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.

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Flexible Customizable Wordpress Themes

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.

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Revolution in WP Themes

• 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.”

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Blogosphere News Sept 27th

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.

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

The Wordpress CMS Site is Launched

Social Networking

• FriendFeed -
  • New Feature - Rooms
  • Share web pages on your FriendFeed using the Share on Friendfeed Toolbar Button

• 20 Things I Learned Using Twitter- some good tips here on making the most of Twitter and using it efficiently. I am adding this link to my Twitter Beginners post
• The Art and Science of Retweeting for Twitteraholics- a guest post by AJ Vaynerchuk on BloggingBits.
• 50 Top Niche Social Media Sites and Their Power Accounts- I should imagine this may have changed some since it was written in December. Does anyone know of other more recent posts on the topic?
• Profilactic social media aggregator - you can now post content to 14 services from within Profilactic - currently supported are: Bebo, Blogger, Facebook, hi5, Jaiku, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Mashable, MySpace, Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr, Twitter and Xanga.
• Flickr integration with Facebook - share your own Flickr photos and browse those of your Facebook Friends.
• If you work from home you may be interested in the WhyDoWork network. A new feature that has been introduced by the site is the ability to add links to your blog, website or affiiate activities to their directory. Reviewing other member’s sites is a factor in determining how high your own links are in the directory.The more reviews, the higher you get. WhyDoWork includes forums, an add friends feature, your own blog page and a work at home job search engine. I have joined up but have not signed up for the blog review feature as yet. I want to check out the others who were doing reviews before I decide on whether it is a suitable feature for this blog.

Blogger

• Blogger in Draft has introduced new features including the long awaited comments embedded in post pages rather than those annoying popusp.
• I am using my blogspot blog to answer the specific questions relating to Blogger so if you have a problem or wish to learn something please drop me a line via comments or my contact form at Sueblimely Blogspot I also keep its blogroll up to date with any good blogger template sites or blogger help sites I come across.

Wordpress

• How to Format Images for Feed Readers A simple solution to ensure your images and text are well laid out in feed readers.
• Wordpress.com enables the use of Google Gears, a powerful browser add in to speed up access times when your PC is communicating with your Wordpres dashboard. If you do not already have Gears installed and enabled on your PC click on the “Turbo” link at the top right of your dashboard . This will take you to the Gears download site. After you install and enable Gears most of WordPress’ images, scripts, and CSS files will be stored locally on your computer. This is not so useful if you use more than one PC or use a public computer while blogging. More info:
  • Browsers supported by Gears
  • Gears Help Center
• Wordpress 6 is around the corner, hot on the heels of the much maligned version 5. Technosailer gives us a sneek preview of 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.6 which includes Google Gears and what looks like a nifty post/snip from any website directly to your blog feature.

Search Engine News

• 4050 Search Engines - Phil Bradley maintains a list of Country Based Search Engines - 4000 to date. Don’t panic at the amount, they are categorized by country :-). If you are interested in more specific topics then Laura Milligan at College@Home provides 100 Useful Niche Search Engines You’ve Never Heard Of As I tend to concentrate on blogging and general search myself I had not heard of many of them, but bloggers on other topics may find this list very useful.

I am setting myself a target of one news post per week, otherwise I will no longer be able to call it news!

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Blogosphere News 2

What KeywordLuv does is allow for the inclusion of a name and keywords in the title field in the comments form. I see this as being useful to include your blog title alongside your name. Those who are familiar with your blog title but not your nickname can associate the two or vice versa. For those who do not know you at all your blog’s title may be an added incentive for them to visit you. The plugin has the potential to encourage more comments too.

Your keywords do not have to be your blog title and can be blog topic keywords; but care must be taken that you do not come across as being spammy. Where I can see the plugin useful is where there is something for which you want to become known for. An example that springs to mind here is Kim from Laketrees who could publicize her Top 101 Top Artists’ Blogs list, as this list is of benefit to other bloggers. I would not consider this spammy.

