ThisIsInspired Magazine » Wordpress

The 10 Best Premium Fullscreen WordPress Themes

Derek Land — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 07:03:27 +0000

Fullscreen websites are becoming increasingly common – and with good reason: A fullscreen background is not only an excellent showcase for your portfolio, but also allows you to create a more immersive environment for visitors. With a fullscreen site, you have a greater chance to connect using photography and to convey emotion. Here’s the Best of the Best in fullscreen WordPress themes.

I lied. There’s actually 12 themes. Twelve themes that are just as fullscreen and just as awesome as the ten.

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Quick: Dynamically Open External Links in a New Window

Derek Land — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:58:21 +0000

Since I began writing HTML ten years ago, I hated using target=“blank” in my markup. Coupled with the fact that if you’re using a strict DOCTYPE the target method is invalid anyway, I began looking for an easy way to open only external links in a new window (and I realize there are pros and cons of doing this). Using this jQuery technique, each link is tested to check if it’s local or not, or alternatively in the second method only opening links in a new window if they are children of a given element.

*Do make sure you import the jQuery library or else you’ll be left wondering why neither of these methods work.

Method #1: All External Links

Opens all external links in a new browser window
Using this method, jQuery checks all link references to see if they are heading off to a local page (eg: hosted on the same domain) or if they are being sent on their merry way somewhere else.

To use this salubrious tidbit, find the script block on your page, and paste in the follow snippet:

jQuery("a[href^='http:']").not("[href*='whatevs.com']").attr('target','_blank');

Make a note of the part that says “whatevs.om” and swap it out with your domain – thisisinspired.com or bing.com, (or .org, .net, .us, etc) for example.

This piece of jQuery will catch all anchor clicks and attach the behaviour otherwise achieved by target=“_blank”.

But what if you just need to open all the links in a certain area of a page in a new window? This may be useful in particular if you wish all links to open in the same except for those links that carry footnotes or references and are used in the midst of a lengthy article. In such cases, it might be to your audience’s best interests to open just those in a new window so they don’t lose their place. In this case, method #2 works best.

Method #2: Only Specific Children Links

Open links in a new window only if they are children of a given section.
This is very, very similar to the one above, except that it doesn’t just batch all anchors together based on what domain they reference – it catches only the anchors within a certain element and opens them all in a new window.

Copy this snippet into the script area of your page:

jQuery("a[href^='http:']").attr('target','_blank');

…and note the ...$(“a[href... area. Insert the ID or class of the parent element directly before the “a”, like so:

jQuery("#content a[href^='http:']").attr('target','_blank');

where #content is the ID name of the element whose anchors we want opened in a new window. For WordPress users, you might change this to .post to select all anchors within only the post itself.

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8 Clean & Sharp WordPress Themes with Centered, Serif Headers

Derek Land — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:20:42 +0000

So I tried to nail down a specific look — at least, a specific feature. Each of these WordPress themes features the same style of header: A clean, centered, professional-looking serif typeface. Enjoy.

Free

Manifest

A clean, simple easy-to-read and content-focused theme. Perhaps a bit too simple due to lack of sidebars, but that’s what makes it wonderful.
Demo > | Download >

Folio Elements

Okay so the serif type is actually serif letters, but it’s easy to swap the ”75″ out with whatever you’d like to say. This theme is fantastic in simplicity and the scrolling is smooth for the main features.
Demo > | Download >

Agregado Lifstream

Beautiful theme for lifetreaming — getting all your stuff together in one big place so your friends can keep up with your life.
Demo > | Download >

Zinmag Tribune

This one is intense and has lots of space for ads and side features (I tried it for my blog but it was waaaaay too in-depth for what I needed). Lots of room to manoeuvre and expand.
Demo > | Download >

Gran Impetu

Demo > | Download >

Not Free

Impressions ($25)

Demo >

NewsBlog ($19.95)

Demo >

Geometric ($70)

Simple, clean and dark. Kind of like Manifest, but with the whole darkness of Batman. Kind of.
Demo >

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10+ (Almost) Essential WordPress Plugins

Derek Land — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:29:28 +0000

I’ve installed WordPress for a lot of people and each time there are a few plugins that always get installed — sort of by default, you could say. If I install a blog, these are ‘part of the package’ that I install and configure right after WordPress itself. I use these all on my own blogs as well — including This.Is.Inspired.

