WPDesigner.com

Reduce Comment Spam to Zero Without Akismet
After my trouble with Akismet, I tried Arpit’s suggestion on reducing spam. It worked! I used to get hundreds of spam comments and trackbacks per day, which makes it hard for me to find ones that were accidentally marked as spam. Now, I get less than a handful of spam comments every couple of days. Although I am still using Akismet as a back up, I have other plugins acting as the first line of defense.

48 Unique Ways to Use WordPress
Bothered by the complexity of installing magazine themes, about ten days ago, I told everyone that WordPress is a blog platform first and foremost so stop trying to do too much with it. This link basically proves that I was wrong. Hey, when you’re wrong, you’re wrong. And ten days ago, I was wrong! However, that doesn’t mean some WordPress theme authors aren’t trying to do too much. Like I said before, if I don’t need to read a lengthy manual to install WordPress then don’t make me read one to install a WordPress theme.

The Future of WordPress Themes
Warning: This is a very long post made up of opinions by notable theme authors and bloggers blogging about WordPress.

Migrating to WordPress 2.5
A guide for plugin authors to prepare their plugins for WordPress 2.5.

Article’s written by Jeff Chandler.

As I browsed the WordPress themes released for February 25th 2008, on WeblogToolsCollection.com, I came across a theme that had everybody raving. It was called Options and was created by Justin Tadlock, the same theme author who created Structure. As I browsed the theme, I couldn’t help but notice the similarities in terms of the icons that were being used, the navigational text/layout, the way the content was displayed, ect. It looked eerily similar to Brian Gardner’s Revolution Pro Media theme. Not only did I call Justin out on his release page, but I also sent an email to Brian asking him if he knew what was going on.

As it turns out, Options is a theme that was INSPIRED by many of the design elements found within the Revolution theme. It wasn’t a blatant copy, but it was close enough to stir up trouble. According to Brian Gardner, he contacted Justin off the record and asked him to make some changes to his theme and Justin has apparently gone ahead with the changes. Brian explains what happened: (more…)

Do you know exactly what you’re buying? Where does everything within that paid WordPress theme come from? Of course, you don’t have those answers.

Theme authors (people you’re buying from) are responsible for answering those questions and making sure everything you’re buying was licensed for commercial use and redistribution. Unfortunately, some theme authors simply don’t care enough to provide those answers and do it the right way.

While I’m trying to make my themes more unique and referencing everything that I use and redistribute within my products so you can rest assure that what you’re using is actually LEGAL, some theme authors’ method of creating “premium” themes is jamming other people’s stuff together and resell it to you without prior written permission for the rights to resell (sell first, ask later).

If you’ve been reading this blog, you know I’ve written about this topic before. At this point, I’m not mad at the fact that those careless people are giving paid theme authors like myself a bad name. No, I’m just disappointed because I was naive enough (the first time around) to believe those careless people simply didn’t know better and that they would improve.

Obviously, having to write about this again proves that those theme authors simply don’t give a damn. And, it’s sad because they’re putting theme users at risk. In the WordPress community, if you’re experiencing some form of success, it’s likely because people are buying your stuff so they could thank you for all the free work you’ve contributed prior to becoming a paid theme author. To the best of your knowledge, the least you can do is everything you can to make sure you’re not putting those people at risk.

And no, I’m not going to name names. I didn’t write this to smear anyone (if I want to, I’d do it later ). I wanted to remind you to be careful and I wanted to vent a little. If you know who I’m writing about, please DON’T point them out in the comments. Thank you.

Keep in mind that the information below is a personal list. I didn’t put it together to say what everyone else should do.

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Recently, I’ve been reading quite a few articles about what makes a premium theme… premium.

First, let me say that the word “premium” bothers me. Mainly, it’s misleading because other theme authors use it liberally to label non-free themes. Like someone said in one of the discussions that I read, premium at this point is simply a marketing term. There’s no higher level of quality to back it up across the board for all themes and all theme authors.

Second, from now on for every paid theme, I’ll aim for the following features:

(For the beginners, the following will look like mumbo-jumbo. If you’re a theme developer, you’re welcome to improve this list through the comments.)

Multiple Custom Templates

• Default Templates: index, archive, category, page, 404, stickied w/ excerpts and asides index, tag, author
• Magazine/Portal: Allows room for growth or in case you want to turn your start-up blog into a multi-author or user-generated magazine.
• Gallery Template: For all the photos and portfolios.
• Custom Archives: Crucial for old blogs with tons of archive links.
• Custom Links Page: For the promiscuous linkers
• About Template: Very important, but often neglected
• Advertising Template: Should include a table for advertising options and pricing
• Multimedia Template: This is top secret.
• Contact Template: Contact page with integrated contact plugins and other options.
• Subscription Template: Just in case you want to guide new readers through subscribing and using RSS or email subscription.

Multiple Skins - Simply multiple color schemes and styles.

