As I am a WordPress user by heart, I have a large list of WordPress related bookmarks. Many of these bookmarks have proven their value over time and I am pretty sure they will be helpful for you too. Welcome to the Ultimate Collection of WordPress Resources.

If I haven’t included a resource I definitely had to include, leave a comment and I will be happy to add it to the article.

General

Here are some general resources on WordPress.

• Host WordPress – What do you need
• Install WordPress
• Upgrade WordPress
• WordPressTV

Beginners

There are always people who would like to get into the game. Here are a couple tutorials that learned me developing WordPress themes.

• So you want to create WordPress themes, huh?
  
• Build a WordPress Theme from Scratch
• WordPress Theme from Scratch (3 parts)

Developing your Theme on your Local Computer

A great way to develop WordPress themes is to have a local server on your computer. A server that runs PHP and MySQL allows you to test WordPress themes without uploading to your online server. It isn’t hard to set up such server:

• Develop WordPress Themes Offline
• Install WordPress Locally
• Sample Post Collection

Codex

The WordPress Codex is the official documentation for WordPress. It has a huge number of content and you can find almost anything about WordPress There. Here are most important resources.

• Theme Development
• Conditional Tags
• Template Tags
• Stepping into Template Tags
• Designing Themes For Public Release
• The Loop
• Template Hierarchy
• Using Custom Fields

Theme Starting Points

When you are just starting out (or if you don’t want to start from scratch) you can use so-called “WordPress Frameworks”. Check of the most popular below:

• Thematic – WordPress Framework
• Hybrid WordPress Theme Framework
• Starkers WordPress Theme
• WhiteBoard – Free WP Theme Framework

WordPress Hacks

Because WordPress is so popular, many people use it. All these people have different requirements and WordPress can’t support them all. So, whoever needs more functionality experimented and hacked away. Here are a few WP hacks you can incorporate into your theme.

• Collection of WordPress Hacks
• WordPress Theme Hacks
• 63 WordPress Hacks
• Mastering Your WordPress Theme Hacks and Techniques

WordPress Tutorials

Hundreds of tutorials have been written about WordPress and theme development. Here is a small  section of the best tutorials out there.

• Social Bookmarking with WordPress
• What Every Blogger need to know about Categories
• Widgetizing Themes
• How to Separate WordPress Comments and Trackbacks
• Different Ways To Display Content in WordPress
• How to Highlight Author Comments in WordPress
• How to Install DomTABs on WordPress
• Create a Custom WordPress Plugin From Scratch
• Build a Featured Posts Section for WordPress
• Unraveling the Secrets of WordPress’ Comments.php File
• How to Blog Design Style Guide

WordPress & SEO

By default, WordPress is a search engine friendly blogging platform. However, you can enhance your themes much further with the following SEO techniques.

• WordPress SEO by Joost de Valk
• Perfect WordPress Title Tags
• WordPress Permalinks Explained
• Duplicated Content

CheatSheets

Cheatsheets can be very handy when you need to reference to a WordPress tag or function. You can print them and put them up your wall for quick referencing!

• WordPress Theme Development Checklist
• WordPress Help-Sheet
• WordPress Advanced Help-Sheet
• WordPress CheatSheet V1
• WP Theme Tags

Promote your WordPress Theme

If you want to release your theme for free to the public, you can add your theme to these sites to get more attention.

• Submit Themes – WeblogToolsCollection
• WordPress – Theme Directory
• WP Themez
• WP Themes Free

WordPress Community

The people around WordPress are great: the community is much alive. Check out these forums to discuss anything WordPress related.

• Official WordPress forums
• WP Tavern forums
• WP forums

WordPress Blogs

Many people write about WordPress to teach other WordPress enthusiasts about their findings and tricks. Here are a few blogs on the subject.

• Lorelle on WordPress
• WP Candy
• ThemeLab
• WpRecipes
• Blog Design Blog
• Darren Hoyt
• WordPress Modder
• Blogging Pro
• WPZoom

Plugins

One great advantage of WordPress is the great plugin support. With thousands of plugins available, there’s almost a fix for anything.

