Archive for 'June, 2009'

Have you every wished you could “Create your own WordPress theme?”. I’m a WordPress consultant, so I hack WordPress themes for a living nearly every day. I don’t mind hacking, creating, customizing, and modifying WP themes at all, but it’s definitely a lengthy process. It took me a few years to learn all the in’s and out’s of template pages, “the loop”, headers, footers, etc. Would you believe me if I told you that there was an editor out there that would allow you create WordPress themes just by pointing and clicking (no coding)?

Today I’m going to review “Artisteer“, a WordPress theme generator. It’s a Windows based software program you purchase, download, and install. It also creates Joomla and Drupal themes (and soon Blogger!). You can even export as a regular static web site template. I don’t care if you are the most advanced theme creator on the web, this is probably the best product for the money you’ll ever see! Not only can you create stunning themes in minutes, but it gives you a frame to hack even further if you want. Create a little stable of themes and make them available on your own web site to quickly build thousands of backlinks! Create Joomla and Drupal themes too to get even more backlinks!

How do you think a blog like doshdosh.com got over 1 million backlinks? I know exactly what it is, it’s the Prosense WordPress Theme. Now do you see the value in creating and releasing free WordPress themes?

Using Artisteer

When you start Artisteer up, you choose which kind of web site theme template you would like to create. Your choices are WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, static HTML, or you can even choose a web developer template for ASP.NET or code charge studio.

Today we’re generating a sample WordPress theme. Once the program starts it shows a very nice default theme to start with:

This design is what Artisteer calls a “suggestion”. You can actually click on the “suggest design” button to toggle through the different library designs available, which you can use as a starting point. Then, once you find one you would like to start with – you can swap out individual elements by “suggesting” colors, backgrounds, fonts, layouts, and sheet design. Just by altering the combinations you can dramatically chane the design.

Rather than explore “suggestions” with this design, I think I’d rather customize the elements myself by hand. So I’m going to switch from the ideas toolbar to the “Colors & Fonts” toolbar. Now, I could “suggest colors” here as well, but I think I’d just rather choose a theme in the “color themes” dropdown.

Once I found a color theme I liked, I made the switch – look how dramatically it changed the theme default!

I also changed the font face to Trebuchet with just one click, but some of the other elements of the typography I’m not happy with yet. You have find grained control over what you would like to change at each element. I could have changed individual color elements one by one, but the scheme I found was fine. Check out the typography elements that you can customize. Not only is it every element from text, to links and headings, but you can change it at every block level from headline, to header, footer, menus, buttons, and more. I’m sorry, you can’t modify CSS code any easier than this, it’s as easy as formatting something in Microsoft Word!

So I made some additional changes to the content font size and the line spacing, and I added some spacing before and after each content block. Again, with just a few point and clicks I modified the theme quite a bit!

Now I’m checking out the layout position possibilities. I think I’m going to leave this theme as-is, but I can easily change the page layout to be “header, menu”, “menu, header”, just a menu, just a header, or nothing.

If you think changing the layout so far was simple, under columns you can quickly switch to just about any one, two, or three column layout in just seconds:

The thing I like about this is the fact that you can define all the elements of the perfect theme, painstakingly picking out every detail. Then you could visit the column layout pulldown and product and export one, two, and three column versions of your perfect theme in about a minute. Try handing coding and hacking that in 60 seconds! It’s just as easy in the layout section to change the position and layout of the search box, categories, archives, or blogroll.

In fact, you can even change the width of the columns by merely moving the slider:

The background toolbar works much the same way allowing you to change background by image, texture, glare, gradient, fill color, images from a file, including control position, transparency, repeat, scrolling, etc. It’s amazing how quickly you could make completely different themes by merely swapping out backgrounds and color schemes. I opted to make some minor changes to gradient and glare for my review theme.

The “sheet” toolbar allows you to control the template as a whole. For instance, you can change the total width of your page, I opted to change mine from 900 to 1000. In sheet options, you can control the “offset” (to offset the design from background graphic for example), padding, radius, border width, and transparency.

The title toolbar is another area with nearly limitless options. You can choose from abstract backgrounds, or actual stock photos. You can select height, text, text placement, blend mode, image format (jpg or png), effects, position – you can even choose a foreground picture on top of all of that!

The menu toolbar gives you complete control over your navigation buttons and menu elements, right down to items and subitems. You also have control over margins, spacing, width, height, etc. I changed to a different gradient, and selected some fancy drop down menus. I changed the shape of my button as well.