Unique Design - I’m still learning and trying to stay away from using too many gradients. It’s too bad top designers have better things to do. Really top notch designs are what the WordPress themes market is missing. Here’s my new list of elements to keep in mind while laying out a new theme…

• Header: logo/title, search form, horizontal navigation, subscription link
• Post: date button, post title, categories, comments link, author link
• Entry-content: paragraphs, headings (h2, h3, h4…etc.), custom text styles, blockquote, blockquote within blockquote, code, image aligned left, image aligned right, image aligned center, unordered lists, custom variations of unordered lists
• Next and Previous links
• Stickied posts
• Asides
• Sidebar: regular and widgets
• Plugin styles for integrated plugins
• Alternating post backgrounds
• Alternating comment backgrounds

Efficient Codes - Of course, it’s not all about design. I always try to code everything with the least amount of codes, not because I’m trying to become a good coder and programmer, but because I’m lazy hehehe.

Thorough Documentation - This is another very important area I think we should focus on. A good read-me file can go a long way. Not only does it reduce stress for the users, it also helps reduce theme support time .

Flexibility - It’s a little bit harder to design for potentially… everyone. I try to keep the designs and codes as flexible as possible because I never know what you’ll use it for.

Plugin Integrations - This area should be easy if you have the last step down to a science. Flexibility and plugin integrations go hand in hand. For myself, I’m trying to take it a step further and pre-style the plugins. In my own themes, you’ll typically find the following integrated plugins:

• WP-Sticky
• WP-PostRatings
• WP-PageNavi
• Comment License (more important people realize)
• FlicKrRss
• Share This
• Author Highlight
• Contact Form

Other Features

• Cross-browser compatibility
• Banner switcher and other theme options
• Print Stylesheet
• Dynamic Tabs
• Social Bookmark Integration
• Slideshow
• Multimedia Integration
• Translatable

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To all loyal small potatoes: Sorry for the recent silence on this blog. I’m working hard on the themes club so I can take a break and make it in time for the Thailand water festival in April. Then, hopefully, I’d be able to hop from Thailand to Korea by May.

That’s it. I’ll be back with some new stuff for the themes club next time. Peace out small potatoes!

Update

Mark of Automattic.com corrected this problem.

Akismet, the anti-spam plugin / tool we all know and depend on to filter millions of spam each day is being used to censor certain bloggers. Recently, someone or a group of people blacklisted my online-moniker, Small Potato.

I know this because my comment (on my own blog) is listed on the Akismet Spam list. This morning, I posted a comment on WpCandy.com to thank Michael Castilla for featuring my themes and that comment also didn’t show up. (Michael de-spammed my comment so you can see it now.)

Maybe I’m paranoid, but I have a feeling getting blacklisted a week after launching my $5 themes club isn’t an accident or a coincidence. After all, a lot of what I said, how I see things, and what I do in the WordPress community rub people the wrong way.

For the sake of a coherent message, I’ll put my thoughts in an ordered list:

1. First of all, I do not know how Akismet’s internal system work, but I managed to track it down to my name, Small Potato. Fortunately, my email, blog’s address, and IP are fine. I was testing the comments on my personal blog (not this one) and my comments got through as long as I didn’t use the name Small Potato.
2. Second, I’m pretty sure that I’m not dumb and / or sleepy enough to mark my own comments as spam again and again for the past several days. At this point, I believe it took the effort of a group of people to blacklist me.
3. Third, the other possibility is the spammers are going after the term Small Potato and I’m simply caught in this new spam wave for potatoes. I doubt it.
4. Fourth, if some people did get together just to blacklist me, that’s really lame. Don’t blacklist me, bro! Hahaha. However, what’s happening to me isn’t a surprise, like most things you do with other people in life, you have to trust the people until they prove otherwise so I’m not going to start doubting my friends and people I know.
5. Fifth, even if this whole thing turns out to be an accident or a glitch in the system. The potential to privately censor people is there. And, it’s difficult to combat this sneaky method. No matter how big or small, going through the spam list is a tedious task that no one wants to do. Therefore, if you’re being blacklisted on your friends’ blogs, they won’t check for you unless you bring it to their attention.
6. Sixth, who knows how many people are being blacklisted. I get hundreds of spam comments per day. Usually, I just clear the spam list without looking through it. (You probably do the same.) And that’s really…unfortunate for those blacklisted bloggers like myself.

I don’t care about my own comments, but I’ll test out an alternate spam filtering system for the sake of this blog’s commenters.

I haven’t been writing tutorials and giving you cool WordPress stuff to use lately, but I’m getting back to it. Starting with this post, the following are my personal bookmarks for this week:

WordPress Theme Hacks
On his new project, Web Designer Wall, Nick La of NDesign-Studio.com shows you how to use conditional tags, dynamically style certain features like a horizontal menu, and how to place whatever you want in between each post.

WordPress Help Sheet
This help sheet is for newbies. Instead of going through the WordPress Codex to look up every basic function, bookmark or download this all in one basic functions guide. Combine this with Nick La’s theme hacks and you’re good to go.