What do you think would constitute spam in a KeywordLuv name?

• KeywordLuv Download page
• More information from Stephen

I have installed the plug myself. Please feel free to give it a try (even if you haven’t must to say).

To use:

In the name field of the comment form add your name in this format: name@yourkeywordtext

Example:
Typing in “Stephen@More than Scratch the Surface” (without the inverted commas) will appear as:
Stephen of More than Scratch the Surface

- although I do not see why you would want to use any one else’s name

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Get More Comments with KeywordLuv

Table of contents for Navigation

1. Navigation Menus 1 - Appetizers
2. Navigation Menus 2 - Entrees
3. Navigation Menus 3 - Main
4. Navigation Menus 4 - Dessert

Today is the fourth course in my series on blog navigation menus - dessert. Some ’sweet’ menus for you to copy - suitable for Wordpress and Blogger.

Here is the html code you will need for all the examples:

HTML

<div id="menu">
<ul>
<li class="selected"><a href="http://www.your home page.com">Link2</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.your link.com">Link2</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.your link.com">Link3</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.your link.com">Link4</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.your link.com">Link4</a></li>
</ul>
<div class="clear"></div>
</div>

Menu Bar

CSS

<style type="text/css">
<!--
#menu, #menu li a {background-color: #8AAADF; color: #ffffff; font-size: 1.0em; font-weight: normal; height: 1.5em; line-height: 1.5em; text-decoration: none; }
#menu, #menu li {padding: 0; margin: 0;} #menu ul { padding: 0; margin: 0 0 0 25px; }
#menu li { float: left; list-style-type: none; white-space: nowrap; }
#menu li a { background-color: inherit; display: block; padding: 0 10px; border-right: 1px solid; border-right-color: #ffffff; }
#menu .selected, #menu a:hover { background-color: #B9CCEC; color: #ffffff; text-decoration: none; border-right: 1px solid #537495; border-right-color: #5B80A4; }
-->
</style>

Tabbed Menu

CSS

<style type="text/css">
<!--
#menu, #menu li a { color: #000000; font-size: 1.0em; font-weight: normal; height: 1.5em;
line-height: 1.5em; text-decoration: none; }
#menu, #menu li { background-color: #FFFFFF; padding: 0; margin: 0;}
#menu {border-bottom: 1px solid; border-bottom-color:#83E292;}
#menu ul { padding: 0; margin: 0 0 0 25px; }
#menu li { float: left; list-style-type: none; white-space: nowrap; margin-left: 10px; }
#menu li a { background-color: #83E292; display: block; margin: 0; padding: 0 10px; border:0;}
#menu .selected, #menu a:hover { background-color: #A0E9AB; color: #ffffff; margin: 0; font-size: 1em; text-decoration: none; border:0;}
-->
</style>

You will of course need to change the links to your own: Copy the code for your chosen menu into a text editor such as Notepad or Wordpad and alter the links to point to where you want them to go. This means altering not only the link text - e.g. Sausage Links - but the hyperlink too. Change http://www.your link.com to the address you are pointing the link to. (remember that blogger does not use the www prefix so you homepage will be something like http://yourbloggeraddress.blogspot.com)

These menus, styled using CSS, are infinitely changeable. If you wish for a thicker menu bar change the height and line height values (currently 1.5em). Change the colors to suit the rest of your blog by changing the values for "background-color" and for text "color".

How to use them in your blog:

Blogger

You can do this by adding an "html/javascript" page element. Firstly you need to make sure you are able to add the page element in the place you want it.

Go to your layout/html section and backup your current layout. Tick the "expand widgets" box. You can alter either of the following two tags (you may not have the crosscol wrapper so will need to alter the header section.