Spam Control

Akismet

Akismet comes bundled with WordPress, but you do have to activate and configure it once WordPress is installed. Do do this, you need a WordPress API Key (log in to your WordPress.org account to find it).
Download >

WP-SpamFree

A powerful compliment to Akismet. I don’t know which I’d go without first.
Download >

Administration

Admin Expert Mode

Trims away all the unnecessary clutter in the blog’s Admin section and really is a great boon to training a new user without distraction.
Download >

Admin Trim Interface

Similar to Admin Expert Mode and offers a few other options.
Download >

Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu

I’ve had a lot of questions about the Admin navigation on the left-hand side. This puts it all at the top of the Admin pages in a handy-dandy drop menu. People understand drop menus better than click-to-expand side menus.
Download >

Formatting

Post Typgrapher

Let’s face it — most folks aren’t familiar with the intricate details of typography. Post Typographer takes some of the headache away and handles stuff automatically, like detecting where a generic hyphen should be an em-dash (and inserting appropriate HTML characters), etc. I’ve gotten lazy myself because of this plugin.
Download >

Syntax Highlighter and Code Prettifier

This is only necessary when you’re publishing code — PHP, HTML, CSS, JS, etc etc. I find it works more reliably than the Google Syntax plugin, but check both out to see what you like better. Uses the PRE tag and looks like this:

function blah($foo) {
	echo $foo;
}
return blah("foo");

Download >
Check out Google Syntax plugin and make up your own mind.

Contact Form

Contact Form does the heavy lifting of adding contact forms to your blog. It uses an easy-to-implement short code syntax to add dynamic contact forms anywhere you want to plunk one down.
Download >

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Beneficial to aid cross-clicking in your site and drive up monthly impressions by suggesting related posts the reader might find useful.
Download >

Miscellaneous

Ultimate Google Analytics

The biggie. everyone wants to know how their site fairs. You configure this plugin in tandem with a Google Analytics site profile for the blog and it inserts all the nasty Javascript code on the fly.
Download >

Twitter Widget Pro

Handles all major interactions you could possibly want between your blog and Twitter. You do have to have a Twitter account, obviously.
Download >

…and for added goodness

Shockingly Big IE6 Warning

This one isn’t really mandatory, and when I code sites by hand I still proof for IE6, but nonetheless this plugin throws up a big yellow banner at the top of the page that asks the visitor to upgrade to a better browser. You can choose whether to uggest current versions of IE, Firefox, Opera & Safari.
Download >

Thanks for reading This Is Inspired! Catch more inspiration online at ThisIsInspired.com and share comments and feedback.

Add Custom Content for Your Blog’s Index Page

Derek Land — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:20:21 +0000

Most of the time we want our index page to the flashiest page on our site. A while ago I wanted to put a dynamic slideshow and special copy on my home page that wouldn’t show up on the rest of the site (and oversized, 2009-trendy intro header sentences written in first-person don’t count). It’s easy enough to do with plain ol’ CSS and HTML — even with the bulk of simple CMSs — but might be a bit more of a hassle with WordPress.

Never fear. It’s so much easier than you think. In fact, it’s so easy to add custom content for your index you’ll wonder why you didn’t do it before.

Ready? Here’s all the code you need for WordPress:

Now you can save your specialized content as ”special_index_content.php” (or ”Lafawnduh.php” for all I care) and you have an easy-to-update way to add custom content to your WP home page.

Thanks for reading This Is Inspired! Catch more inspiration online at ThisIsInspired.com and share comments and feedback.

Start Using WordPress Attachments Now

Derek Land — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:53:57 +0000

Check it out: How often have you wanted to add an attachment for a specific post in WordPress? This little snippet of PHP will let you do just that. It loads attachments into an array ($args), and then lists them (foreach...) with their respective titles (the_title).

$args = array(
	'post_type' => 'attachment',
	'numberposts' => null,
	'post_status' => null,
	'post_parent' => $post->ID
);

$attachments = get_posts($args);

if ($attachments) {
	foreach ($attachments as $attachment) {
		echo apply_filters('the_title', $attachment->post_title);
		the_attachment_link($attachment->ID, false);
	}
}

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