Wordpress
8 Alternatives To WordPress As A Blogging Platform
No doubt in that, that WordPress is the most famous and popular platform for blogging that has been used by millions of bloggers all over the world. But sometime it just does not meet with some of your specific needs and you find yourself helpless as there is no other good option to go for. Therefore, we present 8 best alternatives to WordPress as a blogging platform. These are the 8 solutions that will help you get your own advanced blogging solution.
The list below is based on the 8 CMS’s (Content Management Systems) that offers loads of options as well as features however it’s essential that you weigh pro’s and con’s before making any decision. Check this out and get to pick one!
Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything. Post text, photos, quotes, links, music, and videos, from your browser, phone, desktop, email, or wherever you happen to be. You can customize everything, from colors, to your theme’s HTML.
Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.
Joomla is one of the world’ s most popular open source CMS (content management system). With millions of websites running on Joomla, the software is used by individuals, small & medium-sized businesses, and large organizations worldwide to easily create & build a variety of websites & web-enabled applications.
Blogger is a blog-publishing service that allows private or multi-user blogs with time-stamped entries. It was created by Pyra Labs, which was bought by Google in 2003. Generally, the blogs are hosted by Google at a subdomain of blogspot.com.
Serendipity is a PHP-powered weblog application which gives the user an easy way to maintain an online diary, weblog or even a complete homepage. While the default package is designed for the casual blogger, Serendipity offers a flexible, expandable and easy-to-use framework with the power for professional applications.
A powerful free blog/CMS engine you can install on your own website. b2evolution is an advanced weblog tool, i-e software allowing you to run your own blogs, newsfeeds or even photo streams.
CushyCMS is a fast, simple and free content management system that aims to make life easier for web designers by simplifying content management.
Croogo is a free and open source content management system, built on top of CakePHP framework.
Best Of 2011: A Beautiful Collection Of 50 Free WordPress Themes
In this article, we have composed a beautiful collection of some of the best WordPress themes that we have seen in 2011. As a matter of fact, finding some wonderful and free to employ WordPress theme is like a cherry on the cake for the reason that you can spruce up your blog or website with them and make you blog or website stand out from the rest.
It is approximately the end of this year and for that reason we made up our mind to bring together the most excellent and free WordPress theme that have been released in 2011.
We hope that you like this collection and find a suitable theme for your blog. Feel free to share your opinion with us via comment section below. Enjoy!
Swiss Design WordPress Themes (4 Themes)
15 Plugins Every WordPress User Should Know About
The reason why WordPress is preferred by majority of bloggers is due to the number of plugins available for it. If you browse WordPress plugins database, you will notice that the number of plugins available for WordPress are endless. There are plugins which help you improve SEO of your blogs, integrate social networks, submit your blogs to different search engines, manage sitemaps, display popular posts and much more. However, using too many plugins may have a negative effect on your host so it is really important that you choose the plugins which you really need.
For that purpose, we have gathered a list of some useful WordPress plugins which a blogger or website owner can use. You are welcome if you want to share more useful wordpress plugins that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com, just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter and follow us on Digg as well to get updated.
Google XML-Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps generate special XML sitemap which will help search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. Sitemaps make it easy for crawlers to check the structure of your site and retrieve relevant data efficiently. It notifies all the search engine every time a new post is made on the blog.
Wp Super Cache
This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your web server will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts. It helps to reduce the load on the website as well this way so that your website does not face any down time.
Digg Digg
Digg Digg is an excellent wordpress plugin which helps users integrate different social networking buttons on your wordpress blog. It supports almost all the popular social networking websites including Digg, LinkedIn, Google +1, Reddit, dDone, Twitter, TweetMeme, Topsy, Yahoo Buzz, facebook share, facebook like, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Sphinn, Google Buzz, Designbump, WebBlend, BlogEngage and Serpd.
WP-DbManager
Wp- DBManager allows users to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database, drop/empty tables and run selected queries. With DBManager, users can easily schedule backup and optimizing/repairing of WordPress blog.
Insights
I started using Insights few months back and I must say its an excellent plugin which every blogger should try. With Insights, users can easily find and interlink posts on their blogs, insert YouTube videos, insert Flickr images and much more.
SEO Smart Links
With SEO Smart Links, users can automatically link keywords and phrases in your posts and comments with corresponding posts, pages, categories and tags on your blog.