Change:

<b:section class='"crosscol"' id='"crosscol"' showaddelement='"no"'

To:

<b:section class='"crosscol"' id='"crosscol"' showaddelement='"yes"'

Or:
Change

<b:section class='header' id='header' maxwidgets='1' showaddelement='no'>

To:

<b:section class='header' id='header' maxwidgets='2' showaddelement='yes'>

If you already have 2 widgets add another and so on.

Now go to your layout/add element area and add an HTML/Javascript element to the header or cross column section. Copy and paste the CSS and the html code from your chosen menu into this. Alternatively, add just the html code to your html/javascript element and put the css into the style area of your template. Because Cascading Style Sheets cascade you may find the font size of the menus too larage or small so change the "font-size" in the html.

Wordpress

You can approach this in two ways. If you already have a horizontal navigation menu built into your theme then you can just style this. The default Wordpress menu is already called "menu" so the only changes that are needed are to the your style.php file. From the menu examples above only add the CSS styling portion (the code between the "<style type="text/css"><!–" and "–>
</style>" tags), replacing any tags of the same name.

If you do not have a horizontal menu bar already you can add one by adding the html code to your themes header.php file - just below the header division.

If you want to get fancy then instead of your home page address you can use this line instead.

<li><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>"></a></li>

The next and final course in this menu tutorial will be made of a variety of fresh ingredients to tempt you to indulge yourselves.

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Navigation Menus 4 - Dessert

• Join in Conversation Week 2008, March 24-30 discussing the Top 10 Questions in the World Today…
• Pop Culture Heroines is a new multi author site dedicated to the promotion of strong female characters in popular culture. Writers from all backgrounds are invited to submit a request to write articles for the site. A forum is being considered too, so if the subject interests you, you can vote in the poll currently taking place.
• Alltop, a news aggregation site that provides “all the top” stories for forty of the most popular topics on the Web. Review by Guy Kawasaki - Announcing (Formally) Alltop
• On Imaginif blog - WIN $50.00 cash. Write a blog post about Child Safety by April 3rd to coincide with:
• Blog Against Sexual Violence Day April 3rd
• Snoskred has created another set of feed icons for free download - Introducing The Green Collection- Thanks Snos, they are great.
• From Znet -In-flight Internet cleared for take-off and AOL acquires Bebo for $850 million; Social networking field narrows
• NOTCOT Inc is a growing network of design sites currently including NOTCOT.com, NOTCOT.org, TasteSpotting.com, NotCouture.com - "a visual filtration of ideas + aesthetics + amusements". Definitely a site for sore eyes

Reading

• Top 10 Personal Health Blogs
• 11 Ways To Create Your Own Traffic Jams by Blogtrepreneur
• The Sisterhood of the travelling Bra - follow the Bra’s progress as it travels around Australia courtesy of All for Women
• 16 Top Social Media Strategies for Success
• 99 Free Online Classes on Business and Entrepreneurship
  
• The Top 100 Productivity and Lifehack Blogs

Blogging Tools

• Round II - 50 Directories With Good Google Page Rank To Submit Your Website (No Reciprocal Link Required!) from Blogging Tips

Social Networking

• Trusera is the place to tap into real world experience about people and their health. Stay awhile and tell us your story.
• I have been using Friendfeed for a week or so now, since it opened up to the public. The name describes the service nicely - a kind of social networking aggregator. Add your friends/friends of friends and receive an online feed of their activity from their blog’s RSS feed, on twitter, del.icio.us, ma.gnolia, flickr, picasa, vimeo, netflix, jaiku, last.fm, pownce, reddit, tumblr, zooomr, ilike, status updates from GoogleTalk. Once I am able to find more of my friends on their it will be very useful. Here is my pageif you want to find me. More info from
  SheGeeks FriendFeed is THE Next Big Thing 10 Ways to Get More Out of Friendfeed
• Kill Them With Kindness - guest post by Saphrym on CK Marketing Blog

Wordpress

• How to Setup Gravatars for your Blog - Plugin Free!
• Free WordPress Icon Pack

Search Engine News

• Topicle is a new search engine community.
  Every Topicle search engine only searches handpicked URLs, instead of the whole Web.
  Members can create new Topicle search engines and maintain all existing ones.
• 10 Tips to use sitemap file for faster crawling and indexing of your site pages
• Installing WordPress Locally Under Windows XP
  

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Blogosphere News 17th March

I then discovered a contest, being run by The Success Space, the winning prize being a free copy of the not yet released Revolution Pro Media Wordpress Theme so this post is by way of letting you know about the contest as well as entering it myself. The Success Space is a resource for Wordpress themes and plugins, social media, affiliate marketing, and more.

