Highly Customizable themes

1. SWIFT 5.29 by Satish Gandham
2. Techozoic Fluid by Jeremy Clark
3. Feed Me, Seymour 1.1.2 by c.bavota
4. Magazine Basic ~ Not color wise but allows you to set up a magazine format
5. Weaver (works on the TwentyTen Framework)

The above image are 9 WordPress blogs that are either mine, or I have helped set up.   Now look closely because while there are 9 there are actually only 3 themes.  1 through 6 are all Weaver.  Weaver does have an all white theme, but I like a bit of color, but the all white would be #3 minus the blue.

7 and 9 are Techozoic Fluid and 8 is the Magazine theme.  We (my writing partner and I) like the magazine format for the daily success and motivation tips.  We brought in color by adding color to the side bar and of course through the daily pictures.

Now for those who are curious about the above sites… some I will mention some I won’t because they are not mine and not ready.

1. is MJSchrader.com my home page.  it replaces LoveRockstar.com.  The slogan is “Making your inner rockstar shine!”
2. is my blog connected at MJSchrader.com/blog
3. my old personal blog with a trial theme
4. 50WomenProject.com which is the new site I am very excited to share, it is what I am working on currently.  “Transforming Women, One Woman at a Time“
5. BlueLemonadeStand.com which is currently being overhauled and revamped, and is my Shirt Design store.  “When you want something a bit different“
6. My mom’s website
7. Here, RockstarGuideBooks, but I just changed it to Weaver because I wanted to use the WordPress 3.0 menus
8. 365OnlineTips.com with Daily Success and Motivational Tips.
9. A site for a client but I love the way she’s got the site looking.

With my mom’s site and my client’s I will announce here and on Facebook when they are ready.  They are really working on hard on getting everything looking great.

So those are some themes to look at and some sites if you care to check those!

Live Laugh Love

MJ Schrader

If you are part of the Ultimate Blog Challenge (#BlogBoost), #BlogDaily, #Blog30, or #OurBlog then your goal is to share information and connect with others.  Yet, in connecting with others you want to help your commentators without overflowing you with work.   So today’s post is about comment plugins.

Akismet

This spam plugin comes installed with WordPress, you just need to activate it. This plugin catches most spam and occasional “ham” these are comments it is not certain are spam. You do not have moderate as much as with out it.

Subscribe to Comments

If your readers like a post, they may like the comments as well. With this WordPress plugin they can subscribe to a particular post and comments and a notice will be sent to their email with each new comment. Then they can unsubscribe to some or all posts when they want.

Top Commentators Widget

This is a plugin that you can add to your widgets in your sidebar. With this the top commentators on your blog are listed each month.

Comment Luv

Share the love with this comment plugin. When they comment on your blog it will add a link to their last blog post. This benefits both of you because people are more likely to comment when their posts show.

WordPress Thread Comment

This allows people to comment on an existing comment. The comments will flow logically instead of being yet another comment.

Most Commented Widget

Rather than show the top commentators this WordPress widget shows a snippet of the most popular post. People can be curious about your most popular post or page and this will show them the one with the most comments.

Disqus

Growing in popularity is this plugin / website. Disqus works with Aksimet and blocks more spam.  It incorporates Subscribe to Comments.  Threaded comments.  The Top Commentators, Most commented, can be added to your widgets as I did today.

Tomorrow is Video Wednesday.  It will be about Platinum SEO and will include how to switch from All in One.

Thursday will be “DoFollow / No Follow Myth Busters”

This is a very beautiful, highly versatile theme.  This video will also show you how to get Twenty Ten.

What is the difference between a theme and a template?

Your theme may have templates included.  Many WordPress themes include an “archive template” and the template is different from the standard theme used on most pages.  You can see if you have a template by reading Creating Sales Letters in WordPress.   The theme on 365 Online Tips has different templates, the theme here has a separate box that allows me to turn features on and off.  Yet templates offered the look I wanted for my sales letters.

Where do I install it?