Akismet
Akismet is one of the most important plugin for every wordpress users. What this plugin does is that it checks the comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen.
Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 is another useful plugin which helps users create contact forms for their wordpress blogs. With Contact Form 7, users can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.
FD Feedburner Plugin
With FD Feedburner plugin, webmasters can redirect the main feed and optionally the comments feed seamlessly and transparently to Feedburner.com. It can easily setup new hidden feeds, modify .htaccess files, or asking users to migrate to a new feed, without modifying the template of your website.
Yoast WordPress SEO
Just like All in on SEO, yoast is another good WordPress SEO plugin that helps users optimize their page titles, meta descriptions and keywords to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.
Yet Another Related Post Plugin
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) for WordPress gives you a list of posts and/or pages related to the current entry, introducing the reader to other relevant content on your site.
Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress
Google Analytics plugin helps u track your blog easily and with lots of metadata: views per author & category, automatic tracking of outbound clicks and pageviews.
WP Page Navi
Page Navi adds better pave navigation interface to your wordpress blog and replaces older and newer posts with page numbers.
LinkWithin
LinkWithin is an excellent related post widget which adds related posts with thumbnails to your blog posts.
SEO Friendly Images
EO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set.
If we missed any plugin, please share with us using the comments section below.
50 Minimalist And Stylish Free WordPress Themes
WordPress is the preferred content management system of many bloggers and internet marketers owing to many reasons. Out of them its easily available theme is the most important reason that can completely transform the look as well as the functionality of the website.
In order to let the content communicate with the visitors, bloggers tend to choose neat and clean minimalist WordPress theme. Such minimalist themes are best suited for those projects that demand simplicity. Furthermore, you can easily customize a minimalist WordPress theme based on your needs or requirements.
You’re in luck if you’ve been looking for some nice minimal WordPress themes. Here are 50 classy and free minimalist WordPress themes that you would find useful.
Four Promising (Yet Free) Online WordPress Theme Generators
There are many wordpress tools are out there, but getting by free and good ones is not that easy. That is why I am sharing Four Promising (Yet Free) Online WordPress Theme Generators. Read each entry in the list and see which tool suits your needs best.
You are welcome if you want to share more online wordpress theme generators that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com, just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter and follow us on Digg as well to get updated.
You can now drag, drop, a few clicks and you can have the WordPress theme you wanted with Lubith. It has very intuitive interface that helps you move and resize the theme elements just by dragging the two knobs.
Theme-generator.net is an online layout generator that allows you to design and dynamically generate a personalized wordpress theme for your blog.
templatr is a Template Generator, with which you can create an individual design for your Blog online. You need no knowledge of HTML and no special Software. All you need is a Browser, maybe a little creativity and a small idea of how the finished design should look. You can download the finished Template with a simple click.
This online generator creates your own custom unique WordPress Theme. Without any need for HTML, JS, PHP, or CSS knowledge. You can change the colors, settings, layout, preview live, click “save” and download your unique WordPress theme zip-file. Then just extract, upload, set, and you are done with everything.
Congratulations To The Winners Of ThemeFuse’s Premium WordPress Theme
Thanks to all of the participants of contest in which ThemeFuse’s Premium WordPress Themes were givingaway. We ran the MySql random query and selected these 10 comments to give them ThemeFuse’s Premium WordPress Theme.
- Bjorn Seigers
- Cean
- Conors
- Christopher
- Dorothy
- Josh
- Roy S.
- Juli
- Denise
- Karthick
ThemeFuse was born from the passion for the things done right in every way. Starting from the original design concepts filled with details in every pixels, continuing with the clean code of the wordpress themes, and finishing with the best AfterCare Support there is.
Their aim is to shake up the premium wp industry, and show that wp themes companies don’t have to just keep making the same themes over and over again to be successful. According to their believes that the users want to try new themes, original themes, so it’s time to step up and bring some originality into the mix.
Congratulations to all the winners from SmashingApps.Com. All of the winners will be contacted soon. If you are not winner at this time so please be patient and keep visiting here or subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well because we are coming up with another new great contest very soon.
Thanks to ThemeFuse for sponsoring this wonderful contest at Smashing Apps.
If you want to conduct any contest at Smashing Apps just contact us and send us all the details.
