WordPress Clone Themes – Your Take?

I came across a theme the other day called TweetPress, which bears a very obvious resemblance to the Twitter profile design. Let’s compare.

First, here’s a screenshot of the TweetPress theme:

TweetPress

And here’s a screenshot of my Twitter profile.

Theme Lab Twitter

Not only is it a striking resemblance, it appears the cloudy background image was lifted directly from Twitter’s website, among other things. It’s the default background image set for new profiles.

Update: According to Gabriel Jones, creator of the TweetPress theme, “The [Twitter] API returns the background image, the link colors, everything…” in this comment.

Cloned WordPress themes aren’t exactly a new phenomena though…

Read More

15

Jun

2011

New Community Links Page

A number of you have asked me what happened to my “WordPress Weekend Resources” series since I haven’t posted one of those since September 2009. Basically what I would do is roundup some of the top WordPress-related links I found during the past week, and posted them on the blog with my take on it.

I stopped doing it, because I was posting most of these links on my Twitter account already. Although, for those of you who don’t use Twitter, or follow so many people you might miss one of my tweets, I created a new community links page.

This page is an automatically updated list of tweets from my @themelab account with either a #WordPress hashtag and/or a #tlcom hashtag. The “tlcom” stands for Theme Lab Community, by the way. Also, remember it only posts tweets with my Twitter account, so don’t try to spam the hashtags thinking it’s going to show up on that page, because it’s not.

It’s powered by Juitter, a jQuery plugin, which uses the Twitter Search API to pull my latest tweets with that criteria. Being powered by the Twitter Search API, I believe it only goes back seven days, so make sure you check it at least once a week.

With that said, I have a couple questions for you:

  • Would you still be interested in WordPress Weekend Resources returning? Although you can get more real-time information through Twitter, it has a temporariness attached with it, as you can only go back 7 days or so with the search API. Blog posts would be more permanent, plus there would be more room for information in the descriptions.
  • Would you be interested in a tutorial on how to make your own “Community Links” page template in WordPress? Although it wouldn’t have to be community links, pretty much anything that you can search on Twitter could be put on an automatically-updated page on your site.

Let me know in the comemnts, thanks!

15

Jun

2011

10+ Most Creative Free WordPress Themes in 2009

Believe it or not, there were actually some really great free themes released in 2009. You might not know it because a lot of theme roundup posts these days are riddled with affiliate links to paid themes.

This post will list some of the most creative themes I’ve seen produced in 2009. Note that I won’t be listing every single good looking theme, just ones that I’ve come across which I deem “creative” enough.

Photography / Gallery

AutoFocus – This theme is for photographers looking for a creative way to showcase their photos. There is a pretty unusual layout in which photos are displayed.

AutoFocus Screenshot

Read More

15

Jun

2011