Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

You’ve been using free or premium WordPress templates for a while and have learned how to modify them, change their design and add functionality to them, and now you’re ready to build your own theme. With Themeshaper’s WordPress theme tutorial you’ll be able to create a theme for yourself with all the bells and whistles just how you like it. Your finished theme will be search engine optimized, include google-supported Microformat markup, have valid and logical semantic markup structure than can be used to create any layout, smart default CSS layouts, 2 widget areas coded to disappear when they’re empty and a lots of the typical WordPress stuff you expect from a theme.

Most plugins for WordPress only back up part of your site, but not the complete database and all the code that goes along with it, or only backup on your own server. With the Automatic Worpress Backup plugin your whole blog will be backed up on an external server with the Amazon S3 service. The new version includes Simple Restore which allows you to go from a fresh WordPress install to your backup version in minutes. Since Amazon has made a S3 console available the service has become even easier to use.

If you’re looking for an image management solution for your WordPress blog, you may want to give NEXTGen by Alex Rabe a try. It features sortable albums, watermark function, support for popular image effects, multiple CSS stylesheets, slideshow and a sidebar widget. Here’s a live view of this image gallery plugin.

Making all external links on your blog open into a new window is easy with the help of the SEM External Links plugin for WordPress. This plugin will also change your links to rel=”nofollow” or add an external link icon.

Seek out social comments and mentions from places such as Twitter, FriendFeed, Digg, and YouTube and display them in real time alongside your comments with Disqus. Users can sign in with Facebook Connect, OpenID, or Twitter Sign-in and can also manage and track all their comments through the system.

There are other related posts plugins for Worpress, but Mitcho’s Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) has a lot of configuration options, including thresholds for titles and content, disallowing certain tags and displaying related posts in your RSS feed.

Key features of Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) are:

- An advanced and versatile algorithm: Using a customizable algorithm considering post titles, content, tags, and categories, YARPP calculates a “match score” for each pair of posts on your blog. You choose the threshold limit for relevance and you get more related posts if there are more related posts and less if there are less.
- Templating: A new templating system puts you in charge of how your posts are displayed.
- Caching: YARPP now caches the related posts for all the posts and thus has significantly improved performance over versions 2.x.
- Related posts in RSS feeds: Display related posts in your RSS and Atom feeds with custom display options.
- Disallowing certain tags or categories: You can choose certain tags or categories as disallowed, meaning any page or post with such tags or categories will not be served up by the plugin.
- Related posts and pages: Puts you in control of pulling up related posts, pages, or both.

One of the best image gallery plugins we’ve seen – the NextGen – Gallery plugin – can by downloaded at AlexRabe’s blog. This image plugin, which is distributed under the GNU General Public License is very versatile and offers:

- Sortable Albums : Create your own sets of images
- Upload a Zip-File with pictures : Upload pictures in a zip-file (Not in Safe-mode)
- Watermark function : You can add a watermark image or text
- JavaScript Effect: Use any available popular image effect : Thickbox, Greybox or Lightbox
- Multiple CSS Stylesheet : Use a nice shadow effect for your thumbnails with your own CSS file
- Slideshow: Full integrated flash slideshow
- Sidebar Widget : Show a random picture at your sidebar

Get free WordPress themes with ‘premium-like functionalities’ at DesignReviver. Site also offers design tutorials.

One way to work around reducing ‘ads blindness’ in your blog is to add the Adsense Injection plugin for WordPress which randomly inserts Adsense ads into your blog paragraphs.

Designing a new WordPress theme from scratch takes a lot of time, but it’ll take a lot less time if you use the free WordPress theme generator. The generator is especially useful for simple themes. You can create your own custom unique WordPress theme without any need for HTML, JS, PHP, or CSS knowledge. “Change the colors, settings, layout, preview live, click “save” and download your unique WordPress theme zip-file. Extract, upload, set, and you are done!”