Blog Design Studio

One of the biggest factors for WordPress fame is the amount of development happening around this ever so wonderful content management system. The flexibility it gives to designers and programmers helps them generate inspirational WordPress design. If you would like to learn how to develop WordPress themes and create wonderful designs then you should head over to Small Potato’s ultimate tutorial series on how to create wordpress themes. Apart from that there are various WordPress plugins that’ll help you in WordPress design development, lets check them out -

1. Theme Switch & Preview

Nicolas Kuttler has created various small plugins, however this one is my favorite as it allows you to tweak the template online without breaking stuff for visitors. There is a widget and a shortcode to make switching WordPress design easily. The plugin gives various options and as a developer you’ll surely love them.

2. Maintenance Mode

WordPress design development should be done in such a way or locally [how to install WordPress locally] that it shouldn’t impact the development, however there are times when the site can look weird, while enabling the new theme on live environment. This is where, Maintenance Mode plugin comes in handy. It allows you to create a custom message that’ll be displayed to your visitors while you get to access the blog as normal.

3. User Switching

This is a fantastic plugin that lets you easily switch between the multiple users. In the past there have been few of our clients who allowed various low level user accounts and didn’t want them to see various settings in the dashboard, this is where this plugin can come handy. It allows you to quickly switch between users with the click of a button. It’s up to date and supports older and new versions alike.

4. Get the image

Get the image is a plugin that grabs images for you. You can grab the image and display it around the post using custom fields, WP’s post image feature or you can even extract it from the post itself. If you are playing around with post images, then this plugin can surely help you in easing the task. You can go through its implementation and frequently asked questions over here.

5. Query Posts

This plugin is like a dream come true for those, who aren’t loved by PHP. This plugin creates a widget that lets you display the posts the way you want. This is the widget that keeps users out of the code and gives them the ability to display items on their site how they want. It supports categories, tags, custom taxonomies, author, date, time- and a lot more.

6. NextGEN Gallery

I personally feel that this plugin should become part of WordPress Core. Not only this plugin is a complete CMS in itself for images, it has its own plugins too! I would say that this should become your must install plugin for WordPress, no matter if you are using it for WordPress design development or using it personally! It’s just too good to be true! This plugin powers our WordPress Design Portfolio.

7. YD Network-wide Options

YD Network-wide options plugin lets you easily replicate blog or plugin settings across the network of blogs on WordPress 3.0. It maintains backward compatibility with WordPress MU and is constantly updated by the author. This is a fantastic feature as it allows you to easily maintain the settings and update them regularly across the whole network install in WordPress 3.x.

8. Members

Just like User Switching, members is one plugin that lets you manage the member roles in WordPress. This plugin lets you manage the scope of roles. You can give and take features from roles, create new roles etc. This ensure that members will get only those privileges that you want them to have. A must have plugin if you want to use WordPress as CMS.

9. Custom Post Type UI

Custom Post Type UI plugin gives you easy to use interface for maintaining custom post types and taxonomies. WordPress 3.0 features better support for Custom post types and taxonomies and this plugin improves the interface tremendously. It’s a fantastic plugin and must be in every WordPress designer’s arsenal.

I hope you find these nine plugins useful enough for WordPress design and development. We’ll continue featuring these kind of plugins and various other tips. Please share the posts on Twitter, Facebook or any other social network using the buttons on the left.

WordPress  is considered to be God-send CMS for designers & programmers. It gives enough flexibility for designers to not worry about what all can be designed and can be run on WordPress. We’ve compiled the list of those resources that list some of the most beautiful designs made to run on WordPress.

These design galleries and blog posts are great for the designers and if you are planning to get your WordPress designed then you should check out these resources to

WordPress Design Inspiration Galleries

1. We Love WP

We love WP is probably the best and most up to date gallery. It’s fantastic to see some good work constantly featuring in this web gallery for WordPress designs. One of the best part is that they’ve categorized the designs nicely thus making it easy to navigate industry specific designs. Guess what! They’ve featured us on their website as well :)

2. WP Candy

WP Candy has a WordPress design gallery. It hasn’t been updated since some time however; it remains one of my favorite destinations for WordPress design inspiration. WPCandy not only features the awesome wordpress designs, it also has great tips in its blog.

