Zack Live

Make Your WordPress Theme Ready for Translation

If you want your WordPress themes to be used by more people, you can translate them to other languages, or ask your theme user to do this for you. But first of all, you need to make your theme texts translatable. To do this, you need know how WordPress  do the translation. WordPress uses GNU gettext for localization. With this framework, you can mark your theme texts for translation. You can use the following two ways to mark texts. __($text) : this means $text need to be...

The Power of WP_Query

WP_Query is a powerful tool to control what to display on your blog. This is very useful for plugin and theme designer, especially for magazine style themes which need to display posts of different categories in different sections. In this post, I will teach you how and when to use WP_Query. Case 1: Display posts in particular category In some WordPress themes, we want to show some posts in particular category(e.g. Featured Posts), the easiest way to do this is to use WP_Query. Here is...

Free Elegant Portfolio WordPress Themes

After my last post Top 10 Best Quality WordPress Themes Of 2009, we have found more great themes, today we are sharing some portfolio WordPress themes with you. 1. Irresistable 2. WP Coda 3. Vivee 4.Creative by Nature 5. Work-a-holic 6. Folio Elements 7. FotoFolio 8. WPESP Portfolio Theme 9. Sharpfolio 10. Viewport 11. The Unstandard 12. Gallery...

Top 10 Best Quality WordPress Themes of 2009

A lot of great WordPress themes were created in 2009, we collect top 10 high quality WordPress themes, please let me know if you got better ones. Gallery deStyle Imprezz Folio Elements Compositio Irresistible Glassical FREEmium Black...

iTech Theme: Free WordPress Theme for Gadgets and Tech Blogs

I just started a new gadgets blog Gearor.com, so I design a new theme for it, iTech Theme. This is a high quality, low graphics, Lightweight, fast-rendering and professional WordPress Theme, inspired by SixRevisions,  especially good for technology and gadgets blogs. A tabbed block is added to sidebar for displaying Recent Posts, Popular Posts and Recent Comments. Built in control panel(Theme Options), you can set customized RSS feed, email subscription, twitter subscription and header...

Update: BlackNWhite Theme Update 05/November/2009

While updating Gray Lines theme, I also did the same modifications to BlackNWhite theme. Here is the change log: 05/Nov/2009: Sidebar tabs added for Recent posts, popular posts and recent commentsSidebar tabs added for Recent posts, popular posts and recent comments New Blockquote Design Fix a missing “l” in a <li> of sidebar Codes of blog title and description been changed, better code style, looks no difference 14/Aug/2009: Control panel added. 21/Jul/2009: Upgrade to...

Update: GrayLines Theme Updated 05/November/2009

I've done some modifications to GrayLines theme, here is the change log: Chang Log: 05/Nov/2009: Publish Date added to individual posts New Blockquote Design Fix a missing "l" in a <li> of sidebar Codes of blog title and description been changed, better code style, looks no difference 14/Aug/2009: Control panel added. 21/Jul/2009: Upgrade to WordPress 2.8 (Supporting threaded (nested) comments, sticky-post and comment pages)</li> Because changes are very small, I...

WordPress: Getting Most Popular(Commented) Posts

After my post Getting Recent Posts In WordPress before, I am thinking about getting the most popular posts or most commented posts. Talking about most popular posts, are those most posts  commented mean they are most popular. Not really, there may be some posts, they've been read many times, but people seldom leave comments, aren't they popular? So at the first place, I thought popular posts should be calculated by both view count and comment count. But when I go deep to coding, I found...

Getting Recent Posts in WordPress

Getting recent posts in you WordPress blog, is a old topic. WordPress now has a default widget to do this, but sometime we need to display recent posts outside of the widget area. It's a simple task, you can use one line of codes to do it: <?php wp_get_archives('title_li=&type=postbypost&limit=10'); ?> The function wp_get_archives() is used to display a date-based archives list. While setting 'type' to 'postbypost', it returns posts odered by post date, which means recent...

My WordPress Themes Updated

New update: Update: GrayLines Theme Updated 05/November/2009 Update: BlackNWhite Theme Update 05/November/2009 I've created two WordPress themes, the Gray Lines WordPress Theme and the BlacknWhite WordPress Theme. I updated them today for WordPress 2.7(also 2.8), supporting threaded (nested) comments, sticky-post and comment pages. And  added a control panel which you can set your own RSS feed and your logo image. Download: Gray Lines WordPress Theme BlacknWhite...