Win A Free Copy Of ThemeFuse Premium WordPress Theme For Your Blog
ThemeFuse is running a contest, where 10 winners winners will get the WordPress theme (worth $49 each) of their choice. Well, you guys know what they are offering? Lets say it once again for n00bs.
ThemeFuse was born from the passion for the things done right in every way. Starting from the original design concepts filled with details in every pixels, continuing with the clean code of the wordpress themes, and finishing with the best AfterCare Support there is.
Their aim is to shake up the premium wp industry, and show that wp themes companies don’t have to just keep making the same themes over and over again to be successful. According to their believes that the users want to try new themes, original themes, so it’s time to step up and bring some originality into the mix.
This contest will run from April 5, 2011 to April 15, 2011 and we will select the winners randomly by running MySQL query. Result can be announced any day before April 20, 2011 so keep visiting here or subscribe to our rss feed to get the latest updates. To participate in the contest to win free WordPress theme, All you have to do is :
Just tweet this:
Win a free copy of @ThemeFuse #WordPress Theme from @SmashingApps (RT to Enter)
1. Once you have tweeted, come back to this post and comment with a link to your tweet and put your valid email ID in the email box.
2. Make sure that you are following @SmashingApps and @ThemeFuse on twitter and subscribe our rss feed to track this contest and for future updates. If you don’t mind please hit the like button on ThemeFuse facebook page (they’ll notify the winners there)
3. And that’s it!
So, what are you waiting for now? Let’s participate in the contest and good luck!
13 Excellent Plugins To Enhance The Power Of WordPress Admin Section
There are hundreds of wordpress plugins available on the internet. Some of them are very useful and some of them are only for the sake of existence. But it’s totally up to you that how you can make your wordpress blog more strong and powerful using different plugins to give your blog readers an amazing and wonderful experience. In this post, We are listing down wordpress plugins for admin area that are worth checking out.
You are welcome if you want to share more wordpress plugins for admin area that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.
Developer Tools
The Developer Tools plugin creates an admin user interface for many of the code-enabled features in WordPress and commonly used JavaScript libraries. It also generate template code for theme development.
Role Scoper
Role Scoper is a comprehensive access control solution, giving you CMS-like control of reading and editing permissions. With this plugin, You can assign restrictions and roles to specific pages, posts or categories.
Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu
The lazy and the productive will love it : all admin links available in a neat horizontal CSS driven drop down menu. No need to click on “Manage” then “Pages” to edit pages. And plenty more space on your screen.
WP Login reCAPTCHA
This plugin simply adds reCAPTCHA to your login form. By adding reCAPTCHA to your login form, you can prevent bot / script from trying to login to your WordPress website.
WPMU Prefill Post
You can add the ability to create post template. You can manage templates and use them to prefill a post. Also prefill the post title.
Scissors Continued
This plugin adds cropping, resizing, and rotating functionality to WordPress’ image upload and management dialogs. Scissors also allows automatic resizing of images when they are uploaded and supports automatic and manual watermarking of images. Additionally, images that are resized in the post editor are automatically resampled to the requested size using bilinear filtering when a post is saved, which improves the perceived image quality while reducing the amount of data transferred at the same time.
Auto Post Thumbnail
Auto post thumbnail is a plugin to generate post thumbnail from first image in post or any custom post type. If the first image doesn’t work it will automatically search for the next one and so on until the post thumbnail is inserted.
Global Hide/Remove Admin Bar Plugin
This plugin adds an option to the Settings Menu to globally turn off the Admin Bar and/or turn off the user option in the profile to show admin bar.
Custom Login
You can use this plugin to customize your login screen. It will really help you to design personalized login screen for your every clients.
Hellos Bar
This plugin adds a javascript file that will position a fixed bar at the top of your browser screen to show announcements (controlled by a custom post type [CPT]) on each page load. Built with simple HTML and javascript.
Faster Image Insert
This plugin moves built-in Media Manager down in a meta-box, right next to main editing panel, so you have full control of the manager: opens it, makes it collapse or hidden from the interface completely. Best of all, is now you can insert image(s) much faster, and precisely where you want them to be.
WP Hotlink Protection
The WordPress Automatic Image Hotlink Protection plugin is a single step script designed to stop others from stealing your images. Simply add an .htaccess file to your root folder thereby stopping external web servers from linking directly to your files.