Top 40 Blogs About WordPress
An interesting list by Artur of WPThemesGallery.com, in which Wpdesigner.com is ranked #3. Thanks Artur! If your site is not up there, send an email to wpthemesgallery [at] gmail [dot] com to get listed.

Out of the all the two cents already published about WordPress.com upcoming premium themes marketplace, my own thoughts are best described by the following:

You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on. - George W. Bush

What I think of WordPress.com marketplace:

It’s a brilliant idea and I can’t wait to work twice as hard for half of the money (50/50 split with WordPress.com) selling CSS only GPL licensed premium themes to uninformed WordPress.com users and give those themes to everyone else for free because I still wouldn’t be working hard enough to justify my above minimum wage income supported by the generous WordPress blog platform.

Coming up with a high quality premium theme without breaking any law isn’t already hard enough. To all you lazy theme designers spending only a week on each theme, step your game up. If you get on WordPress.com’s good side, you’ll get the chance to sell GPL licensed CSS only themes to more than 1.7 million WordPress.com users. And that’s important because those uninformed WordPress.com users, making you work twice as hard to provide support, is definitely the crowd to cater.

And don’t worry about thieves stealing your theme by simply copy and pasting your GPL licensed CSS. WordPress.com will be there to protect you even when it can’t.

What you should know:

• This is not about you. It’s about WordPress.com making money off of you. Don’t get it twisted.
• You’ll work for exposure to the wrong crowd - people that need more support than you’re willing to give.
• Even if you’re willing to sell your soul for cheap, you won’t get the exposure you’re dreaming of because you’re not allowed to credit yourself for the work by linking back to your site.
• After a grueling week of design and development, you can look forward to splitting 50/50 with WordPress.com. Even if you net $2000 per theme, it isn’t worth it to split 50/50. On your own, you can EASILY make more than $2000 per theme. Just ask me or Brian Gardner. (Splitting 50/50 to sell text link ads might be the right thing to do because you don’t have to directly work for that money. But creating WordPress themes is no joke so don’t get wamboozled into splitting your hard-earned money.)

What you should do:

• Stop dreaming of a central marketplace giving all designers (you) a fair chance to compete. You don’t need one.
• Stop being lazy and build your own buzz. Release free WordPress themes, then advertise your services / products.
• Stop thinking about working with WordPress.com and start thinking about working against WordPress.com. Start a similar service. Get designers on your side. Charge a flat fee instead of 50%. Don’t wait to see what happens with WordPress.com themes marketplace. While the WordPress.com team is working on their own system, you should be working on yours. Launch before them.
• Stop jumping onto the bandwagon. Remember the last time you got wamboozled?

Wpdesigner and many other blogs wrote about how TemplatesBrowser.com re-packaged many authors’ themes with spam links, more than a month ago.

Right now, TemplatesBrowser.com is down, but another site has taken its place. The new WordPress theme spammer site is WordPress-Designer.com.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Themes that are up for downloads on WordPress-Designer.com have been re-packaged with a spam link to promote a blog about forex trading.

As you can see, even one of my themes, Digg 3 Column, is on that site. And of course, I DON’T support what they’re doing.

With the exception of working for small business blogs, there aren’t many options for WordPress designers out there. Mainly, it’s because WordPress designers are cursed by a paradox. Non-small-business clients actually expect to pay less for a design just because it’s a WordPress theme. So, what else is there for WordPress designers?

I don’t know about you, but I’ve given up freelancing for a long time. It’s no longer fun or worth while. I’m aiming for higher than what freelancing can pay me on average. Yes, I’m aware there are $10,000 projects out there, but the point is I would be working for someone else. Once the project is finished, I get the money and nothing more.

If you’re one of my loyal readers, you know I’ve been dying to open up my own WordPress theme store, especially after what I experienced first hand from the success of the Showcase theme. Ideally, I want to duplicate that success over and over again with less effort, and without the word freelance.

But at this point, after some research (more…)

Wpdesigner needs your vote to compile a list of the best WordPress themes of 2007. Instead of another top WordPress themes list, personally picked by one person, here’s your chance to contribute and correct where previous lists have been wrong.

To nominate a theme, write a comment based on the following format:

• Name of Theme
• Download page / address
• Author’s home page (optional)

Nomination period closes at 3:00 PM (PST) Sunday, September 23, 2007. Please double check nominated themes before posting yours.

The following links are my personal bookmarks to everything related to WordPress. Some will lead to more useful links for your WordPress needs. (more…)

WordPress 2.3 Beta 1 was released yesterday, August 27, 2007. It’s first release candidate will be available on September 17. From now until its final release on Monday, September 24, 2007, there will be a beta release for WordPress 2.3 on every Monday. While testing WordPress 2.3 Beta 1, there were several noticeable changes and additions:

Tags

The first obvious addition is the tagging system that was not available in previous WordPress versions. Tagging allows more room for organization when your simple list of categories isn’t going to cut it anymore. For details about this new feature, read Ryan Boren’s post, WordPress 2.3 Taxomony Schema.

Here are cropped screenshots of the tags input space and listing.

(more…)