The video below will show you but, it may be hard to catch it.  You want to visit your File manager in your cpanel.  Then public_html.  Find the website you want to add the templates to, then look for wp_content.  Open your themes and find the theme you are currently using.   Open the theme upload your templates there.  Then find the templates you want to use and pull the contents, all of them, from the folder and put them into your theme.

And now time for your video!!

Hope you enjoy and hope it helps!

~ MJ Schrader

PS Get your templates at  Templates.LoveRockstar.com

Yesterday you learned some of the advantages and disadvantages of advertising copy in WordPress.  Today is going to cover some solutions to the sidebars and menus.

Does your theme have templates?

Many WordPress themes have various templates. If you are writing a page in WordPress you can look for Page Attributes. This is to the right of your writing if you have two columns or underneath if you have just one. In this box you hopefully will see parent and then template. Unfortunately not all themes offer various templates. The template will have a name sometimes it will tell you archive, no side bar, clean or something similar.

Template Testing

Unfortunately previous does not always show various templates. If you do not want it going live, go to the publish button and change Visibility to private then publish. Then you can see if that template is going to fit your needs.

Theme Options

Some themes have special page options. You can look for a box with the theme name and options on your page. There you can turn off the sidebar or navigation menu.

Make Your Own Template

You can learn coding to create your own template. It really does not take much, if you like your theme you just create a copy of your sales page and remove the sidebar and header information. Since this information varies so much there is no simple explanation of it.  I have created templates and now I would rather BUY MINE

Buy Your Own

This is what I did.  You can see the package I got (he’s since updated it with new templates) by visiting WP landing pages.  Tomorrow I will have a video for you on how to load it and set it up.

Many people have asked me about writing sales letters in WordPress. They want to know if sidebars and headers and menus are acceptable. This is a mixed situation.

Advantages

If they decide that product you are advertising is not for them but they like your style then being able to look at other products or information is great. This keeps them on your website longer and allows them to pick and choose what they want. If they are not certain your product is for them, they can click the sidebar or other menus to learn more about you and any other products you may have.

Disadvantages

Many people advocate that an advertising copy should have only two options. Option one buy this product or option two hit the back button. By having the menu links and sidebar your potential customers or clients can get distracted. After the distraction they may forget or no longer be motivated in buying your product. Also what may be a cool graphic on your blog is not appropriate on your sales letter. The twitter stream in your sidebar may not be something you want on your sales letter.

Solutions.

There are many solutions which will be discussed tomorrow.  Although one solution I strongly suggest is WP Landing Pages which can be used for landing pages, sales pages and more.

Now that we have covered some of the major features for users, (see bottom of this post for links) how about the features you probably have heard rumors of and wonder why I did not mention. Unfortunately a couple features I was looking forward to, are in fact developers features.

Are you a code hacker?

Developers features are called that because they are mostly geared towards… well… developers. These require changing codes, a bit of code hacking and having more than a basic knowledge of WordPress.

Multi-Site Feature

Combining WordPress MU with WordPress you now can install WordPress once and create many websites.  This can mean sites for clients or multiple incidents for your own use. All it takes is adding one line of code to the WordPress configuration file and having a server that is strong enough to handle the added load. After adding it you will have a Network tab under your Tools tab.

Individual Author Templates

This is a feature blogs with multiple authors have been wanting. It allows each author on a blog to have their own template. This requires creating new author.php template files, yet one can be created for each author.

Custom Post Types

Sometimes you do no want to use posts or pages for your next WordPress entry. With other content management systems you have other options, but you can add new post types by adding code to the functions.php file. Then you can add as many new types as is necessary. These new post types will appear beneath the comments on your dashboard.

Custom Taxonomies

These are available again by adding some custom code. They can be added beneath one of your new post types to add a different type of tag. One example would be having a post type called books and creating an author taxonomy. Thus different book posts could be assigned to the respective author taxonomy. The new taxonomies will appear beneath the post type to which they are assigned.

What type of codes?