Within the articles toolbar you control the titles, metadata, text formatting, link options, and all aspects of the header and footer of the individual content blocks. In other words, you control what is before and after the content itself. I changed all the little icons for my metadata, and took out the blocks for my metadata. I chose to put the titles in a block instead.

In the blocks toolbar you have the ability to change nearly anything and everything imaginable in the sidebar. I gave my headings rounder corners with a gradient and a nice modern glare. I could have change a lot more, because there are a lot of instand “styles” to choose from, and you can control the background, header, and content area of all sidebar blocks.

Buttons are of course only going to appear on forms, but the buttons toolbar lets you fully customize them as well:

The footer toolbar is the last one, and you have the usual options, such as fill, gradient, texture, alignment, transparency, and you can choose from a multitude of RSS icons.

When you’re all done making changes – it’s time to export your brand new WordPress theme! You have options even here! You first fill out the basics, like author name and URL, template URL, tags, and description. These are all important because they’re what people see when they upload and activate your new theme!

You can control watermark and footnote options here as well. My only “wish list” item is here I would like to be able to manually edit and enter whatever footer links I want, and not just have a checkbox for “author backlink”. All is not lost, I can manually edit it once the theme is generated, but the whole point here is to do everything you can within Artisteer and quickly generate a WordPress theme in record time!

When you finally do hit the “extract” button to create your theme you are prompted for a name and whether to extract as a folder or zip archive:

Now that I’ve created a brand new theme during this review, I decided to check it out before officially turning it loose. Artisteer did generate 60 files for my new WordPress theme. 33 of those were icons and images though. I noticed a “readme.txt” file, which explains how to install the theme. It also explains that each exported theme is localized into 4 languages: “French, German, Italian and Spanish translations are exported by Artisteer in the WordPress compliant file naming format: _.mo“. Pretty cool by default! It also generated a screenshot, and all the normal theme files (and some not so common).

Here’s a list of the theme template files generated:

404.php
archive.php
archives.php
comments.php
footer.php
functions.php
header.php
index.php
legacy.comments.php
links.php
page.php
search.php
searchform.php
sidebar1.php
sidebar2.php
single.php
style.css
style.ie6.css
style.ie7.css
script.js

I chose to remove the readme.txt file, and then I edited my attribution link in the footer. Now that the theme is ready – I’m going to upload it to one of my test sites and see how it looks live!

Once I uploaded the files, I went to my admin dashboard in my test site, and sure enough my title, description, link, tags, and screen shot all look great!

The preview looked good too, and once I activated the theme live this is what looked like on my test site:

Conclusion

The Artisteer WordPress Theme Generator is the most incredible piece of software I’ve seen in a very long time! If you use WordPress regularly – I think that you’d be crazy not to immediately purchase this software. If you’re a blogger, consultant, web designer – you’d be even more foolish not to get it right away. I don’t care if you are the hottest premium theme designer on the planet, you can STILL save TONS of time with Artisteer. If you’re a blogger, do you have any idea how many backlinks you can generate from designing a little stable of free Wordpres, Drupal, and Joomla themes? If you’re a designer – even better! You can create the most kick-ass designs ever in Photoshop, but if you’re not a coder or don’t have intricate knowledge of WordPress this is exactly what you need. Create all the graphics you want, and then use the “from file” options for background, header, buttons, blocks, etc. Maybe your a WordPress designer, and you can use Artisteer to port all your designs over to Joomla and Drupal – how much time would that save? You could even your own theme directory or “theme of month club” using Artisteer. I’m sorry – the possibilities are endless!

I’m going to use Artisteer to create WordPress themes all the time. I’ll use it for myself, for clients, and I’m going to make themes available for free here on jtpratt.com, and I’ll submit them to all the WP theme directories I can find. It’s funny too, apparently the official WordPress theme directory already knows how to figure out you generated your theme using Artisteer, because you get an error message on upload that says “sorry we already have enough themes submitted that were generated using Artisteer software”. That’s just stupid considering I could use Artisteer and still have custom backgrounds, headers, images, graphics – the default options of the software are just a starting point. In addition, I could hack any theme after exporting to add a featured content gallery, some cool jquery functions, custom plugin support, or just about anything. I guess that’s why there’s tens of thousands of free themes online, but only 852 in the official WordPress directory.

Download my free WordPress Theme “Blue Abstract”

If you’re still not yet convinced that Artisteer is the greatest thing since the Askimet plugin – download “Blue Abstract”, my new free WordPress theme! Test drive my theme for yourself and see what I generated in just a few minutes!