Cimy Header Image Rotator
With this plugin, you can displays an image that automatically rotates depending on setting. You can setup from one second up to one day and more. Intermediate settings are also possible.
WordPress Themes Giveaway From TemplateMonster
TemplateMonster is running a contest, where 8 winners will get the WordPress theme of his choice. Well, you guys know what they are offering? Lets say it once again for n00bs.
We are thrilled to be partnering with TemplateMonster project for the initiative and support of their WordPress promo campaign. And now we announce the beginning of a new interesting WordPress Lottery that will target the variety of professional WordPress themes available at TemplateMonster and give our readers one in a lifetime chance to get their favorite WordPress templates for free!
As a powerful web platform, WordPress is now managing various facets of web design, including blog sphere, portfolios, design galleries, online business activities and even eShops. So, if you need a quick makeover of your website – this is a real opportunity to bring your project a valuable solution that drives efficient results and expands functionality.
This contest will run from February 7, 2011 to February 12, 2011 and we will select the winners randomly by running MySQL query. Result can be announced any day before February 14, 2011 so keep visiting here or subscribe to our rss feed to get the latest updates. To participate in the contest and win WordPress theme from TemplateMonster, All you have to do is :
1. All you have to do is choose – out of all WordPress Templates available at TemplateMonster – one theme that you like most and then drop us its ID here in the comments section giving the reasons for your preference with your name.
2. Use valid email ID in the email box.
3. Make sure that you are following @SmashingApps on twitter and subscribe our rss feed to track this contest and for future updates.
4. And that’s it!
So what are you waiting for now? Let’s participate in the contest and good luck!
13 Most Robust WordPress Plugins To Speed Up Your Blog’s Loading Time
There are hundreds of wordpress plugins available on the internet. Some of them are very useful and some of them are only for the sake of existence. But it’s totally up to you that how you can make your wordpress blog more strong and powerful using different plugins to give your blog readers an amazing and wonderful experience. In this post, We are listing down wordpress plugins that are really essential for every blog.
You are welcome if you want to share more blog loading time speed up wordpress plugins that our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter as well.
W3 Total Cache
W3 Total Cache improves the user experience of your blog by improving your server performance, caching every aspect of your site, reducing the download time of your theme and providing transparent content delivery network (CDN) integration. With this plugin, you can save up to 80% Bandwidth via Minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and RSS feeds. We personally use W3 Total Cache and recommends this plugin to our all the visitors.
WP Super Cache
WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. It generates html files that are served directly by Apache without processing comparatively heavy PHP scripts. By using this plugin you will speed up your WordPress blog significantly.
HeadJS Loader
This plugin reformats your page to utilize Head JS in your WordPress site. It strips out all your old javascript declarations and puts them into head.js calls so that they are loaded in parallel.
Plugin Organizer
This plugin allows you to change the order that your plugins are loaded. It also adds grouping to the plugin admin age.
JS & CSS Script Optimizer
This plugin will help you make your website more quick. It can grouping and packing Java Scripts and CSS. Also it makes fewer HTTP requests.
WP Minify
This plugin integrates the Minify engine into your WordPress blog. Once enabled, this plugin will combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time.
Scripts Gzip
A WordPress plugin to merge and compress the CSS and JS links on the page. It does not cache, minify, have a “PRO” support forum that costs money, keep any logs or have any fancy graphics. It only does one thing, merge+compress,
and it does it relatively well.
html-compress
This plugin clears html of web page. It reduces space, tab, etc. on all source content, including in line css and javascript.
Performance Optimization: Order Styles and Javascript
What if you are using plugins and that are adding calls to JavaScript and CSS files dynamically. This is case of WordPress blog, where we use many plugins and those plugins add various Styles and Script files dynamically from wp_head() call. This plugin helps you assign the order to stylesheet and JavaScript (external and inline) for performance optimization.
External Files Optimizer
It automatically combines and compress css/js files generate with wp_head() and wp_footer().
It enables gzip-compression if the visitor’s browser can handle it. This will speed up your WordPress website drastically and reduces bandwidth usage as well. Uses the PHP ob_gzhandler() callback.
WP Parallel Loading System
The WP Parallel Loading System is a wordPress plugin that will enhance the loading efficiency of your Blog.
CloudFlare
The CloudFlare WordPress Plugin ensures your WordPress blog is running optimally on the CloudFlare platform.
