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WordPress Theme + Plugin: Making your site more iPhone friendly – use WPtouch

ashish — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 19:16:16 +0000

The iPhone is a revolution in the mobile market, leading to its becoming the top selling product in the SmartPhone market. There are a huge set of users out there who use the iPhone for navigating to different sites and consequently form a market for your blog. It would be a mistake to ignore all those users out there who use mobile browsing, especially when people who are your competitors are reaching out to all these users. Hence the quest to reach to out this market, and ensure that your site has a mobile version that will appeal to such users.
There is a counter argument that most sites appear fine on the iPhone browser, but you should think about this question only if your site is a plain site that does not have heavy graphics, or does not have Flash (the browser on the iPhone does not support Flash), or uses a lot of Javascript for rendering the menus, background, or other fancy stuff.
If you want to render your blog / site to iPhone users, you can find a lot of options on the internet, but you will need to evaluate them through actual use to ensure that you are getting the required speed and efficiency.
Here is another plugin + theme that does the same, it’s called WPtouch (site).
Read more from the site:
WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhone, iPod touch or Android touch mobile device. It comes complete with all the standard WordPress blog features: search, login, categories, tags, archives, photos & more. WPtouch also offers many customization features through a beautifully designed WordPress admin panel.
Not all websites are created equal, with some sites failing to translate well in the viewport of a small mobile device. Many WordPress sites today make heavy use of different javascripts which significantly increase the load time of pages, and drive your visitors on 3G/EDGE batty. So we’ve come up with WPtouch, a lightweight, fast-loading, feature-rich and highly-customized “theme application” which includes an admin interface to let you customize many aspects of your site’s presentation.

WPtouch comes with a host of built-in features. Some notables include:
User-selected theme toggle (between WPtouch view and your site’s regular look)
iPhone-like application appearance, functions
AJAX, jQuery & JS effects
Full WordPress search, pages, archives, categories, tags and links support
Theme native social bookmarking support
iPhone/iPod touch native post e-mailing support
Ajax comments, posted in real time
Ajaxed pagination (users can browse posts like YouTube videos)
Admin selectable custom icons for pages, logo, bookmark icon
Manually edit your site’s title to fit WPtouch
Show / Hide post excerpts, customize style in different ways
Easily add your own icons to customize menu appearance
Admin inclusion/exclusion of site pages shown in the theme’s menu
Compatibility suite in admin to inform of add-ons, WordPress version support
Automatic Archives page layout (if you have or create a page called ‘Archives’)
Automatic Photo page layout with Flickr (if you have or create a page called ‘Photos’ and have the FlickrRSS plugin installed)

Plugins and Themes compatible with WordPress 2.7

ashish — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 16:02:31 +0000

As WordPress comes out with new versions, people who have an installation of WordPress start wondering whether the plugins and themes they are actually compatible with the version to which they are upgrading. If these are not compatible, then the experience which their visitors would get is likely to be non-optimized, and for site owners who spend time tweaking their site, such an eventuality is not something that they would like to contemplate.
The latest WordPress version due to come out is version 2.7, and this same checking for compatibility with version 2.7 for plugins and themes needs to be verified. WordPress.org has these links that show the compatibility.

List of Plugins compatible with WordPress version 2.7 (link)

List of Themes compatible with WordPress version 2.7 (link)

Plugins and Themes compatible with WordPress v 2.6

ashish — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 11:22:27 +0000

Wheneve a new WordPress version comes out, there is always the angst over where the currently used plugins and themes are indeed compatible with the deployed version of WordPress. If the themes and plugins are not compatible, it normally has a bad effect on the blog – the theme or plugin may not work, may work in a limited way, or may work wrongly. In the case of a theme that does not work properly, the viewer may not see the page as you intended, or may end up not seeing the page at all.
With the responsibility of setting up a blog, comes the responsibility of making sure that all the components that are being used are compatible, and so on. Fortunately, WordPress.org has a list of plugins and themes that are compatible with the WordPress version 2.6

Plugins compatible with Version 2.6 of WordPress (link)

Themes compatible with Version 2.6 of WordPress (link)

New free Blogger templates

ashish — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:38:11 +0000

There are a whole host of people who prefer to write their blogs using Google’s Blogger service. It gives a free hosting capability, allows you to place your own content on the site, gives a number of different widgets, and has numerous other blog-friendly features. The one major problem with using Blogger as a platform for your blogs is that the default list of templates is (for want of a better word), downright boring. When you first create a new account and select a template, you get a very small list. Once you have created the blog and to to modify your template, you get a few more customizations possible on the available theme, but none of them are likely to make your very enthusiastic.
However, Blogger does allow you to add your own theme, and if you want to change your template, then there is nothing simpler than finding some great template resources on the web. There are plenty of such resources, and here is a listing of some of them. Given that preferences can vary, I will not try to pre-select any. One word of warning, there is always the temptation to look at more templates, however, if you find a template that you like and supports what you want to do, then you should go with that and stop looking.

http://bloggertemplates.itmag.org/,
http://www.eblogtemplates.com/,
http://mashable.com/2008/05/17/70-plus-new-and-beautiful-blogger-templates/,
http://freshbloggertemplates.blogspot.com/,
http://www.finalsense.com/services/blog_templates/,
http://www.blogspottemplate.com/,
http://www.blogcrowds.com/resources/blogger_template.php,
http://freetemplates.blogspot.com/,
http://blogspottemplates.blogspot.com/,
http://mashable.com/2007/09/13/blogger-templates/,
http://btemplates.com/,
http://blogger-templates.blogspot.com/

14 free Adsense templates – widget-ready

ashish — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 18:17:44 +0000

People are always on the lookout for great free WordPress themes, and it is not easy to cut through the clutter and find some good themes. There are sites that offer hundreds of themes of all types (fluid, fixed, 3 column, 2 column, and so on), and from personal experience, I know how hard it can be to finalize a theme. What people (at least me and a few of my friends) look for is the ability to find distinctive themes that are not so common, seem to present the content to the viewer with great readability, and yet tries to meet the goals of the site creator in terms of good placement of Ads, Images, Surveys, Links, and so on.
So without much further discussion, let me give the link to this site that offers 14 new templates (NOTEPAD CMS THEME, PAPER THEME, CITY LIGHTS THEME, COUNTRYSIDE THEME, DOZEN ROSES THEME, FLOWER FIELDS THEME, MY WORLD THEME, PERFECT SUNSET THEME, SOCIAL THEME, SPORTS THEME, FINANCE THEME, FREEDOM THEME, HEALTHCARE THEME, PERSONAL THEME, POLITICAL BLUE THEME, and POLITICAL ORANGE THEME)
All these themes (including demos and screenshots) are available at this link
The site also offers to let you purchase some other premium themes.