As I mentioned in a previous post, one of the things Hack WordPress is most known for is our WordPress theme galleries.   Because of this, we have worked really hard to maintain them by both adding new themes as they are released, as well as removing older themes that are either outdated, are no longer available, or are no longer supported by their authors.  

One of the most common requests I get via our contact form is to break apart our galleries into more of a niche focused display of WordPress themes.  Because we aim to serve, this post will be the first of a three part series breaking down the premium WordPress themes available.    Next we will be going through our free galleries and looking for more helpful ways to display those as well.

This first WordPress gallery was designed to feature some of the best News and Magazine Premium WordPress themes currently available for purchase.  I included both styles because the lines are kind of blurred between the two and I didn’t want any debate over which category each one falls under.  Themes are not listed in any particular order and I have included any listed features with the theme whenever it was possible. 

Future galleries will include premium blog themes and premium business themes.   Enjoy!

Revolution Pro Media 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

Single-Use ($79.95), Multiple-Use ($199.95)

Source/Demo | Purchase

Mimbo Pro Theme

• Control panel options for Google Analytics and Feedburner, logo and header image management, homepage categories, optional color schemes, and advertisement management
• Custom templates for categories, archives, authors, sitemap, search results
• Auto-resizing for images
• Built-in contact form
• HTML controls for comments (bold, italics, blockquote, link)
• Print-friendly options on single-post pages
• Two widgetized sidebars with optional advertising
• Tabbed and separated comments/trackbacks
• Built-in gravatars and author highlighting
• Cookie crumbs on single-post pages
• Print.css stylesheet
• Optional microformats in the footer

Single-use ($88.95), Multiple-use ($199.95)

Source/Demo | Purchase

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This guest post was written by Jean-Baptiste Jung, who maintains a blog (written in French) that covers WordPress. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

Tired of your old navigation? So, what about creating a Magazine-style drop-down menu?
I propose here a drop-down menu listing your pages and sub pages, including one last item to show up your categories directly in the menu.

HTML and PHP

We will start by using WordPress core functions in order to retrieve our pages and categories. Edit the header.php of your theme, and replace your old nav code by this one:

<ul id="nav" class="clearfloat">
<li><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>/" class="on">Home</a></li>
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?>
<li class="cat-item"><a href="#">Categories</a>
<ul class="children">
<?php wp_list_categories('orderby=name&title_li=');
$this_category = get_category($cat);
if (get_category_children($this_category->cat_ID) != "") {
echo "<ul>";
wp_list_categories('orderby=id&show_count=0&title_li=
&use_desc_for_title=1&child_of='.$this_category->cat_ID);
echo "</ul>";
}
?>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>

This code will make a list of all our pages and subpages, as well as a last list element named “Categories”. When an user will hover top level pages (in case of a page menu) or top level categories, we will show up the related sub pages/categories.

CSS

Even if the code is fully functional, our script needs a good CSS styling. This CSS, which was taken from Darren Hoyt’s free Mimbo Theme, is perfect for what we want to do.

#nav{
background:#222;
font-size:1.1em;
}
#nav, #nav ul {
list-style: none;
line-height: 1;
}
#nav a, #nav a:hover {
display: block;
text-decoration: none;
border:none;
}
#nav li {
float: left;
list-style:none;
border-right:1px solid #a9a9a9;
}
#nav a, #nav a:visited {
display:block;
font-weight:bold;
color: #f5f5f4;
padding:6px 12px;
}
#nav a:hover, #nav a:active, .current_page_item a, #home .on {
background:#000;
text-decoration:none
}
#nav li ul {
position: absolute;
left: -999em;
height: auto;
width: 174px;
border-bottom: 1px solid #a9a9a9;
}
#nav li li {
width: 172px;
border-top: 1px solid #a9a9a9;
border-right: 1px solid #a9a9a9;
border-left: 1px solid #a9a9a9;
background: #777;
}
#nav li li a, #nav li li a:visited {
font-weight:normal;
font-size:0.9em;
color:#FFF;
}
#nav li li a:hover, #nav li li a:active {
background:#000;
}
#nav li:hover ul, #nav li li:hover ul, #nav li li li:hover ul, #nav li.sfhover ul, #nav li li.sfhover ul, #nav li li li.sfhover ul {
left: auto;
}
a.main:hover {
background:none;
}

Javascript

Modern browsers (Safari, Firefox, Opera, and even Internet Explorer 7) will not have any problem with the :hover pseudo-class on li elements. But as we can easily guess it, the obsolete IE6 can’t deal with that.

In order to make our script compatible with IE6, we’ll need to charge this little unobtrusive Javascript code, in the head section our our HTML document, or even better, in a separate .js file.

<![CDATA[//><!--
sfHover = function() {
var sfEls = document.getElementById("nav").getElementsByTagName("LI");
for (var i=0; i<sfEls.length; i++) {
sfEls[i].onmouSEOver=function() {
this.className+=” sfhover”;
}
sfEls[i].onmouSEOut=function() {
this.className=this.className.replace(new RegExp(” sfhover\\b”), “”);
}
}
}
if (window.attachEvent) window.attachEvent(”onload”, sfHover);
//–><!]]>

Now, your new drop-down menu is ready and will give your blog a professional look.

If you consider yourself a WordPress freelancer or at least have good enough hacking skills to do some paid work with WordPress, you may be wondering what the best ways are to find work?  