• Akismet
• All in One SEO Pack
• WordPress.com Stats
• WP Super Cache
• WP-DB-Backup
• Contact Form 7

More plugins? Check out these links:

• WordPress – Plugin Directory
• 10 Un-Usual WordPress Plugins that Improved my Blog
• Ultimate Collection fo WordPress Plugins

WordPress Inspiration

It’s important to get inspiration from time to time, it can give you many idea’s for your themes. Here are some WordPress related showcase sites.

• WordPress Showcase
• We Love WP
• Loop Press
• WP Inspire
• WP Candy – Sites

Illustration by cambodia4kidsorg definite

Blogging

So you want to start blogging, right? That is great news, we never have too many blogs on the internet! Welcome to the new blogging guide written with one goal in mind: help you to start blogging. This guide will tell you exactly how you prepare before beginning with blogging and what points you need to consider before you make the start.

I guess you all have read blogs from time to time. Maybe you already have checked some blogs to see how things work in this world. That is only great but it’s not everything you need to know, there is more. You will learn all those things in this guide.

This guide include six chapters till date and in the future I might write some other chapters that might help the beginner out. What there’s written now is enough for a starter to become a beginning blogger.

You can’t learn everything just from reading, there comes a time you have to take that write-page and write your first article. Remember that.

When the time comes, enter the game.

Content Table

0. Welcome to the Guide
1. What is a blog
2. What pages should a blog have
3. Choose a Niche
4. Store your blog
5. Blogging software
6. Blogging Tips and Tricks

As you might know, I have been diving into WordPress theme development and I’ve learned many tips and tricks along the way. I noticed I was forgetting about some small issues all the time.

That’s why I decided to make a WordPress Theme Development Checklist. Oh, and if I forgot about some things, be sure to let me know!

General

• Stylesheet should start with these codes or your theme will not be recognized as WordPress theme.
  /*      Theme Name:  The Name of your theme
  *        Theme URI: The URL where people can get more information
  *        Description: Description
  *        Version: 1.0
  *        Author: Your Name
  *        Author URI: Designers’ URL
  *        Tags: red, black, widget-ready (etc) */
• Download the Sample Post Collection to have a filled WordPress installation to start with.
• Theme preview image
  • 240 x 180 pixels
  • Name: screenshot.jpg, screenshot.png or screenshot.gif
• Widget ready themes
• Add rules to your Comments form
• Backwards Compatibility (WordPress version 2.5+ is alright I guess)
• CSS sprites for optimizing images
• WordPress PSD framework

Stylesheets

Make sure you have these stylesheets included with your theme:

• General.css
• Print.css
• Reset.css
• Browser specific stylesheet – ie.css
• Compressed Stylesheet?
  

Browser Compatibility

Test your theme in a number of browsers to make sure everyone sees the same theme. Use browsershots.org to get screenshots from your site in the most browsers. The most important browsers are:

• Firefox 2.0/3.0
• Internet Explorer 6
• Internet Explorer 7
• Google Chrome
• Safari
• Opera

Blog Elements

Every theme should have some elements every blog should have:

• Title/Logo
• Navigation of Pages
• Navigation of Categories
• RSS links
• Search Form
• Archives links
• Dates/Timestamps
• Comments
• Copyright message
• Past/Next links
• Advertisiments

Styled Everything?

You never know how bloggers will use your theme and therefore you have to style all HTML elements. Here are some elements you might not have thought of:

• blocknotes
• tables
• captions
• unordered lists
• ordered lists
• img

Pages

The basic pages you need to produce for a good template hierarchy:

• Index.php
  • Header.php
  • Footer.php
  • Sidebar.php
• Single.php
• Archive.php
• Page.php
• Home.php
• Author.php
• Date.php
• Tag.php
• Category.php
• 404.php

Valid HTML/CSS

You can not validate your PHP files, so you have to go to your favorite browser and click the right mouse button > view source. You copy/past everything into the HTML validator.

• Style.css (CSS validator)
• Single.php (HTML validator)
  • Normal
  • With Comment/Without Comments
  • Login Required/Non-required
  • Password protected pages
• All other pages (categories/tags/authors/ etc)

Suggestions?

Remember, this checklist is not finished. Because I learn about WordPress theme development all the time, more things will be added as soon as I think of them. My question for you is:

Do you have suggestions that make this WordPress theme development checklist better?

PDF Version

Soon, I will also come up with a PDF version of this checklist so that you can print it and put it next to your computer when you are developing WordPress Themes.

