Dan Murphy's Blog

This post has some great links to some very nice WordPress themes, and since I am always wanting to update my site you can never have too many places to choose from!

Top 100 Word Press Themes

I love when people do the research for me.  In one of my blogs I found HackWordPress.com the following entry that he lists out what he believes to be the best WordPress themes out there.  Of course that’s an objective point of view but never hurts to read what other people have written

Well you can never have too many WordPress themes to select from.  So lets add this one to the list.  This site takes the Digg approach to rating themes so people can vote on their favorite.  I am a big fan of the one I have now specially because I have customized it a little but its always good to know what is out there.  I am interested to see the redesign of the admin-pages that is scheduled for 2.4 release in January.

Tired of looking at those ugly WordPress Admin Pages?  Try this plugin all you have to do is the normal plugin work of downloading, up-zipping, uploading, and activating.  I have made some minor changes to the css files to clean up some stuff and make the text a little easier to read seeing as how some of the text was too small to read I also fixed the alignment of some of the tables so things line up correctly.  Looks like the original project is abandoned as the last time it was updated was December 2006.

PS…This plugin only works with Safari and Firefox if you are using IE you will not see a difference.  I just read the road map for WordPress and it looks like re-designing the admin pages is on the list for the next release in January 2.4

So I Ajaxed WordPress a little with a plugin cleverly called AJAX’d WP I think that this makes the comments section much smoother and better integrated to add comments.  It was pretty easy to install with some minor changes to the theme that I am using to run those Ajax scripts.  No more jumping to a new page to post comments now it can be done right on the page.  I also added an Ajax Poll to the right side of the blog, not that too many people visit but I figured I would play around with some stuff to see how it works.  Hopefully these new plugins haven’t effected my load time on my blog but I think its all good so far.  Let me know what you think or any suggestions/issues you may have…

Well if you haven’t noticed I have installed a very nice gallery plugin for WordPress.  This is going to replace my Coppermine photo gallery which has worked well until now and I have decided I wanted something more closely related to my blog.  This program is super easy to install just download, unzip and upload to the plugin folder and then activate the plugin.  It also has a widget which you can install which will run in the sidebars and you can have it randomly select images or stick to one image.  I also had to install JW Image Rotation for the slide show option to work correctly

As you can see below each post I have now added the ability to rate the blog you are reading with stars.  It is a simple WordPress plugin and installs with just one file.

With the upgrade to WordPress 2.3 they have now added the ability to add Keywords to your posts for web crawling services such as Twitter…Since Live Writer seems to be the best publisher out there there are some things you have to tweak on the blog to get the keywords working.  This is the zip file that you need to unzip into your wp-includes folder and then update your blog accounts on windows live and its all good.

Here is the link to the original post from Digital Inspiration.

This website is great for free wordpress themes and is super easy to navigate. WordPress Themes