Showcasing Your Customized Theme
Having been offering free WordPress themes for more than a year, I have seen some designers customizing my themes in a nice way. I hope to see more beautiful work from you! The time is ripe to showcase your beautiful work on my site. No matter what you have modified, simple or complicated, as long as I feel that the modification is nice and could give inspiration to others, I’ll feature your site/blog in my forum (yes. I am going to open a support forum for my themes soon!). For example, I like the simple modification of the Girly Nature theme as shown in this site which shows different way of displaying the font design in the header and the post title. I also like the big customization of the Paper Craft theme as shown in this site where you see the designer made a big change to the graphic of the original theme. I will create a section in my upcoming forum where you can showcase your customized work of my themes. I welcome all my theme users to actively participate in this program. Simply submit your site/blog for review. The following shows just a few modification examples from using my...
Read MoreWhy IE6 Must Die?
The Internet Explorer 6 was released 8 years ago. Because of its ability to tie up with Windows XP, Microsoft was able to lock in an astounding 95% captive market. Since IE6 was launched in August of 2001, the browser was already plagued with numerous problems that led to a plethora of unresolved browser bugs and security issues. Eight years have passed and the same nagging problems remain and it is now time for me to weigh my options and consider the reasons why it is time for IE6 to go. 1. Absence of Transparency Support in PNG IE6 has not been able to resolve the problem about its inability to support transparency in PNG as we end up with annoying gray color displays as replacement to the transparency. We are better off with Firefox, Opera, Safari and IE7 as they support transparency in PNGs. 2. Serious Security Issues Failure to update your browser is tantamount to opening yourself up to all sorts of security attacks. If you insist on using IE6, then you must have to contend with code snippets that are capable of shutting down your IE6. You can learn everything about them at Wikipedia. Read through the information and find out why IE6 is considered unstable. 3. Facebook, YouTube and Digg are shunning away from IE6 The signs are all written on the wall. Facebook, YouTube and Digg are slowly disassociating from IE6 and they have recently announced plans to scale down their support for IE6. Ultimately, we will reach the tipping point where you will not be able to browse Youtube and Digg using IE6. Due to the reasons stated above, as of this writing, I will not test my themes against IE6 anymore. Also, I will not support any IE6 related issue for my WordPress themes. If you are still using IE6, I strongly urge you to upgrade your browser to IE7 or IE8 to avoid problems. And since IE8 is already released and its market share is getting bigger, I will start testing my themes against IE8. Removing IE6 from my browser test and adding IE8 to the list will now make my themes compatible with IE7, IE8, Safari, Opera, Firefox and...
Read MorePoll: Suggestions for Additional Theme Features
My designing skill for WordPress themes has improved a lot since I created my first theme last year. It’s time I contribute more to the community by incorporating more features to my existing and new WordPress themes. There are so many features that I could add but I will only add those that most of you want. Feel free to participate in the poll below and let me know which feature(s) you would like me to incorporate in my themes. What additional features would you like to see in my...
Read MoreFull Feature List of my Free WordPress Themes
This post will be constantly updated to reflect the recency of my free themes’ features. My themes have some of the features that you can’t find in most of the free themes out there. And I make sure they contain those features that I outlined. Theme Features Summary Free Forum Support One-Click Easy Setup 6 Major Browsers Supported Optimized for SEO Free Theme Upgrade Options Page Automatic Thumbnails W3C XHTML/CSS Compliant Latest WP Version Supported Wide Screen Resolution Friendly CSS Structure Award Winning Themes Ad-Widget Ready Drop-Down Menu Custom Header Menu I will describe the features of my free themes in 3 parts. The theme features in the first part applies to ALL my themes. The features in the second part applies to ver. 2+ of my themes. The features in the third part applies to ver. 3+ of my themes. The fourth part outlines the recognition I got from big websites. Part 1: All my Free Themes Contain These Features Free Forum Support One of the big reasons people like my themes is the FREE support. Previously, the support was done in the comment section. When I figure that the comment section can no longer address your issues in the most efficient way, I decided to move the support section to the forum. Whether you have issues with my themes or just want to say hi, you are most welcomed to my forum! One-Click Easy Setup Once you have uploaded the theme file to the correct folder in your server, the next thing is to activate the theme in the WordPress admin. After activation, you blog will be up and running without further configuration. 6 Major Browsers Supported Most of the themes(free or paid) I found on the internet claim to be compatible with major browsers but didn’t specify exactly which browsers they did the test. Is theme compatibility with Firefox and IE browsers enough? Yes if you are targeting 90% of the internet users who use the two browsers. For every theme that I release, I will test them against 6 major browsers that include Firefox, IE7, IE8, Chrome, Safari and Opera. Click here for more details. Optimized for Search Engines One of the most important factor for a SEOed theme is W3C compliant. No doubt about it, my themes are compliant with W3C. Besides that, a logically use of heading tag such as H1, H2 etc. are important in the search engine ranking. My themes’ blog title, post title, page title defined using H1 to H4 so search engines give more weight to those title keywords. Free Access to Theme Upgrade I will constantly update my themes to fix issues and make them compatible with the latest WordPress version. A revision will be released whenever there is an update and the version details will be shown in the "Change log" section of the theme page. W3C XHTML/CSS Compliant It is not easy for a theme to pass the W3C validation. Because of that, not many themes are compliant with W3C. I will go all out to fix all the errors when I test my themes against the XHTML validator and CSS validator and make sure I pass both the tests before I release the themes. For the benefit of being W3C compliant, click here Latest Official WordPress Version Supported When WordPress releases a new version, I’ll retest all my themes individually using the latest WordPress version. Therefore, you don’t have to worry about WordPress compatibility issues if you use my themes. It is definitely not easy to retest so many themes in a short time whenever...