Keep Updated!

Do you want to get noticed when the CheatSheet PDF version gets released? Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed, or you can get the latest news delivered right into your mailbox.

I have been developing on the internet for some time now and I have owned multiple sites online. These sites all had their own custom design developed by me. I was constantly copying/pasting files to the site being developed and the time it took bothered me.

It bothered me that bad that I decided to search for an alternative. The alternative was called XAMPP and it has the possibility to run your development space offline, on your own computer. You would have your own “webserver” that runs MySQL and PHP, which means you can install WordPress too. That sounded awesome for me!

Installing your offline “webserver”

The program XAMPP was the perfect solution to all my developing adventures. That’s why I would recommend this program for anyone interested in developing WordPress themes. Let’s install XAMPP.

You should download the latest version from the original site. I run a Windows computer, so I’ve downloaded the Windows version. I guess it doesn’t differ much between other operating systems.

The installation progress shouldn’t be to hard, it is just a normal setup.

Starting your offline “webserver”

Once you’ve installed this program, you have to start the program. You can do that by running the XAMPP.exe file.

To make your webserver run, you have to start the Apache and the MySql modules. PHP has no apart module because it is included in the Apache module. We need to run these particular services to make WordPress work.

Navigating to Localhost

When you have started these modules, you have started your offline webserver. This means you can navigate to the contents of your webserver from this point. The URL you have to visit is http://localhost/.

You should get redirected to the XAMPP web-based control panel. In this control panel you can find links to Status, PHPMyAdmin, phpinfo() and other services. A services that is of interest of us is PHPMyAdmin.

PHPMyAdmin and MySQL

We need to create a new database to install WordPress to PHPMyAdmin offers that service. Fortunately, all you need to do is “create a new database” and you are done. In the online versions you need to make users and passwords, but on your localhost, things can stay simple.

If you, for example, have made a database called ‘blog’ you need to remember the following information when installing WordPress:

Database: blog
User: blog
Password: (no password)
Server: localhost

Installing WordPress

Finally, we are ready to install WordPress as we have set up our database and offline connection. First things first, download the most recent version from WordPress.org. From now on, things are the same as your online version.

You have to extract the WordPress files to these folder: /XAMPP/htdocs. Remember to use the database information I have given you before.

Once WordPress is Installed

After you have installed you are ready to go. You can now develop WordPress themes with the ease of a webserver but it doesn’t cost you much time to constantly upload more recent versions of certain files to see changes.

Now you can just save your files and you see your changes right away. This greatly improves your productivity when developing WordPress themes. It defenitely did for me.

Blogging is a business of many aspects. You need to write quality content, promote your content on social media, network with fellow bloggers and if you are interested in monetizing your blog, you need to find advertisers for your blog as well.

If you have your visitors on your blog, you want to keep them and let them browse around. You can do that by improving your blog design. That’s not today’s subject, we will improve the look and feel of your article.

Most important part you should learn from today’s topic is that you keep your reader focused on your content. They shouldn’t be bored.

Make your article look nice too. Photo by Araswami

1. Strong, Italic and Colors

One of the most important parts of webdesign or blog design is contrast. With a proper use of contrast you can draw attention to the parts you want your visitors to see (for example advertisements or your RSS link).

To make certain sentences or words stand out from the rest of your paragraph and content, we can use strong, italic or text with a color.

2. Paragraphs

As we have discussed before, the paragraph is a very important part of your content. The whole article visitors are reading is build on paragraphs.

The important part of your paragraph is that they shouldn’t bore your visitors. If people don’t like how the letters and words “flows” or “feels” they might skip that paragraph, or in the worst case move on and click the exit button. I suggest you read some tips for styling the paragraph.

You also have to make sure you don’t write paragraphs that are too long. You have to keep the attention on what is important. Usually I keep my paragraphs around 4, 5 or maybe 6 sentences, because that is the length myself am most comfortable with.

Paragraphs that are 10+ sentences “feel” like though and hard-to-understand content while if you keep your sentences shorter, it doesn’t feel like that and your visitors read the same amount of text.

3. Images

You are looking, right? photo by Kamoteus.

Using images in your article can make your post easier to read and scan and make it looks nicer. For example, if you align an image inside a paragraph you rebut the focus from the paragraph to the related image.

