Do you ever have trouble finding a theme that you like for your website? People tend to like all sorts of different features and looks with their themes, which is what makes WordPress so incredible. There are theme authors out there looking to accommodate your requests.

Moses of WPThemesPlugin.com is looking for your WordPress theme input. According to Moses:

So, what do you actually look for in a theme? is it purely based on the design & colors, or is it based on functionality or are you looking for a balance of both?

I need your help, in my mind i envision on creating my next theme to look similar to this site but than again i had a friend of mind that said a design like that would look “too busy” and too many parts/columns.

So please help me out, give me some hint or even point me to some URL of sites that attracts you, let me know your prefrences such as:

- 2,3 or 4 columns?

- Dark or Light colors?

- Header or no Header?

- CMS options or just normal blog layout?

- Ads ready?

- Big or small footer?

Now is your chance to provide some input and help see that theme you always wanted to get created.

Roughly four months ago I talked a bit about how to set up your blog so only the admin can see an edit button on blog posts. For whatever reason, I’ve always set this up on each of my websites and really get a lot of use out of it. Much along those same lines, Michael of WPCandy has written a post explaining how to display content so only the admin can view it. This goes well beyond the edit button and allows you to setup just about anything to display for the admin.

In hist post, Michael provides some code that looks at the user id to determine if the user has admin privileges and then displays whatever you tell it to for that user. Here is the code:

<?php global $user_ID; if( $user_ID ) : ?>
<?php if( current_user_can('level_10') ) : ?>
<a href=”http://yourdomainurl.com/stats/“>Stats</a>
<?php else : ?>
<?php endif; ?>
<?php endif; ?>

If you run a multi-author blog and would like to make this stuff available to editors, authors, contributors, and more, you can easily adjust the user level to determine who sees your display.

Great find Michael!

The idea of premium WordPress themes has been around for quite awhile now, in large part thanks to the man who I consider to be the godfather of premium WordPress themes, Brian Gardner. If the name doesn’t sound familiar, you may know of him as the author of the wildly popular Revolution themes.

Even though these themes have been selling quite well, today I noticed that Brian has taken his Revolution brand to another level with the release of his latest installment of his popular Revolution themes series, this one called Revolution Pro Media. Here is a sample of how the Revolution Pro Media theme looks:

Revolution Pro Media Homepage

Revolution Pro Media Single Page

Revolution Pro Media Post Page

If the looks aren’t enough, you will also get the following with the purchase of this theme:

• Featured homepage tabber area
• Featured photos from Flickr
• Featured YouTube video
• Other featured areas using custom fields
• Google AdSense integration in between posts and comments
• Section, Archive, Blog page templates

In addition to offering all of this at the low price of $79.95, one of my favorite things about Brian is that he offers lifetime access to all upgrades made to any themes you have previously purchased.   Many clients have already taken advantage of this offer, as he recently released a 2.0 version to all of his original Revolution themes.
If you are a fan of Brian’s other Revolution themes (News, Magazine, Tech, Sports, and Blog), for a limited time Brian is also offering the Revolution All-Inclusive theme package for $299.95. He is only making this offer available until midnight (CST) on Thursday, February 14th, so you’ll want to act fast to take advantage of this promotional deal.

In doing some research around the internet, I disappointed to see that no one has yet created a “Parked” WordPress theme. With the increase in the popularity of domain names and parking domains, a few companies have been offering “domain name parking” services for awhile now. Popular examples of this would be Parked.com and Sedo. Unfortunately, when using one of these services, you have limited control over what is displayed, how it is displayed, and limited control over important SEO factors such as keywords/descriptions, etc (which are used to determine which advertisements are displayed).   I’ve always felt that using Google AdSense would be a better option as well.

Because WordPress is free, I’ve noticed that it has become fairly popular for domainers/bloggers to setup a WordPress site on the domain and just place PPC advertisements all over it. This gives them full control over the meta tags and display of the site, as well as helping with search engines because they will sometimes penalized traditional parked pages.

Something I would like to see is a theme designer put together a theme that is designed specifically for parking a domain, instead of for hosting a blog. You could then create some advertisement blocks for users to plug PPC code into and also include room for a picture or two.   If setup like this it would be easily interchangeable and used across a lot of domains.  Whoever takes the time to do this would have this niche all to themselves and would probably even be able to charge for it as long as it comes with a multiple-use license.

Anyone have an interest in making something like this?

For anyone who still isn’t sure what I’m talking about, here is an example of a parked page:

As you can see from the picture above, this page includes a title and a place to contact the owner, a picture on the right, and a number of advertisements where the owner of the domain gets paid when they are clicked.

While there continues to be a number of great premium WordPress themes released every month, I’ve also noticed some great existing themes that established blogs have been using are now making them available for purchase also.  One of these blogs is the Blogging Experiment blog, who recently made their WordPress theme that they use available for purchase.

Currently you can get the theme in one of two color combinations:

Blue/Orange Version

Blue/Green Version

This theme includes the a menu at the top to feature some of your best work and room for two 125×125 buttons.

The best part about this theme is that there aren’t different tiers like most other premium themes.   You pay $75.00 for whichever version you want and it looks like you can use it as many times as you want.

Check out the Blogging Experiment Theme.

On one of my main blogs I maintain several reference posts which are updated regularly in the hopes that they remain a valid resource for my readers. So far these posts have proven to be pretty beneficial to search engine traffic and well received by readers that reference them regularly.

If you run a blog where posts are regularly updated, you may want to consider updating your post meta data to also reflect the last modified date when applicable, rather than showing just the original posting date.

In order to do this, Ardamis has posted a quick code hack to get your single pages to reflect the last modified date. He uses the default Kubrick theme, but it easily apply to just about any theme.

As always, you’ll want to make a backup of your single.php file (or any files you will be changing) before proceeding.

Look for the code that displays the post date. It should look something like the following:

Posted on: <?php the_time('l, F jS, Y') ?>

Now replace it with the following code (slightly modified from Ardamis’ post):

Posted on <?php the_time('F jS, Y') ?>
<?php $u_time = get_the_time('U');
$u_modified_time = get_the_modified_time('U');
if ($u_modified_time != $u_time) {
echo "and last modified on ";
the_modified_time('F jS, Y');
echo ". "; } ?>

Now your posts should show the last modified date immediately after the original posting date, rather than just showing the original post date! I use this on most of my blogs and I am very pleased with it.