Will you consider using this WordPress Theme Generator? The home version that does only WordPress themes is only $50. You can’t buy 100 backlinks for $50, but you sure can get 100 backlinks out of your very first theme. If you want the most bang for your buck, and want to create Joomla and Drupal themes, the $130 for the standard license, is nothing compared to the value you will get out of it. I mean seriously – how many hours have you spent looking for the perfect WP theme? How many hours have you spent building backlinks? This one program solves so many problems at once it’s not even funny!

Visit the Artisteer web site now!

Did you know that guest blogging builds better backlinks? I don’t understand why people don’t guest blog more. Let’s pretend for just a second that you were a celebrity and you had just finished a movie or a book. How would you promote it? You could take out ads on radio and television, or the newspapers. I guess that works, and it’s pretty expensive too. Most celebrities get out there during the month of release and heavily promote it personally themselves on every television and radio show they can. Those shows are happy to have the celebrities on because they draw in more viewers.

So – you’re not a celebrity, and you can’t get on the Tonight show to talk about your blog or web site – can you? No matter who you are though, there are blogs online that have many more readers than you do, and believe it or not – they could use your help! You may not have “celebrity power”, but if you can write engaging content – you have the same thing for any blog that a TV or radio show gets out of a celebrity appearance. You have “content power”!

Are you one of those people that wish they had more traffic? Do you wish you could double or triple your RSS subscribers? Do you keep posting and commenting on blogs relentlessly but still you get lackluster increases in web traffic? If you follow my plan for guest blogging, I believe you can build the best backlinks you’ve ever had, and get the highest returns for your time spent.

How to Guest Blog

• Find your top 20 Competitors in your niche
• Write a coverletter explaining who you are
• Contact all 20 competing blogs
• Write posts for the blogs that respond
• Give sample blog titles to blog owners for approval
• Write 1,000-2,000 word posts
• Write incredibly engaging posts
• Once posts are published, respond to all comments for at least a month
• Let the traffic roll in!

I’m sure you already know who your blog niche competitors are. If you don’t, just type in your best keywords and all the sites on the first 2 pages of google are your competitors. More than likely they all have a contact page. If they don’t, do a whois lookup (google it) and to find the email address of the domain owner and email them. What you want to do is write a coverletter, just as you would to accompany a resume for a job. Explain who you are, why you’re an expert in your niche and show direct examples of your writing online including the URL of your main blog. Offer to “guest post” for their blog a minimum 1,000 word post with accompanying graphics in exchange for a short byline with one or two links at the end. Once you get a response from these blogs, submit some sample article titles before you start to write. Then, write a post that is the most engaging you can possibly come up with. Once your article is published, check it multiple times per day for comments, and respond to each and every one as if it were your own blog. Then watch the backlink accrue!

In my case, I was researching WordPress blogs one day and I came across a list of the “top 10 wordpress blogs” on the web. The first thing I thought was “why am I not on that list?”. Then I thought, well – if I can’t make the list I’ll bet I can guest post on each and every one! Which do you think will do you more good, leaving 100 comments on blogs or writing 1,000+ word guest posts for your top 10 competitors? I’ve talked to some people who can’t bring themselves to guest post because they think it’s “giving content away”. Since when is self promotion giving content away? It’s giving a piece of yourself away mostly, because you’re showing how good your content is and giving people a reason to come back to your site and read more. It’s like putting up your realtor sign in somebody else’s yard. Every blog I’ve guest posted on this month has had more than 5,000 RSS subscribers. And guess what, the most your guest post – the easier it is to guest post at some of the biggest blogs online, because you can actually change your coverletter to say “I’ve guest posted here, and here, and here…”. I’ve written SO MUCH content for other people over the last two weeks that now I have offers stacked up for a month – and they are all to PAY ME to write content (and still get bio links at the bottom)!

If you want examples – I’ll give them to you, along with the time I invested in each.

I wrote 2 articles for wphacks.com back to back:

How To: Hack WordPress Theme Template Pages
1,700 words, 4 hours to write

How to Use WordPress Conditional Tags to Hack Your Theme
1,400 words, 3 1/2 hours to write

Then I wrote for 2 other blogs:

10 Ways to Install Accordion Menus in Your WordPress Theme
1,400 words, 6 hours to write

10 Things You can Do with WordPress Besides Blogging
3,900 Words, 11 hours to write

Conclusion

If you’re good at guest posting, you can build the best backlinks (that money CAN’T buy). The last guest post in that list was soooooo popular, that once it went live it got upwards of 100 tweets and their web host SHUT THEM DOWN. I think they had to switch web hosts, or at least upgrade – because the site was down 3 days before it came back online. I guarantee that post is SO good that page will have it’s own pagerank in 3-4 months, how much better is that backlink? Don’t envy your blog competitors, use them to your advantage – guest posting helps both you and them. And who knows, you might even network some new relationships that start projects with your competitors!

