Solostream Small Business Blog
A clean, simple, two column, right hand sidebar theme with widget support. Red dominates the color scheme, which sports a nice amount of white space.
Also, a nice feature is the “featured post”, which sets off the top most post from the rest.
This handy plugin has been updated to 2.9. For those not familiar, it provides an unobtrusive menu bar above your blog when logged in to facilitate posting and managing your blog.
While there, check out the many other updates to the multitude of plugins that Denis has released to the community.
Also, Denis has opened a forum for his many projects.
The ever popular K2 theme, modified for a 3rd column, recieves an upgrade. Upgrade covers the use of live search with widgets, and a tweak to the column widths. Generally speaking, if you are a fan of this design, as well as 3 columns, this is a definite must see.
Much apologies to those who’ve contacted me about recent releases, and those who looked for their WP news from the Station. After many trials and tribulations, I’m back online and prepared to pick back up bringing you news about the most recent news and notes about WordPress and it’s community of developers and designers who make it one of the best on the ‘net.
Back in Feburary, I stumbled upon some free templates from Template monster. I made some comments here on this blog about how ironic I found it that they were table based. The irony was that one of the tables based designs were based on Cameron Moll’s design. The same Cameron Moll who expounds on the virtues of CSS and XHTML. I summed up with a snide comment, “get with the program”. Little did I know, that they came across my comment, and have indeed attempted to step up to the plate and make their WP designs CSS and XHTML based. Before I get into the details and observations about that aspect of things, a little more about the themes, and how I came about them.
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Yeah, Yeah, I’ve heard it all before. However, I think this idea is just different enough that even the most cynical WP user will find it interesting. We all have seen the Classic theme gathering dust in the corner of our install, or worse, it’s been deleted. However, I find it intriguing, and am offering up the idea of a contest in which ONLY the style sheet is redone. No code on any of the template’s change. I know this was done in earlier versions of WP, and with the release of 1.5 and Kubrick, it all became passe, however I’d like to revive it, and be able to offer up for download the new styles that show up. I think that would give new users even more to choose from, not to mention, it gives everyone a chance to participate, as you don’t have to be a coding genius to compete with the stellarly talented designers out there who know the WP code like the back side of their hand.
So, with that said, I have at least one potential sponsor lined up, if there’s enough interest, and would attempt to line up a couple more if there’s really enough interest. As of today, my stats are saying there’s at least 84 of you reading this feed, so perhaps a few of you could chime in on your feelings on such. Perhaps I don’t know that Classic is going to be dumped in a future release, and I’m wasting my time. All of which I’d love to hear. Please, then, chime in, just this once, and let me know if there’s interest in such a contest, and if it’s a worthy contribution to the community.
I will say I haven’t finalized the details, but adding graphic elements would be accepted, the only real rule I’d stick by is the no changing of the code in the templates. Any other suggestions welcomed.
Another way of combating spam. This allows to ban a commentor by email, IP, and several other options. Similar to the blacklist feature, this however spells out for those not familiar with such.
More a plugin for plugin authors, this takes into account the many uses of scriptalicious in plugins these days, and offers the ability to have a single copy, used by all plugin authors. There’s been discussion of including this in the core as well.
Beta 2 of the Squible theme has been released, this release scraps the old system of integrating sections and now uses widgets. Still a great concept theme, if only it had better support for more than one post on the main page. Still a valiant WP theme, with lots of ideas to cobble into your own design, and definitely one that breaks the sidebar mold.
A handy plugin for searching and replacing content within your blog. A perfect example is the moving of images. Rather than hunt through each post and edit the url for the image, this plugin takes the work right out of the task. Also could be handy for fixing posts that are causing validation errors.
While at Urban Giraffe, check out John’s other plugins, including disable wpautop, which turns off the auto formatting in posts.
Also, if you are interested in theme design, his four part series, Dissection of a WP Theme
is as useful as they get.