If you too want to be in the running for the free theme here are the instructions:

• Write a brief post about this contest on your blog.
• Be sure to include the following in your blog post:
  • A word or two about the Revolution Pro Media magazine style theme (optionally, include the image)
  • Link to the Revolution Pro Media Wordpress theme
  • Link to the Success Space’s contest post and after posting leave a comment there to let them know you have entered.

The winner will be announced on 15th February so entries need to be in before then.
Good luck if you do enter.

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Contest - Win a Premium Magazine Style Wordpress Theme

I have been trialling the Wordpress ‘Yahoo Shortcuts‘ plugin for a week or so now. As I found it a little tricky to come to grips with, I thought I would give you a bit of a run down on how to use it and a review based on my experiences. The images and popup links in this post have mostly been embedded using the plugin.

This plugin uses Yahoo Shortcuts to add Yahoo search popups and Creative Commons-licensed Flickr photos to blog content.

The image to the left is an example of a Yahoo Shortcuts “badge”.

As you are writing your post, the plugin searches for media relevant to your content. A message, at the top of the sidebar in your post window, alerts you to the number of ‘Shortcuts’ that have been found, allows you to review the post and choose whether to include all or some of suggested links and images:

The information suggested is based on various Yahoo search topics and services. A ‘Shortcut’ may lead to a Flickr image, a financial data, stock quotes , a map , a news item or information about specific companies, products, and people. More services are to be added (maybe maybe sports, movies, and music?)

If you want to view and add what has been suggested for inclusion in your post, click on the “Review this Post” button. You will be taken to an edit screen, which shows your post with the suggested shortcut ‘keywords’ underlined with a blue dotted line and a small arrow icon to the right of them. Hovering over the underlined word gives you a preview of the link suggested. Clicking on the arrow brings up options based on the type of content suggested. From here you can delete the link. Where graphical representations are available you can choose to convert the link into a badge, which embeds an image instead.

A section at the bottom of the Yahoo post review window post shows Flickr thumbnails based on keywords in your post. If there are no images to your liking, a search function allows you to browse for more within the same window.

Hovering over a thumbnail will produce a popup window showing you a larger version of the image. If you decide to include it, clicking the “Add to Post button in this window produces another popup window where you can choose the size of image. Pressing “Submit” here will insert the image into your the review post window. Once you are happy with the shortcuts included, press save and you will be taken back to your post window.

Opinion:

Flickr Image placement - if you wish to move the image from its automatically embedded position at the top of the post to somewhere else, care has to be taken that your post layout is not messed up and that text is not floating in places you don’t want it to go. Center placement may be the safest. This image came up for the words “Flickr Image” and he is cute so I thought I would leave him here:

I have not found much use for the linking and badge features, but it was only its Flickr image capabilities that initially attracted me to the plugin.My blog topics do not lead to many automatically suggested and relevant Flickr images. I can, however see this feature being of great use to some blogs.

Once I got used to the interface the plugin became much quicker to use.

Let me try some words to see what the plugin comes up with:

“Funny Sign”‘

“Chocolate”

That is too tempting, I feel a chocolate attack coming on.

Links:

• Yahoo! Shortcuts page
• Yahoo! Shortcuts Download page.
• Yahoo! Shortcuts Demo Video

Post from: Blogging Sueblimely

Yahoo Shortcuts plugin for Wordpress