Just want to drop in and point you guys to an excellant article from Smashing Magazine.

Top Ten Web Typography Sins

This article gives ten examples of bad type usuage such as too much emphasis, fudged copyright symbols, and the terrifying all-capital-letter trend (To which, quit it. Please? Are you seriously yelling at your visitors the second they come to your site? Bad!).

I’m still super busy. Last week my brain decided that it was sick of designing and I ran into a terrible layout block. Thankfully that seems to have passed finally, but I’m dealing with a terrible sinus infection that litterally has me rocking back and forth on the floor in pain at times. That’s no exageration, I wish it were. Thankfully, that too seems to be getting better today.

I’ll open orders back up soon. Promise!

Hi everyone! I just wanted to write a quick note to say thanks for all your orders and inqueries. I’m so busy right now with DZNROKR orders, it’s fabulous! If you sent me an email and I haven’t responded yet I’m sorry. Orders are still technically closed, but I will get to every email as I complete current projects.

Thanks also for all the downloads of the free theme! I’ve been checking my referrals and I’ve seen alot of really cool modifications. Here’s a couple of sites that really stand out. Both based on WP-Fansite:

• Isla Fisher Online
• EveTorres.net

Awesome!

Hopefully soon I’ll be able to get back into WP Wednesdays, my apologies for introducing that and then abandoning it. I promise it won’t be forgotten for long.

Hey guys, I’ve finally finished the free theme that I was working on. It’s css based, with (mostly) valid XHTML/CSS, not to mention a Widget-Ready sidebar. I wanted to get this launched, so smaller tweaks will still be made in the weeks to come. I should also point out, this is not the uber-cool Fanpress theme that I’ve been talking about, this is just a plain, easily customizable theme.

→ View Theme Demo

→ Download the Theme

» 245 downloads so far.

Installation & Usage

• Open header.php and edit your navigation into the list.
• This theme is widget-ready! Drop items into your sidebar, or edit sidebar.php for manual editing.
• Upload the WP-Fansite folder to your /wp-content/themes directory.
• Activate theme in your administration panel. All done!

Read-Me

DZNROKR is credited for this theme through a link in the footer.php file linking back to the original page where this is available for download. You may not remove this link, but you can place it either in the footer or in your sidebar.


WP-Fansite by DZNROKR is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Orders are closed again for the moment. Sorry! I’ll get them back open as soon as I can! Thanks guys, you’re absolutely awesome.

Here’s a new feature at DZNROKR - Wordpress Wednesdays! There’s a ton of great stuff about Wordpress than you may not know that can make running your site so much more efficient, especially when running fansites. Every Wednesday I’m going to write a different article about quick and easy customizations that you can make to get more out of Wordpress.

This week, I’m going to talk about why tagging is a great way to get more people to your site from search engines.

What’s the difference between tags and categories?

A lot. A category should be something that can easily cover a good amount of posts. A tag may only get used once (or 1000 times), but is a more relevent word or short phrase to the content of the post.

Example:

Category: Stephenie Meyer
Tags: Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn, The Host

Granted, those tags can prove to be quite broad. This would also work:

Category: Hogwarts
Tags: prefects, quidditch, thestrals

Also, I should mention that tags do not rely on categories, meaning you could put prefects under Stephenie Meyer’s category (but why would you?).

Why use tags?

Tags are sort of like search engine sugar, an easy way to find your site from a range of keywords you might not use in your site meta. Also, why would you want to turn away amazing things that help your site like Technorati?

Tags also help the users on your site find content quicker via the use of tag clouds in your sidebar (or wherever). If they are looking for articles relating to a certain film, or album they can easily get to the archive for that tag, or even subscribe to it’s feed.

How to add tags to your theme

So if you’ve decided you want to take advantage of the tagging system in Wordpress, you may be wondering how to implement the tags into your theme.

First, let’s add the code to grab the tags to your post information. This is usually found in index.php, single.php, and archive.php. Open those, and find a spot in The Loop (they place where the title, date, and content are) and place this code:

<?php the_tags(); ?>

I usually place that along side my categories, or below the_content.

To add the tag cloud, open up sidebar.php, and add this code:

<?php wp_tag_cloud('smallest=8&largest=24&'); ?>

Smallest and largest indicate the font size depending on the number of posts linked to each tag.

Comment with any questions or comments below.

This post is to test out and make sure everything is running correctly after our upgrade to 2.6. Looks like it worked!

I had fully intended on launching this new theme along with at least one free theme download, unfortunately that didn’t progress as quick as this theme did so I finally decided to go ahead and launch this new format, with a free theme to follow soon.

As previously mentioned, I’m still working on creating the ultimate fan theme that I’m really excited about. So hopefully that will be out soon as well. Now that I’ve got this launched that’s one less project on my to-do list, and a little bit of extra time added to my day to work on Fanpress. Here’s a shot of what I have up to now:

Please let me know what you think of it so far, and any features you would like to request for this upcoming theme.

Hey guys, I’ve been working on creating a theme that will help you build the best Wordpress fansite you can. I don’t have the feature list completely worked out, and I’m not sure that everything will go the way I want, but here are some the features I’m hoping to include:

• Several color schemes (pink, blue, green, and yellow - for now)
• Advanced filmography/discography management (you’ll add films/albums via the news administration)
• Featured Articles: In two different formats- A list of links to recently featured articles, or one featured article with Title and Excerpt of the article.
• Several different page templates and page layouts, including: Affiliates page (managed internally by Wordpress, or optionally Affiliationally), Archives page, Film/discography page, and more
• Integrated plugins: WP-PageNavi (cool numbered page navigation), AuthorHighlight (highlights the post authors comments on a post), Post Avatar (assign images to posts)

This is all still in development, but I’m hoping to be able to release it within a month or so. My first priority is of course custom orders, so I can’t determine an exact date quite yet.

Stay tuned!

Hurry and get your orders in! I’m only taking FIVE new orders right now, to prevent getting so backed up.

Also, to prevent some confusion: Wordpress themes take longer to create than a plain old layout for a website. It can take several weeks for me to complete a full Wordpress theme. Please keep this in mind when you order your theme. Thanks!

Interested in running Wordpress on your fansite, but not sure how to get your posts, categories, and comments from Cutenews? The Other-Ext-WP plugins handles that for you.

Visit Plugin Site

About the Plugin

This useful Wordpress (v.2.3+ & PHP 4+) plugin allows Cutenews users to transfer their Cutenews installation into Wordpress, including categories, posts, and comments. It uses custom functions to read the information from Cutenews and format into Wordpress compatible data. Then, the plugin uses the Wordpress API functions to enter the data into the database. It places the posts into their correct categories and supports the transfer of comments, which will retain their proper information as well. This script is easy-to-use and is available under the GNU General Public License (like Wordpress).

Installation

Upload the plugin file (extwp.php) into your Wordpress directory under /wp-content/plugins/. Open your adminstration panel and go to Plugins and activate it by clicking Activate next to the description of Other-Ext-WP. Now you should see a link to Other-Ext-WP under your plugins sub-menu (next to Plugin-Editor for example). Go to Other-Ext-WP. Now just read the instructions. Configure the options (see README). Click transfer and the process will begin. When it is complete, delete the plugin from the server.