SixRevisions has information about the codes.  Since I have not yet tried these I suggest you visit their site and follow their instructions if you want to add these features.

~ MJ Schrader

Menus

Have you ever wished you could just quickly add a new tab to your menu? Now you can!

Not all themes accept the menus option, but this impressive feature will soon be something theme developers will add. If your theme accepts it great, if not you can visit Widgets, Appearance, and drag the Custom Menu to your sidebar. Just visit Appearance then Menus.   What you see on the right side will look similar to what you see below.

Adding to Your Menu

This is impressive. Many of my clients want to link different blogs and websites. With “Custom Links” you type in the web address, called URL, and then add a label for the menu. You can check mark various pages to be added to your menu or scroll down and check the categories you want added.

Change Your Menu

Then over on the right on the new menu you can create a custom name. Click the down arrow beside the menu item and you can change the “Title Attribute” or “Navigation Label.”  You will also notice you remove the item or cancel the change you made.  Drag and drop the menu to rearrange it, even move an item a bit to the right to make it a sub-menu item.

Of course the themes that support this are limited.  You can upload the brand new Twenty Ten theme created by the WordPress staff to use this feature.  You can also add to your sidebar as noted previously.  Either way the ability to create a unique to you menu is absolutely delicious.

~ MJ Schrader

PS.  Tomorrow you can read about other features.  If you want me to go into the features of the new Theme Twenty Ten please comment!  And please comment with your favorite features!

PPS Save 25% off my products?

You can save 25% off any product this special page.  You have until July 17th!

During Check Out use Coupon Code: PatSpecial610

The Delay in Release

WordPress 3.0 was supposed to have been released May 1, 2010.  One for the delay is they want to take a break from updating the program, so they wanted it correct.  The “Break” according to the WordPress.org site…

Over the next three months we’re going to split into ninja/pirate teams focused on different areas of the around-WordPress experience, including the showcase, Codex, forums, profiles, update and compatibility APIs, theme directory, plugin directory, mailing lists, core plugins, wordcamp.org… the possibilities are endless.

So expect bigger and better experiences in all things WordPress.

What are the WordPress 3.0 features?

There is a bit of a rub there. Some of the much talked about features are more for developers than for most WordPress users. This is not to say that users have been left out, in fact what has been added has been wonderful.  But for today I am going to talk about features for regular users.

Regular User Features

The features for regular users is the ability to create menus and short links. One feature that stands out to me is being able to upgrade all your plugins at once.  WordPress 3.0 has upgraded the image editor so you can crop, flip and change the size of your image.

You should notice the screen and dashboard look cleaner. This is not a big thing, but it is a visual difference.  There are many other differences that are similar to the dashboard.  Just minor changes that make user experience a bit better yet are not that noticeable.  For a complete list visit: WordPress Codex.  This is a complete list but it is Geek.

The added features have just made WordPress even easier to use and made it an even better program.  Tomorrow will be how to use your new features.

~ MJ Schrader

PS Below is a video from WordCamp in San Francisco.  My goal is to go to a WordCamp next year.

It is actually surprisingly simple to change your WordPress Blog into a WordPress website. The benefit is that you wind up with a static web page as your home page and you have a blog, or update page as well. This means you keep the blog and you can change the name of it to updates, news, latest, etc…

Visit Pages.

Pages is a tab on your dashboard. Under pages you want add new. Here you are going to create a home page. You can call it anything you like, but you probably want to use a name that lets people know it is the home page. This is the page people will land on when they visit your website.

Next you will need to create a page that will be the new name for your blog. You can use blog, updates, news or anything you like. This name needs to reflect that this is where people can find the latest information.

Visit Settings

After you have created the pages you are going to scroll down on the dashboard to settings. Beneath settings is a tab called reading. On the right you are going to change the radio box from “Your Latest posts” to “A static page.” Now you are going to select your front page, which is the page people will land on when they visit your website.

Next you will need to select the page you named for your posts. Once you have done this you will have what looks like a regular website. You will also have the ability to share latest information with your readers!