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: 13% [?]

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: 24% [?]