Zack Live » WordPress Themes

Premium WordPress Theme: Stylize

Zack — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 04:17:10 +0000

Stylize is an elegant, gorgeous and stylish magazine style Premium WordPress Theme. It supports latest WordPress(2.9+) functions, including thumbnails, threaded (nested) comments, comment pages, sticky post. Stylize is inspired by Hypebeast, I add a top billboard slider, which you can set images and links in options page. A tabbed sidebar section is added as well to display more information in less place. In single post page, I separate trackbacks from comments, this makes the post looks clear and more professional. The theme settings page is the big point of Stylize theme, I spent a lot of time on it. In the settings page, you can set head logo, enable or disable slider, slider images and links(as many as five slides), enable or disable sidebar subscription, customize subsciption images and links, enable or disable tabs, tabs’ title, customize RSS feed, add content to footer(Google Analytics code, for example).

Single Post Page

Standard Features

Supports WordPress 2.7+.
Supports WordPress thumbnails, uses thumbnails in front page, you can easily add thumbnail to a post in editor page(right bottom).
Supports threaded (nested) comments and comment pages.
Supports sticky post.

Advanced Features

Ajax slider, you can set every things of slider in theme settings.
Ajax Tabs, you can set every things of tabs in theme settings, too.
Separate Pingbacks/Trackbacks from comments, this makes post pages look better.
Supports WP-PageNavi.
Full-functional theme settings, a lot of settings had been added to the settings page, check out the following image.

Powerful Theme Settings

Customize Logo settings.
Sidebar subscription settings, you can customize your RSS feed here(like changing to Feedburner feed).
Sidebar tabs settings.
Slider settings.
Footer settings, add your Google Analytics code here.

Hight Lights

Remarks

After activated Stylize theme, remember to go to Stylize Setting page to set theme options.
Stylize theme uses post thumbnail, remember to set thumbnail for your post.
Add Thumbnail

Less Theme: A Blank Theme for WordPress Theme Designers

Zack — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 06:18:25 +0000

I’ve think about this for a while, and now the first version is ready to go. The Less theme is a blank or a template theme for WordPress theme designers, it supports the latest WordPress, has all common functions a WordPress theme should have. It was designed in simple layout so that you can easily modify it, to make your own themes.

I create this theme, because I want to have a basic template to start with when I create a new theme. By copying this theme and change the name, I don’t need to re-create those must-have files, you know, index.php, single.php, comments.php, etc.

Less theme supports latest version of WordPress, which means it supports threaded (nested) comments, sticky-post and comment pages. A theme options page is added, you can change the header logo and set your own RSS feed(like a Feedburner feed). Trackbacks are separated from comments, it makes the post page looks better.

That’s all for now, I’ll keep updating this theme as it’s the basic of all my new themes. You can use it for your new themes as well, wish this theme helps you too.

Tutorials for Translating WordPress Themes

Zack — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 03:18:14 +0000

I was thinking about translating my themes to other languages, so that I started to search for some information. And I found it’s not that easy as I imagined. Some details need to be concerned.

I thought maybe I can write a tutorial for this, but later I decided it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel. Here I will introduce you for some great tutorials on WordPress Themes Translation, wish may help you.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Translating_WordPress
Official translating tutorial from WordPress.org codex, most of the concepts you need to know was introduced. But this is not just for translating themes, but about the whole WordPress translating. If you are new to this topic, this should be your first post.
Localizing WordPress Themes & Plugins
This is a great and detailed tutorial on how to make your themes and plugins translatable.
Translating WordPress Plugins & Themes
From the same author as the second tut, while the above one is about making your themes and plugins translatable, this tut is talking about translating themes and plugins in practice with poEdit and GNU Gettext.
Make Your WordPress Theme Ready For Translation
This is a tutorial I wrote before, as you can see in the title, it’s about making your theme translatable.
My Tutorials on Translating WordPress Theme (Chinese)
As there are not enough Chinese tutorials on translating WrodPress themes, I translated and wrote this series of translating tuts according to above 3 tuts.

If you have some information that I missed or better than these tuts, feel free to let me know.

Make Your WordPress Theme Ready for Translation

Zack — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:13:49 +0000

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 $text need to be translated, and returns the result.
_e($text) : this means $text need to be translated, and prints out the result to the webpage, equal to echo __($text).

Let’s see some examples, the first one is the easiest one, when you have no posts to display, we will show a message: ‘Not Found’, here is the code:

Not Found

Because this message will directly print to the screen, we use _e():

This is very easy, isn’t it. The second example is about the comment number, here is the code:

The translations are not directly print out, but to be used for the function. So we are using __() to do this:

There is one more situation, which is you need to translate a sentence with parameter. Here is one example:

by

You can’t only translate ‘by’, because in some languages, you need translate the whole sentence so that it will make sense. Here is how to do it:

We use PHP function printf() to insert the_auther() to __(‘by %s’), so that you can translate the whole sentence.

Now you know how to make your theme translatable, next time I will write about how to translate your theme.

Free Elegant Portfolio WordPress Themes

Zack — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 08:08:49 +0000

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 Theme

13. Fullscreen

14. Infinity

15. Linquist

[via: WPBeginner]

Top 10 Best Quality WordPress Themes of 2009

Zack — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 14:43:57 +0000

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.

iTech Theme: Free WordPress Theme for Gadgets and Tech Blogs

Zack — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:23:00 +0000

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 logo. Compatible with WordPress 2.7 and above(including 2.8.6), support threaded (nested) comments, sticky-post and comment pages.

Tabbed block is added to sidebar for displaying Recent Posts, Popular Posts and Recent Comments in a small amont of space.

Subscriptions of RSS feed, Email and Twitter is placed at the top navigation bar and can be customized in admin panel(Theme Settings):

There are total 6 setting you can customized:

RSS Feed Title
Custom RSS Feed: URL of customized RSS feed, you can put your Feedburner Feed here.
Email Subscription: For Feedburner users, you need to enable this function in Publicize settings in Feedburner. And then change ZackLive to your Feedburner id. If you have any troubles with this settings, feel free to contact me by commenting below.
Twitter Subscription: Enter your Twitter name here.
Logo URL: Enter the URL of your logo, your can upload it to your server or image hostings like Flickr, and then copy and paste the link here.
Show Description or not: Sometime you don’t want your description to be displayed, while you are using image logo, just check this, your description will not be showed.

Download iTech WordPress Theme

iTech theme in action on Gearor.com

iTech WordPress theme is released under GPL License.

Please let me know if you found any bugs.

Thanks to Dan Breslau for helping me with bugs. I’ve learned a lot from Dan.

Update: BlackNWhite Theme Update 05/November/2009

Zack — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 03:16:03 +0000

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
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)

The updated version have been uploaded to Theme Directory of wordpress.org, may be available in several days, you can now download it here:

Download: Black n White WordPress Themes

Let me know if you got some ideas about this theme.

Update: GrayLines Theme Updated 05/November/2009

Zack — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:59:51 +0000

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
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)

Because changes are very small, I am not going to upload it to Theme Directory of wordpress.org, you can download it here:

Download: Gray Line WordPress Themes

Let me know if you got some ideas about this theme.