, free and premium, and have a post in the pipeline showing you my findings.

For Blogger users, there is a list of blogspot template sites on my Blogger blog.

Popularity: 17% [?]

Reading

• Your turn – if you have written or have read something that may interest readers here or come across a new site worth a look at let me know; by leaving a comment here or via my contact page. (The latter may be best if it is your own post so that others do not perceive it as being spammy) I will only publish comments that include links if the links are relevant and useful. (covering myself here in case I get spam!).

  If you are a regular reader you will know I try to feature posts from some of the lesser known blogging blogs and those who write excellent posts about blogging but do not have that as their main topic.

  You likely check out the more popular blogging blogs yourself but I do also include links to these if the content is of particular significance.

News

• I know a lot of my readers are mums so Moms Group Manual may be of interest. – this blog is a "Mom’s Guide to Connecting with Other Moms" both online and in person.
• Google is partnering with newspaper publishers to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online. Millions of pages of news articles will be digitized. These will be searchable by using Google News Archive or by using the timeline feature after searching Google News. This may come in very handy for research purposes for some bloggers. Read more on the Official Google Blog.
• Come On In The Web Is Fine has started a campaign to encourage sites not to play music on loading. I was recently asked by a client to add Christmas music to their site this year and I had to politely say "no way", that is not a good idea. I feel a post coming on about this topic so will say no more for now.

Blogging Tools

• 8 Google Reader Extensions for Firefox 3

Cyclo.psis a stock photo site search engine that "brings the results of the most popular stock sites to one location". Search once. See it all – no binocular vision on this site folks Joking, I think the name clever.

Social Networking

• Sweetcron- I am looking forward to get onboard with Sweetcron, a new lifestreaming application. Similar to Friendfeed in that it collects together your activities on sites such as Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg. The difference is that you install and run Sweetcron from your own server and in a graphical format. A good example can be found on YongFong’s Sweecron site – not surprising as he is the application’s creator. Cha Cha France gives more details at Sweetcron | The Best Automated Lifestreaming & Blogging Software
• CMS Wire discusses whether Jaiku, which now allows its members unlimited invites, has missed the boat in Microblogging with Jaiku: Too Late to the Party? I must check Jaiku out again. If anyone wants an invite let me know, seems I can now invite anyone I like.
• Dwigger – threaded conversations and voting for Twitter. The idea sounds promising although the content does not show this as yet – No breaking news here. Top voted tweets today being largely about Talk Like a Pirate Day e.g." talk like a pirate day? shit, i forgot."

Blogger

• Antonio Lupetti from Woork has published some excellent tips for tweaking a blogspot template in 7 Tips to design professional blog layout using Blogger.

Wordpress

• So you want to create WordPress themes huh? 16 beginner tutorials from wpdesigner – more advanced lessons to come.
• 68 Unique Wordpress Themes from CSS Leak
• wordpress plugin : my profiles download page
• Smashing Magazine have written a great post for those interesting in doing some Wordpress tweaking and coding, with links to articles and tutorials. WordPress Developer’s Toolbox I wish I had thought of that post!!
• Web Tools Collection takes a First Look At WordPress 2.7
• 2.7 brings the option of adding SSL security to protect your blog from hackers. To activate go to Edit Profile in the My Account menu of your dashboard and then to "Browser Connection". Choose “Always use HTTPS when visiting administration pages.”

Popularity: 16% [?]

The website that has been taking up my time and my passion, to the extent that I have not been posting here as often as I would like, is launched. The Fragile X Association of Australia now has an interactive site built around Wordpress.

From posts I have written before, you may know that I have a son with the condition and, at the time he was diagnosed. little was known about it – despite Fragile X Syndrome being the most common form of inherited intellectual disability and the own known genetic cause of Autism. I have since been on a bit of a mission to ensure as many people know about it as possible so that other kids and carriers are diagnosed and get the proper treatment. Male and female carriers may have their own distinct health issues that are quite distinct from those affected by the syndrome. Some males are being incorrectly treated as having Parkinson’s disease for example.

As well as standard Wordpress pages with information relating to Fragile X Syndrome and the support and services offered by the Association, the blog section will enable them to update the site frequently with news of Fragile X and the various activities run by the Association and its State Support Groups. Pages can be easily added and edited when more information is needed. With frequent advances in research and treatment trials anyone interested can be kept up to date. Although I am going to be around to teach and help with the system, the Association’s office manager and committee members will be able to operate the site themselves.

More technical aspects:

I chose Wordpress as a CMS system over Joomla and Drupal because of its easy of use and administration. Other CMS systems can be quite hard to learn and Wordpress has all the features needed; either inbuilt or via plugins. Although I am very familiar with Joomla in particular adding content is still more time consuming than WP. I have found that despite all good intentions the clients I have built Joomla systems for add very little new content, or ask me to do it for them.

I did have to add some coding manually rather than use plugins to get the navigation system to do what I wanted, so that only certain pages showed in the main menu and specific menus appeared on particular groups of pages. Despite having very little practice with PHP this was not too hard because of the excellent documentation on the Wordpress.org site. If anyone would like to know how I created any particular aspects of the site, please let me know.

My last addition to the site was the forums, which I did not want to configure until the site was being hosted on the proper domain. The rest of the site I had created in a subdirectory of my own server and transferred over afterwards, with a bit of editing of the database. I used SMF for the forums because of the extent of features available. I still need to redesign the template to match the rest of the site.

A request

Please visit the site and have a bit of a read – your knowledge may possibly be of great help to someone you know. If you have the time please leave a comment on a news item – it will give the site editors some practice with the comment section and encourage those who are not used to leaving messages to do so. If there is anything particular you would like to know that you cannot find within the main site, drop by the forums and ask – or leave suggestions for content or feedback on the site.

Now I will do some catching up on what is happening in the blogging world to again bring you news of new tools, software, social networking and other stuff that will hopefully be of use to you.

Popularity: 11% [?]