Read MoreChecking my Themes Against 10 Criteria Outlined in Yoast.com
I stumbled upon a post on Yoast.com outlining the 10 criteria of a perfect WordPress theme. Without hesitation, I went ahead and check my themes against those criteria eager to see how I score for my themes. The 10 checks are as follows: Hooks Template files Is your theme widgetized? Does your theme have a search option? Does your theme work in all major browsers? Is the theme’s code valid? Check the outgoing links! Can the theme handle pages? Make sure your theme supports trackbacks How is your theme handling titles? The following is the report: 1 Hooks Requirements: – In header.php, it should have a small piece of PHP code that looks exactly like this wp_head(); or this do_action(‘wp_head’);, usually just before a piece of HTML that looks like this: . – In footer.php, it should have another small piece of PHP like this wp_footer();, or this do_action(‘wp_footer’); – In comments.php and/or comments-popup.php, it should have a piece of code like this: ID); ?>, just before the HTML tag. Result: All my themes contain the code. 2 Template files Yoast said it is a standard to include all the 9 BASIC files below in a theme to avoid installation problem. Each file represents a standard WordPress feature/structure. home.php, single.php, page.php, category.php, author.php, date.php, archive.php, search.php, 404.php Out of the above mentioned files, I only have home.php, single.php, page.php Does that mean I am missing most of the WordPress features? Not at all. I actually simplified the file structure even more by merging category.php, author.php, date.php, archive.php, search.php, 404.php into one single file, index.php Result: All my themes contain the standard WordPress features. 3 Is your theme widgetized? Strictly speaking, a theme without widget is not a WordPress theme. To determine whether a WordPress theme is widgetized, look for this code in the sidebar.php file: dynamic_sidebar(”); . Result: Needless to say, all my themes are widget ready. 4 Does your theme have a search option? WordPress search function is quite powerful so there is no reason not to include it by default. Result: Search option can be found on all my themes. 5 Does your theme work in all major browsers? Your visitors will get turned off if your blog is not compatible with their browsers. However, it is impossible to make a theme work in ALL browsers. The author advises the users to install a theme which works on IE6, IE7, Firefox and Safari. Results: Not only do my themes compatible with IE6, IE7, Firefox and Safari, they are compatible with the Opera as well as an increasingly popular Chrome browser. 6 Is the theme code valid? It is very important for a theme to comply with W3C. A theme with W3C compliant will be crawled by search engines easily and it is more likely to work on several browsers and other display devices like PDA. However, you can’t find many themes pass this test either because the theme author is more of a designer than a coder or the coder doesn’t bother to take the effort to make it W3C compliant. To see if a theme pass the test, you can use the XHTML validator and the CSS validator Result: All my themes pass both the W3C’s XHTML and CSS test. 7 Check the outgoing links! Normally, the free downloadable themes will have the theme author’s link in the footer. Some will also have the advertiser’s link. You need to check where the external links point to in order to avoid linking to bad...
Read MoreAmendment of License Terms for my Free Themes
WordPress themes’ license has been a debating issue among the WordPress community. Due to the fact that WordPress is an open source program and releases under a GPL license, many assume that all WordPress themes should also be GPL-licensed. Indeed, a lot of free downloadable themes are released under GPL license. But the problem with those themes is that majority of them can’t match the quality of other themes that are released under a different license. I have researched major players who design WordPress themes and none of them released the themes under GPL license with one exception from Studiopress.com. This site releases professional magazine style WordPress themes. Their themes’ license is GPL but still, you have to purchase to use it. All my themes are free to download. To sustain the site, I have to get advertisers to sponsor my themes so I can use the proceeds to continue releasing more high quality themes. Therefore, I can’t afford making my themes available for free under GPL license. My themes have been using Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported license and it will continue to stay that way. In addition to the current license, there is one amendment that I’d like to include as follows: Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.templatelite.com/terms-of-use/ The reason behind this change is that the current CC license doesn’t specifically mention about the footer links and script of my themes. Now I make it clear that removing the footer links and script of my themes is against the terms! In short, the license allows you to share and remix the work of my themes but you have to make sure that 1) you keep the footer link and a footer script intact 2) you can’t use my themes on your commercial sites Those found in violation of my terms and conditions will be ordered to remove my themes from the affected...
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