There have been lots of complaints about WordPress’ visual editor. It adds extra (usually unwanted) formatting whenever you have a line break. It’s just a pain to deal with. Understandably, I personally never use it. For those who may not be knowledgeable at HTML, there are excellent alternatives available. In this guide I’ll go over:

• TinyMCE Advanced
• Dean’s FCKEditor
• How to disable the visual editor

If you’re fed up with the default WordPress visual editor, I suggest you read on.

Read the rest of this entry »

To anyone that isn’t aware, Lester Chan (GaMerZ) is a WordPress plugin author that has released some very useful plugins that I use myself on this site, including the WP-PageNavi (for page navigation) and Download Manager (for tracking downloads on the free WordPress themes page).

He has just announced a few days ago a large portion of his plugins are now updated and compatible with WordPress 2.5 and above. The full list of updated plugins can be viewed on that link. For the remaining plugins, there are beta versions available on the Downloads page. These are supposed to work with 2.5, but have not been thoroughly tested and therefore, still in beta.

This is a very nice looking magazine theme, originally designed by Rambling Soul, called Tomodachi. On the homepage, there are areas for the latest post and an author’s box - where images can be used through custom fields. There are two sidebars, both of which are widget-ready. Native Gravatar (WordPress 2.5+ only) and tagging support is also present within the theme.

Live Demo | Download

And now on to the features in greater detail…

Read the rest of this entry »

As you returning website visitors can see, Theme Lab now has a new design. If you’re currently reading via RSS, please take a minute and have a look for yourself. It was designed by TheHiveDesigns.com, provider of custom quality web 2.0 designs, and coded by XHTMLValid.com coding services.

Why the change? I felt after several months of the same design, it was time for a fresh look. Theme Lab is growing every day and I also wanted more room to “expand” if needed. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, feel free to leave a comment below. Hope you all like it!

Today we have another great theme, originally designed by Styleshout and ported into WordPress by myself. As the name implies, this is a simple WordPress theme. It is Gravatar-ready (WordPress 2.5+ only) and has a widget-ready sidebar.

Live Demo | Download

If you’re getting one of those HTTP Error messages after crunching your batch uploads in WordPress 2.5, I have some solutions for you. These errors have plagued people on the WordPress support forums ever since 2.5 was released. The problem may lay with your web hosting configuration, your browser settings, or maybe something else. Don’t give up yet. In this quick guide I’ll go over how to:

• Use an alternative uploader plugin to get images uploaded
• Use an .htaccess fix to allow batch uploads
• Disable flash on the batch upload screen

Read the rest of this entry »

There seemed to be a three column theme drought recently, so I decided to port this one called Stylevantage from Styleshout. This template has been around a while, but I couldn’t find any decent WordPress integrations, so decided to do a fresh one myself.

• Fully compatible with WordPress 2.5 and above
• Native Gravatar (WP 2.5+) and tagging support
• Both sidebars (left and right) widget-ready
• Validates XHTML strict

There are three different color stylesheets available (orange default, green, and blue) which can be easily switched out in the header file. Simply change Orange.css to Blue.css or Green.css to change to the color of your choice.

Live Demo | Download

After a few different people requested Gravatar support in the comments for the popular Choice WordPress theme, I decided to look into it more carefully. I came across this great post by HackWordPress which gives you a small code snippet to add Gravatars to your comments loop. Since then, I’ve been adding Gravatar support to all the themes here, just because it’s so simple to do. In this guide I’ll show you how exactly I integrate Gravatars into themes.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here we have another beautiful design from Rambling Soul, ported into WordPress by me. This free WordPress theme would be great for any nature-related blog. It has a widget-ready sidebar. Comments have Gravatar support for WordPress 2.5 users. It also has native WordPress tag support.

Live Demo | Download

Update - May 26, 2008: The PSD file for RS Garden has been released by RamblingSoul.com.

Sitemaps can be an important factor in making your site more navigable and accessible. And no, I’m not talking about the Google XML Sitemaps which you submit directly directly to Google - never to be seen by human eyes. I’m talking about an actual page on your site that has a list of all your posts and pages. There are a few helpful plugins that can help you out with this. I’ll go over some of them in this guide.

Read the rest of this entry »