Recently I changed the theme on this blog, and in the last post I talked about how much work it was. It took a lot of planning and preparation, and believe it or not it’s still not completely done! It’s kind of like remodeling part of your house, once you get things moved around you find other things you’ve neglected over time that you need to take care of. Move your furniture and you find lots of things you haven’t seen in a long time. Next thing you know your washing the drapes and painting the walls. I found a need to create some new graphics for certain pages to blend better with the theme, and I had to completely re-organize the category structure for my posts (something I should have done a long time ago).

If you’ve been building a blog for a long time, then you’ve become established in the search engines and you’re probably used to a certain amount of search traffic coming in each and every day. What you may not have thought about is how minor adjustments could affect that. Google has evolved to the point where it can make almost instant adjustments to search rankings. Case and point – I had a client last week who had problems with his WordPress blog, all pages were displaying an error. Within 48 hours all his search engine listing were that error. That may seem pretty quick, but in fact I believe it happenned the first 24 hours. I fixed his entire web site 3 days after the error first took over his site, and now (a week later) the error (in google) is still the description for his home page listing in google.

In my case, I changed my entire theme, changed all my categories, and then I changed the SEO plugin I was using – and in turn changed the title of my blog and many of my blog pages. The next day my incoming searches dropped by nearly 80%. I decided to ride it out (for 4 days) and see if things improved, and they didn’t. So I switched back to my old blog title and old SEO plugin. Now 48 hours later, traffic is still down 80%. I lost the 8 additional listings under my main one in SERP’s, but my pagerank, Alexa ranking, backlinks – everything is the same.

So, let this be a lesson to both me and to you. Changing your theme can change your search engine listings, but more importantly making even the smallest change to your blog can affect search rankings. Changing tag or category structure, changing permalinks, changing SEO plugins, changing your blog title – all can DRAMATICALLY affect your search listings! My advice to you would be to avoid major changes all at once, do them one at a time so you know (if there is a problem) which change affected it. Also be aware that if any changes affected your Serps negatively, it may take google ten times longer to change back to your original listings. I don’t know why this is, but I’ve seen it time and time again in search results.

What have you done to affect your search rankings before?

I’d like to thank Erika Nicole Kendall at Hype IMD for designing my new theme! If you’ve read my blog before you know that I’ve had the same old hacked up theme for several years now. I gave her my requirements and some basic ideas and she did the rest. If it’s time for a theme refresh on your blog or web site, I suggest you click that link and ask her for a consult! She did an outstanding job based on what a pain in the ass I can be, and I didn’t have to do a thing – other than figure out where to put what.

Having said that, the job of “where to put what” took what seemed like forever! I think I worked on it 5-6 hours today alone before I set it live minutes ago. I don’t change themes very often because there are must soooo many things to think of. I figured since I just went through this it would be beneficial to write down all the things I to think about before I could turn the new theme on for good.

First of all – once you get your new theme coded, you should test it for awhile to make sure everything is ok. You can test it without anyone knowing by simply using the Theme Test Drive Plugin. Once enabled, whenever you are logged in as admin you’ll see your new theme on your blog, but no one else will!

Next, make list of all the things your old theme has and make sure your new theme does as well. If it doesn’t, consider creating the pages you need based on your new index.php (home) page.

- do you have a search page?
- do you have a 404.php (page not found) page?
- do you have archives pages?
- do you have category and / or tag pages?
- do you need to customize comments.php?
- do you have any page templates you need to create?
- is anything hardcoded into your old theme?
- are all your plugins up to date?

This blog is pretty big with 4,000+ pages indexed in google. My old theme had category images, dozens of category template pages, and lots of hard-coded stuff. Like page navigation, breadcrumbs, translation blocks, and more. Over the last 3 weeks I’m sure I worked 40 hours+ making sure the new theme had everything I needed to launch. That also included updating my entire category structure as well though.

If you’re launching a new theme, my advice to you is to backup everything, make a list of work to be done, and make sure you have at least a few sets of eyes (besides yours) test your entire blog before you put it live! How do you like my new theme? I think it’s awesome! If you have a product or service to sell that has to do with WordPress or blogging – I suggest you buy one of my banner slots today before they’re all sold out!