And if you use an image you should consider adding a caption below to explain what the readers are seeing. That makes it easier to connect the image to the content and that might help the reader to better understand everything that has been said.

4. Whitespace

Whitespace is the most underestimated part of webdesign and that while it has great power: it can make or break a design.

With whitespace you can make the content feel less cluttered and comfortable on the eyes. A very “busy” layout is less easier to read then a layout that adds enough space between elements. I suggest you read this article by A List Apart about whitespace.

5. Titles

Did you take a look at this article? It is separated in chapters, and all these chapters have a title that stands out and makes a structured article. With one fast look your visitor you can see what each chapter is about.

You can achieve a title that works by making the size larger, bolder and you could also add a color. You have to make your title stand out.

Smaller Tips

6. Lists – Organized data is very easy to read for your readers. With lists you can structure information and you can make it look good too.

7. Links – Make it easy for your visitors to see what are links and what are not. Do you remember those default colors? Why do you think the were styled with the colors blue, purple and red? People recognize them as links. You can use some other colors and styles, but remember to let them stand out from the surrounding.

8. Backgrounds – Another way to make some part of your post stand out from the rest. For example, if you have quoted someone you could make visitors look at it by adding a slight darker or lighter color (depending on your layout style).

Important notes

This article is all based on my experience on the web and how I read articles online. Everyone could have their slightly different ways and views and therefore everyone should be able to create an “article-design” that you prefer.

If you follow the basic rules or pointers given in this article you can produce a nice and structured article. Just remember you shouldn’t overdo certain things. Using bold sentences or colors will lower the effect we have been talking about.

After the redesign I have implanted many new tricks and plugins into my WordPress theme to improve performance, the look and productivity options of my blog.

Other blogs have been writing articles like these too, but I will add a couple that aren’t the usual plugins that you have already implanted.

1. Advanced Excerpt – Because I needed to customize the default excerpt function of WordPress I decided to give this plugin a go. I can now do everything I want with my excerpts like the number of words, the html characters that are allowed, the ending character and more.

2. DoFollow – There has been numerous discussion going on about the Dofollow. Is it a good step to take with your blog? I think it is, it haven’t increased my spam posts, but it have increased the ‘look-like-real-comments-but-are-spam’ comments. You will get more discussion, and a little more moderation.

3. FD Feedburner Plugin – If you are using Feedburner as your RSS service, you should have this plugin installed. This make sure all the subscribers subscribed to www.yourblog.com/feed/ are redirected to feeds.feedburner.com/yourblog.

4. Feed Pauser – Feed Pauser was exactly what I was looking for. After almost every post I found some small typos in my article but the article was yet send to the RSS feed, I couldn’t change the typos there. With Feed Pauser you can choose to let WordPress send your post to the RSS feed after a number of minutes so you make sure everything is fine.

5. FV Code Highlighter – If you want to highlight code tags like HTML, CSS, PHP or JavaScript on your WordPress blog you could use the other plugins out there. This plugin however is developed to give the blogger full control over their codes. You can style everything in this code highlighter!

6. RSS Footer – My fellow Dutchman Joost de Valk know what bloggers need. This RSS footer plugin let you do exactly what its name tell us: add a line of text, a copyright notice or even advertisements after or before each post that is published in your RSS feed.

7. Samsarin PHP Widget – If you want to use widgets for your sidebar, there might be time you need to use PHP to get the functionality you like to have. This “PHP widget” is a an awesome solution as you can choose as many widgets as you like.

8. Search Excerpt – The default search function sucks, we used to sort by date and not by relevance. Fortunately there has been some talking about this and this plugin has been developed to help us.

9. WP Existing Tags – This small plugin adds an existing tags-section to your new post page. This makes it easy to choose a tag for your post and makes sure you don’t make two tags almost identical to each other.

10. WordPress Download Monitor – If you offer downloads for your visitors it might be nice to know how many times files are downloaded. This awesome plugin does a good job.

This question had crossed my mind lately and I think some of the bloggers out there might thinks about this once in a while.

Are you on your own on your blog? Picture by wili_hybrid.

A typical blogger might have a busy day with a regular job because they can’t live from their blog yet. And this while their visitors are constantly looking for more interesting articles and content.