3. CMS Designs

CMS Designs is an inspirational showcase and gallery website with collected and submitted well designed blogs and websites powered by popular Open Source content management systems like WordPress. CMS Design features some good examples. It is updated slowly but regularly. There are some designs that are treat to watch. http://wordpress.cmsdesigns.org/

4. WordPress Showcase

What can be better than the official directory of designs that rock! Team Automattic selects some of the coolest websites/blogs running on WordPress. It’s a great inspiration resource for WordPress designs as well as programming.

5. WP Garden

It’s a nice little directory run by Sadish Bala, a WordPress fan. I was personally not impressed by WP Garden’s own design but it certainly features some really nice WordPress designs across various categories. http://wpgarden.com/

6. WP Float

WP Float has a good collection of WordPress Designs that give inspiration. They’ve even kept their tag line as WordPress inspiration. They’ve got pretty long list of various categories and have got loads of sites in each of them. Overall it’s a fantastic resource to get design inspiration.

Blog Lists that feature great WordPress Designs

7. Hongkiat – 100 nice and beautiful blog designs

Hongkiat has listed some of the best blog designs across the internet in a blog post. 100 blog designs in a row is definitely an art work, all of the designs are inspiring and mostly are on WordPress. Even if they are not, what can’t be made in WordPess?

We spent weeks going through hundreds and hundreds of blogs in the blogosphere, looking for blogs with nice and interesting design. We marked down those with great interface, graphically beautiful, unique personalities and styles. Here we bring you – 100 Nice and Beautiful Blog Design.

8. SixRevisions – 45 beautiful and creative WordPress Designs

Jacob Gube from Six Revisions has done a fantastic job by listing some of the greatest designs made that are running on WordPress. It is truly an amazing resource for WordPress creative design inspiration. Well not just that he even lists 25 outstanding WordPress designs in another post and that is also a true gem.

WordPress provides designers utmost control over a theme – resulting in unprecented flexibility in the layout and design direction he or she can take. WordPress – in the title – is inside parentheses because the designs you’ll see below are wonderful designs despite of the publishing platform they use (which just so happens to be WordPress).

9. Instant Shift – 55 excellent WordPress site design for design inspiration

Daniel Adams has listed some unique and beautiful looking WordPress site design. The collection in that list is fresh and inspirational. It’s a link that should be in stored in your bookmarks. I’m sure you’ll find it as one of the best source for inspiration at all the times.

Anders Ross has also created a similar list that features 70 brilliant WordPress design for inspiration. It’s another wonderful resource that you must check out.

In this designs showcase we trying to present you exemplary design trends, new practices, creative ideas and designer’s skills. There are so many different WordPress designs out there that it’s always hard to decide which one to select. We spent last few weeks to compile this list of highly beautiful, creative and most importantly inspirational site designs over web which might help you to get inspired with their work.

10. Blog Design Studio – 35 Best WordPress Design Websites

Our last post was a super hit where we’d listed 35 websites that are using WordPress, WordPress MU or BuddyPress for running fantastic designs and use WordPress as CMS instead of just a blog software.  We listed only those websites that had fantastic design and great programming.

Popularity of WordPress is clear in its own way, however it becomes crystal clear when we see small businesses, professionals or even big corporations are giving preference to WordPress over other CMSes. WordPress as a CMS has evolved and is used to build beautiful and professional websites.

Code is Poetry

Considering my love towards techie stuff and my love for WordPress, many have suggested to me that I should start coding myself. However, considering the fact that I haven’t gone through any formal education around computers and coding, I wonder if I can go ahead and create magical themes or plugins for WordPress. I won’t deny that I’ve given a shot to programming and for that I tried to learn Flex [I know its not related to WordPress, however there was a purpose behind it] however I couldn’t do anything with it due to lack of time and motivation.