Today we’re going to talk about manipulating data in WordPress without using the database. Hacking WordPress is great, because basically you learning to add and modify things in your theme with little code snippets. WordPress plugins are great, but so many WP newbies get caught up in “plugin overload”.

When you add (yet another) plugin to WordPress you are actually adding to it’s load. Meaning, every single time a page loads in WordPress it has to check every single plugin in /wp-content/plugins (EVEN the ones that are NOT activated!) to make sure it doesn’t have to do anything. If you have 5 plugins WP has to check 5 times, if you have 35 plugins it has to check 35 times! Also, nearly every plugin you activate adds data and/or tables to your database. More data, more tables, more queries = MORE LOAD. Is it any wonder why some WP powered blogs and web sites are soooooo slow?

Some of your activated plugins might not be coded optimally and might have excessive database queries that will slow you down. Some plugins conflict with other plugins as well. My general rule of thumb is, – if it’s something I can figure out how to add a little snippet of code for, I will! For instance, I know many people that use a google analytics plugin – and to that I say -WTF? The FIRST thing you should do is learn how to use your theme editor in the WP dashboard. If you can’t copy and paste some simple javascript into your footer through the dashboard – you’ve GOT to learn how to do it and become wordpress literate ASAP!

Now then – let’s get started!

How to ‘include’ a file Anywhere

One of the easiest things you can learn in PHP is how to ‘include’ the contents of a file. Why install a plugin for something as simple as this?

Open up a text editor (NOT word processor like Word, TEXT editor like Notepad, etc.) and put something in it. It doesn’t matter what it is, it can be words, HTML or PHP code, JavaScript, whatever. Save it on your desktop as “my-include.php”. Upload it to your theme directory.

Now, open your “index.php” and place the following code before or after the loop:

<?php include('my-include.php'); ?>

Guess what – you just learned your first data hack! Typically an “include” like this is used for an instance where you want to display the same thing on in many different areas or theme pages. Maybe you want the same google adsense block to display on all your tag and category pages? Just use a one line include before the loop to include one file with the JavaScript code for adsense! Maybe you want the same banner ad, or announcement on certain pages, an include will save you there too.

Conditional Includes

It’s VERY easy to create a much more streamlined include by using WordPress conditional includes.

Maybe you want to include an ad, an images, or some text in your sidbar, but ONLY only on category and tag pages.

This is the code:

<?php if ( is_category() || is_tag() {
include('my-include.php');
} ?>

With conditional tags you can include the file on only specific pages, you could have a message on just your home page in the header, footer, or sidebar – the possibilities are endless. I wrote an article over at wphacks.com about this: learn more about Conditional Tags.

Adding Data To ‘the loop’

I showed you how to add things before and after your content – now let’s try and add some random stuff right in the loop! My best example for this is ads, on my many different homepages on my blogs I tend to add adsense ads in between the posts. Problem is – adsense doesn’t like more than 2 of these per page! So you can’t have the “include” happen after every listed file – you have to do something like this:

<?php if ($count==2) { include('adsense_homepage.php'); } ; ?>
<?php if ($count==6) { include('adsense_homepage.php'); } ; ?>
<?php $count = $count + 1; ?>
<?php endwhile; ?>

All that code says basically is to include my file “adsense_homepage.php” after the second and sixth post in the loop!

How to Get data in a file

The last thing I have to show you is a little more complex example for getting the contents of a file line by line. Basically this code will grab exactly one (random) line from a file and include it. This is great if you want to create a file with say a dozen images, and include a different one in your header randomly each time the page loads. I use it rotate different text and banner ads all the time.

There’s only two things you need to know – first EVERYTHING you want to include has to be on exactly ONE line per item.

Here’s the code:

<?php getad(my-ads)
function getad($ad = '') {
$ad = trim($ad);
if(strlen($ad) > 0) {
$ad = ABSPATH . "wp-content/" . $ad . '.php';
if(file_exists($ad)) {
$ads = file($ad);
return $ads[rand(0, sizeof($ads)-1)];
}
}
}
?>

You don’t have to make any changes to the code “except” for the very first line. Create a file called “my-ads.php” and save it in your /wp-content directory. You only need to change getad(my-ads) to getad(my-filename) if yours isn’t called “my-ads.php”. Just make sure your filename has the .php extention or you’ll have to change that in the code above as well!

I’m sure I’ll get a comment saying you could just ad this to your WordPress functions file or make a plugin out of this – sure you could, I’m just trying to keep this example simple.

Conclusion

There you have it, everything you need to know to get you started hacking file includes in your WordPress theme! So go start making some customizations and stop downloading so many plugins!