But what if you think you need to bring much more interesting content for your readers then you can provide? You could find yourself looking at the same problem I was looking at and you might consider the question asked before: Single or Multiple Authors?

If you are considering adding multiply authors to your blog, be sure to read on for the disadvantages and the advantages. The advantages first:

Multiply authors: Advantages

More time

- Usually the most important reason to add more authors to your blog: you will have more time for other things. Maybe this is family or other blogs, or maybe you just want to have less stress.

More Articles

- More authors will mean more time, you will be able to add more quality articles to your blog than you should when you were a single author. It’s also great as a backup: if you fail to write an article for 5 days due for example family problems, you will know your blog will be still running smooth.

Different Voices

- We can approach this point from two sides, this time from the ‘advantages’-side (the disadvantages will come later). Different voices can be a good thing for a blog: your readers can read a story they are interested in explained in a different writing style and tone. This might work refreshing for your blog!

Multiply Authors: Disadvantages

Money

- Money is a problem for many people. If you don’t earn (much) money through your blog you might not be able to pay your authors. Great authors that write quality articles aren’t too cheap and this same rule applies as in every business: you get what you pay for. You could also consider contacting some bloggers in your niche for a guest-post.

Personal Blog

- If you have a personal blog you shouldn’t invite other authors to write an article: your visitors are your visitors because they want to read something about YOU, not some other author.

Different Voices

- Here’s the disadvantage. Many niches are full of blogs with different authors. Some readers might subscribe to your blog because they like how you are formulating your sentences. They aren’t subscriber to your blog to read some others insight.

Vote For Your Preference

Do you have a preference for a blog? Do you subscribe easier when there’s only one author? Or don’t that interest you as long as you read quality content?

Give you me your thoughts as people might find that valuable information (I do). And maybe you could vote on the poll about this question!

Photo By suzanneandsimon

One big difference between a blog and a website is the way visitors can interact with the blog author. Bloggers allow all their visitors to leave a comment anytime. If they asked a question, simple say they enjoyed the article or when you don’t agree with the author’s opinion. That’s the power of the blog.

I have to admit, getting comments is one of the greatest things you can get when you are blogger. You get the confirmation your visitors are actually there and they aren’t just a number on your statistics software.

But allowing comments isn’t everything you can do to get user interactivity on your blog, many more options exist. In this article we will go through the solutions I think works best to improve user interactivity.

1. Contact Form

You should always try to make things as easy as possible for your readers on your blog. People are lazy and busy and if they can’t find something right way, they will simply leave.

The same thing with the contact form: if they can’t find that page in one click, they are usually gone. If you make it easy to find your contact information and web-form, you will receive more thank-, opinion- and comment-emails. That’s always great.

In some cases you could even add multiply contact forms to your blog to improve the number of emails you get.

My plugin recommendation is Cforms II: the best contact form plugin available for WordPress.

2. Polls

Adding a poll is a very good feature to add when you want to improve user interactivity. Many people read your article and move on, because they don’t have the time to add a opinion through the comments.

With a poll however the user only has to click once to leave an opinion and they will do that easier. You can also use the poll to gather valuable information about your visitors!

A good solution to add a poll to your WordPress blog is the WP-Polls plugin.

3. Shoutbox

If you have a free spot in your sidebar and you want your visitors to contact you even easier then hitting the “contact” button, consider using a shoutbox on your blog.

In a shoutbox a user can “shout” what they would like to tell you or the other visitors. Your visitor usually only has to add their name, email and their message, so when placed on a easy to find spot, it’ll really stimulate user interactivity.

You can find a live example of a shoutbox on Jeffro2pt0. To add a shoutbox to your WordPress blog, the following plugins AJAX Shoutbox and WP-Wall are recommended.

4. Community Forums

If you want to have a conversation or extensive discussion, the comments under your article aren’t the right place. That’s where your forum software comes in: you can separate the discussion from the other comments.

Forums were developed to let people talk to each other and therefore ideal for these kind of conversations. It can also become a place where visitors come to discuss and talk about niche-related news.

Remember: to make a forum successful on your blog you need to have a large visitors base.

This article will tell you exactly how to integrate forums with your WordPress blog.

