Category Archives: WordPress

Themes, Plugins, coding and design concepts as well as general discussion about developments within the popular WordPress content management system community.

What do you look for in a “premium grade” WordPress theme?

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… Is it an advanced feature set? Is it a cutting edge design? Is it a combination of both with a sprinkling of pixie dust for extra magic? What do you look for in a “premium grade” WordPress theme? I use the term “premium grade” as I’m not refering specifically to paid-for or “premium” WordPress themes, but rather to themes of a high standard.

With such a vast array of free (and paid-for) WordPress themes on the market today, it’s easy to get lost, wading through the thousands of themes available. As many of the themes are user created, and not everyone has experience or training as a web designer or developer, users get presented with many sub-par WordPress themes. In contrast to this, the themes market is becoming more and more advanced on a daily basis, opening doors for users to experiment with more advanced, theme specific, functionality, enhancing their themes and making them unique and personalised.

With this advancement in the “premium grade” themes market, users are also becoming more expectant, and critical, of the themes which they are presented. It is becoming more common and expected for a theme to have a clever design hook of sorts, some nifty Javascript or an additional “unique” custom feature, if not all three.

So my question is; “What makes a theme ‘premium grade’ in your eyes?”

Win a signature series WordPress theme

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So, the good fellows at Obox Design are delving into the WordPress themes zone. Over the past few months, there has been much discussion, and a few sneak peaks, of “Hash One”, the first in the Obox Signature Series of WordPress themes.

“Hash One” has had an awesome amount of work put into it and is set to include several theme specific features, courtesy of the Obox development department (aka. Mr. Marc). The dudes (and lady) at Obox are running a competition to get a chance to own 1 or approximately 40 unique versions of the “Hash One” theme. Here’s how it’s done:

1. Find the tweet on Twitter sent out by @obox (or @MarcPerel or @NatPerel) discussing the Obox Signature Series theme, “Hash One”.
2. Retweet the above-mentioned tweet.
3. Visit your profile page and get the direct link to the tweet you just made.
4. Paste this URL  into a comment on From-the-Couch with a message.

That’s it. An easy 4 step process to get yourself in the running for this really cool theme. For screenshots of the theme and a bit more about the features and whatnot, visit From-the-Couch.

Custom WordPress Widget – Recent Posts

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I’ve just finished the first round of coding of a widget idea I had for my blog this afternoon. This widget is to display recent posts. Yeah, I know, a “recent posts” widget comes bundled with WordPress. This widget is different. :)

In a short sentence, this widget does the following: “Give me a maximum of the latest X posts that aren’t the first X posts, and display them in a list. If there is a custom field that holds an image, grab it’s value and display the image as a square thumbnail”. The reason for this blog post is more to discuss a few things I learned while coding this widget.
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