Over at the Planet Ozh blog, Ozh recently gave some great tips on how to find WordPress work.   The first tip?  Subscribe to the WP-Pro mailing list, where job offers are regularly available.   These jobs can range from theme design, coding help, or even basics like installing WordPress. 

Other places he mentions to look:

• Official WordPress jobs board - These boards look pretty busy
• WordPress Job - Aggregates job offers from several freelancers

Your other option is of course to do some work up front and then charge for it, which is how premium theme authors and premium plugin authors make their money.   This way people come to you and they know what they are getting ahead of time. 

Any other good places to find WordPress work?

Yesterday I wrote a post titled When Has Stealing Content Gone to Far?   At the time of publishing that post, I wasn’t really sure how it would be received because of the subject matter.   So far all feedback has been pretty positive, so I decided to write a quick follow up post talking about how to deal with getting your content stolen.  Thanks to Laurence for the idea.

As most people should know, when you publish content, pictures, or whatever else on the internet, there is always some risk that things will get scraped or stolen completely from your website/blog.  Despite everything falling under copyright protection, people sometimes get away with it because it is often difficult to enforce. 

So, what can do you to deal with content theft?  Here are two things readers suggested that may help:

1. Terms and Conditions - Create a clear terms and condition policy that is findable on your website.   It may not help, but it certainly can’t hurt anything.   Throw it in the footer of your blog or somewhere that it is accessible. 
2. Use Internal Links in your Posts - In addition to the SEO benefits of working on your internal linking structure, scraped and sometimes stolen content will often include these links back to your website.  

Hopefully those methods will help avoid this in the future, but what can you do when your content has already been stolen? 

1. Contact the Offender - Depending on the situation, some sites may have a contact form or some way to contact the thief.   You can also try checking the domain whois records.  This is a good way to request they delete your stolen content and stop stealing your content in the future.   Though most know they are doing so, a few might not be aware that this is illegal.
2. Take Action Against the Offender - If the first option doesn’t yield any results or there is no way to contact the owner, there are two ways to take action against the thief.   If they use Google AdSense to monetize the site (most do), you can report them to Google by clicking on the “Ads by Google” link in the lower right corner of the AdSense box and provide them feedback.  I believe stolen content is actually one of the default options you can check.   The other thing you can do is contact the hosting company and let them know they are hosting websites that are doing illegal practices.  I’ve heard of people have some success going this route, so it is a great last resort. 

So, that is what I have.   What do you do to deal with scrapers and content thiefs?

P.S.  Ironically enough, unless there is some sort of screening process that I’m not aware of, this post will be scraped at least 3 times shortly after publication.   Am I the only one that finds humor in that?

This guest post was written by Hayes Potter, a 13 year old programmer and web developer that gives webmasters tips on protecting their website from common hacking techniques. If you have webmaster or WordPress knowledge and are interested in writing a post for Hack WordPress, please contact us.

I absolutely love the i3 WordPress theme. I used it for my site for about a month, and I had no problems for what I needed. It features a “mac” look, has the Mac OS X classic background that fades into the mac’s “spotlight blue”. The sidebars are on the left and right side not attached to the middle content. The separate widgets are each in their own little bubble with a mac like toolbar as the header. The theme displays the pages in the middle content column, and this is one of the very rare themes that display the sub-pages very nicely under the page parent. Also you can move around the columns to your liking, so instead of the content being in the middle you can have it off to the right and the sidebars on the left, and vice versa.

If you are on the photos section it would display a small little bar under the pages bar displaying the sub pages, but if you are on the home page it will not display these sub pages. It has a built-in search bar in the top right hand corner, and it looks like the spotlight application in Mac OS X 10.4 and higher, except its black. The only problem I’ve ever had with it is displaying javascript in sidebar, ad- sense would fine, but a simple javascript code would make the sidebar screw up and shift to the bottom of the page. I switched themes because of that and because it is a very popular theme, and I like to switch up my theme every once in a while.

I highly recommend using this theme if you can’t find a better theme for yourself. Thanks for reading and have a wonderful day!

If your blog has over 100 subscribers on it, it is pretty likely that your blog is probably getting scraped, as they seem to be everywhere anymore.   Hack WordPress currently has 3 blogs scraping its content every time we publish a post, so we’ve become pretty familiar with them.   But that is not actually what I’m referring to when I came up with the title of this post.

What I’m talking about are people that manually reprint an entire post on their “legitimate” blogs.  One blog that has been doing this to me (and I assume others) is a blog called WordPress Collection dot com.  The link was intentionally left out.

The two most recent posts (as of publishing this post) are identical copies of two posts in our archives.  Here are our posts:

• How To: Display the Recent Posts of Specific Categories
• How To: Prevent Google from Indexing Your Images

Now, to be fair, I fully understand when dealing with code that it really doesn’t change, so I have no problem with someone taking one of our code hacks, or someone else’s posts, and publishing it on their blog.  We have done this on occasion, but we always have a fresh post where only the code is the same, and we link to the source.   Unfortunately with this site, it uses the exact same title and exact same content as our posts, word for word.   The only thing I could find changed is the permalink in the code, which was switched to the permalink of their blog.

So, when does content theft go to far?  I’ve never liked scrapers but I have learned to live with them.  They usually only reprint a excerpt of the post and link to the source.  This, however, is going to far in my opinion.   At least change the wording around the code and link to the source.  As a result, this website has been added to my blacklist of sites I don’t visit or link to, etc.

I’ve seen people mention contacting their web hosting as a good method to deal with content theft when something like this gets out of hand.   What methods have you used to deal with content theft?