I gave a thought on learning coding using WordPress as CMS, however all was in vein and I finally gave up on coding. However, don’t get surprised if you start seeing me posting tutorials related to coding anytime soon. During those motivational hours, when I tried to get my hands dirty with coding, I found out that IDEs [what the hell are IDEs?]are like “God send tools” for newbies. Although, I was equally surprised to find out that until recently there hasn’t been a single IDE that will be helpful in coding WordPress themes & plugins.

Note: Don’t Forget to check out the Big Question at the end of the post!

There have been only few IDEs, some of them are not known at all and all of them are commercial as well. Its definitely another surprise that WordPress, one of the most popular Open-Source CMS in the world doesn’t have any customized Open-Source IDE. We’ll surely discuss that further however, for now let us see the available IDEs for WordPress -

1. ThemeDreamer

ThemeDreamer is a Plugin for Dreamweaver that helps in coding for WordPress. The plugin is fantastic and provides WordPress functions as code hints as well. This is one feature that can surely help newbies to quickly learn the coding without worrying about remembering tons of available functions. The down side of ThemeDreamer is that its dependent on DreamWeaver [there is a positive as well, due to this it works on Mac & Windows] and which costs a fortune in itself and on top of it one needs to buy this plugin too. So if you are one of those who want to learn things without spending a single buck, then this is way too out of your budget.

Another reason, why this plugin fails to impress is that it is not up to date and probably one of the reason is that DreamWeaver CS5 supports WordPress & Drupal code hints. But then, there will be a dent of $400 if you buy CS5, although $0 if you plan to take the other route.

2. CodeLobster with WordPress plugin

CodeLobster is another IDE that provides WordPress functions although I’ve heard not so great reviews about this software. It doesn’t cost as much as Dreamweaver although when we talk about value for money, it doesn’t look like an impressive solution. To give you an idea about what users think about this IDE, i’ve taken this quote from its review by SoftPedia Editor -

The Good
As I thumb up, the autocomplete and function info options are to mention. They need work, but its a good start. Conversion options are also interesting, not something you find everywhere. I liked the interface: typical but clean and easy to use. Online help is available, for whenever you’re in need. CodeLobster is small and easy to install (unlike specialized platforms).

The Bad
I’m sorry to say this, but it still needs much work. If for web development some interesting features are implemented, for other languages (Java or SQL, for instance) support is perhaps too much said. I’ve seen better freeware, so…more is needed! Spellcheck wasn’t exactly OK either and the menu could have been better organized. “Best” for last: unexpected errors occurred for no reason. This is not acceptable for a shareware product.

The Truth
Well, if you are looking for the perfect code editor, you probably shouldn’t stop at CodeLobster. The intensions are good, but I feel it needs much more work to justify the 25 dollar fee for the license. It allows 30 days of free trial, so give it a shot.

3. Adobe DreamWeaver CS5

We’ve already talked about it and expressed our ‘not so great’ opinion because of the price associated with it. However, that was only for those who want to learn and code. Although, there is not doubt that how Dreamweaver has won the hearts of thousands of developers out there who take web development as carrier. They’ve recently integrated Auto Complete features for CMSs like WordPress, Drupal & Joomla. Its these little innovative features that keeps Adobe Dreamweaver ahead of all the other IDEs that you come across. Not only it has matured with time, it is currently best known commercial IDE for web development.

Check out DreamWeaver CS 5 in Action -

What are Open-Source Alternatives?

Now comes the big questions, is there any open-source IDE that gives Code hints for WordPress? Well, the answer is NO! There are various Open-source IDEs like NetBeans, Eclipse, Aptana etc. however, none of them provides code hints for WordPress. There aren’t any commercial plugins either for any of these.

Don’t you think that there should be an open-source IDE for popular CMSes like WordPress? Don’t you think that much more development will take place and more newbies will start to adapt these CMSes if they’ll see that switch can be easier through IDEs? Always eager to hear your thoughts so please take your time to leave a comment!