5. Community News

Community news is a feature that is popping up at some more places lately: it allows visitors to promote their own articles in the sidebar of your blog.

If you don’t have the time to fill your readers’ hunger for more articles, let them provide interesting articles for their fellow readers by adding the news items to your sidebar.

Frank Verhoeven has just released the Community News plugin that
allows your visitors to add their news to the sidebar or page.

6. Voting

Usually, people have their opinion ready about an article, plugin, theme or website. Why not use this fact and let people rate that stuff with a voting system?

This way you make it very easy (same principle as with polls) for people to give their opinion about something, just with one simple click.

To add a voting system to your WordPress blog, you could use the GD Star Rating plugin.

Do you have other tricks?

There are loads more ideas and tricks in the world that could improve the user interactivity of your blog, so if you would like to share some that could help me or the readers, please do so in the comments!

To improve the user experience of the comment section of your blog you can do a couple things. You can add Gravatar support to make the comments more appealing, but there is more.

For example, you can separate the real comments from the trackbacks. You often see links or lines of codes mixed up with the original conversation and that can be annoying to the commentator or the people just reading the comments. They might have lost track of the conversation because of the mixture.

Showing Comments Only

The trick to show real comments only is very easy to implant with the use of the comment.php file. The first thing you need to do is open comments.php.

Step 1. Locate the following lines of codes:

<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>

Figure 1.1

Right after, you need to add a couple lines that filter real comments from trackbacks and pingbacks. The following codes add that functionality:

<?php $comment_type = get_comment_type(); ?>
<?php if($comment_type == 'comment') { ?>

Figure 1.2

You need to close this function or your comments.php file will give an error.

Step 2. Locate the following line:

<?php endforeach; /* end for each comment */ ?>

Figure 2.1

Right before that line close the tag:

<?php } ?>

Figure 2.2

It is really important you past that line before the endforeach tag.

Showing The Trackbacks/Pingbacks

As of now, you have real comments left by real people only (if you have a proper spam protection installed), no links will interfere with your conversations.

We aren’t done yet, because we (most likely) want to show appreciation to the blogs that linked to us. We do that by adding trackbacks or pingbacks only too. You have two choices:

1. Before the comments
2. After the comments

Depending on which spot you choose you have to place the following codes somewhere else.

<h3>Trackbacks</h3>
<ol>
<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>
<?php $comment_type = get_comment_type(); ?>
<?php if($comment_type != 'comment') { ?>
<li><?php comment_author_link() ?></li>
<?php } ?>
<?php endforeach; ?>
</ol>

Figure 3.1

Before the comments. If you want to place these codes before the comments, locate the following codes. Remember if you are using a customized theme this might differ a little:

<h2 id="comments"><?php comments_number('No Responses', 'One Response', '% Responses' );?> to “<?php the_title(); ?>”</h2>

Figure 3.2

Add the codes shown in Figure 3.1 right after these codes.

After the comments. If you prefer to put the trackbacks right after the comments (which is in my opinion the best spot to encourage user commenting!) you should locate these codes:

<?php else : // this is displayed if there are no comments so far ?>

Figure 3.3

Add the codes shown in Figure 3.1 right before these codes.

When I was developing this new theme, I wanted to add more user interactivity to the site and to create a dynamic sidebar. A user that visits once in a week should find different articles and more related stuff.

That’s why I looked for a Community News plugin, a plugin that allows users to add articles they thought were relevant to the blog, and allow me to moderate them.

I couldn’t find this kind of plugin anywhere, so I looked at my buddy Frank Verhoeven with some sweet puppy eyes. He agreed and developed a wonderful plugin that allowed me to do everything I wanted and this plugin goes beyond!

FV Community News plugin for WordPress was born!

Features

The current feature-list is awesome and there’s more to come:

• Widget Ready (Different form/results widget)
• Moderation panel (with email option) – Make sure you approve the right articles
• Customizable templates
• Captcha Spam protection (on/off)
• Settings

FV Community News – Settings Page

Add More Interaction To Your Blog!

If you want to get more people to be active on your blog or you simply want more related articles (= more content) for your visitors, be sure to download this plugin.

Read more information on Frank’s FV Community News and be sure to keep track of Frank’s blog for more interesting plugins. Did you know he developed the great Code Highlight plugin I am using on DivitoDesign?