People asked me how I mention my recent articles in WordPress sidebar by display post thumbnails and titles with a well-styled. Today, I would like to response their request. This way is being used in some blogs. I’m not sure if they are using the same method as mine, but at least we will get [...]

There are lots of WordPress plugins for contact forms, but wouldn’t it be nice to have more control over the markup? In this tutorial, I am going to show how to use a custom page template to create a contact form in WordPress without a plugin.

It’s been a great year for Theme Lab, the community, and WordPress in general. We’ve seen a number of innovations, such as the Builder theme by iThemes. We’ve seen some cool new WordPress-related sites like WP Questions and WP Chat.

Being the end of the year, I thought I’d take this opportunity to highlight some of the best content here at Theme Lab this past year. Without further ado…

Add a Widgetized Footer to Your WordPress Theme – A step-by-step tutorial on how to add a widgetized footer to (almost) any theme. Includes HTML, CSS, and WordPress code examples.

Gallery WordPress Theme Review – Gallery is a free Thematic child theme designed by Chris Wallace. It was no doubt one of the most stunning free theme releases of the year. In my theme review I went over the features and how to use them.

Are Free WordPress Themes Dead? – This post of mine was a response to a post at WPShout entitled Free WordPress Themes? Forget it. It’s Over. Basically, I disagreed that all free WordPress themes were dead, but rather lame, boring themes were (as they should be).

Jungleland – Free WordPress Theme – Speaking of lame and boring themes, Jungleland certainly is not one of those. Designed by Styleshout, I took the template and ported it to WordPress with custom thumbnail support and a whole lot of widgetized areas. It was featured on one of Smashing Magazine’s recent free theme roundups.

Newsworthy – Free WordPress Theme – This is a free news/magazine theme designed by DemusDesign. I took the template and ported it to WordPress, again with custom thumbnail support and even more widgetized areas than Jungleland.

Interview with the Owner of Premium Mod – Of course, how could I not mention this now “infamous” interview with the owner of Premium Mod? What started out as a relatively straightforward interview with someone who re-released modified commercial themes for free, erupted into a gigantic GPL fight in the comments.

Stop Downloading WordPress Themes from Shady Sites – In this enlightening post, I go over the issue with encrypted/malicious code in distributed WordPress themes. There’s also a video which shows how the sites with top rankings in Google for keywords like “free wordpress themes” tend to have encrypted code in their themes.

Conclusion

Although this isn’t really “content” per se, I thought the new Theme Lab design was also worth mentioning, which was introduced earlier this December.

Hope you all had a good 2009. For the upcoming year, I’d like to hear what you’d like to see on Theme Lab in 2010. More free theme releases, WordPress tips/tutorials, theme reviews, videos/screencasts?

Sound off in the comments. And of course, happy new year!

Related posts:

1. Are Free WordPress Themes Dead?
2. Theme Lab is 2 Years Old – Another Year In Review
3. WordPress Weekend Resources – June 5, 2009

How can you add the snow fall effect to your WordPress blog? I got several compliments from readers for the cool snowfall happening right now in our blog design. Here is how it works.

Remember it started in 2007, when limited time snowing was introduced for wordpress.com blogs. Now though several snowfall plugins are available, I am using the Let it Snow WordPress plugin designed by Aen Tan. You can Download Let it Snow from the WordPress Extend directory.

Now the best part is you can customize the snowing effect to suit your needs and blog design requirements varying the number of snow flakes and speed of falling and see all the sticky snow settling at the bottom of the screen.

Of course it works better on dark blog colors… and you can see it live right now on our site and add it to your blog too this chilly winter season.

Read Related Articles

1. Snow Fall on WordPress Blogs!
2. Winter Blogging : Snow Fall on Your Blog
3. Best Blogs on WordPress.com
4. Grand Effect Tech Blog Network Launches
5. WordPress.com Crosses One Million Blogs

Original article: How to Add Snow Fall Effect to WordPress Blogs
Copyright 2009. Quick Online Tips. All Rights Reserved.

This is a complement to our previous post The Ultimative Guide For the_post_thumbnail In WordPress 2.9. In WordPress Version 2.9 probably the most discussed feature is the post thumbnail. Important for this function, it is only working when it is explicitly enabled in the theme.

Today we are going to look at getting the content of a post using ajax and then display it in a popup box. The popup part is actually the easiest part, thanks to the fantastic Simple Modal plugin for jQuery written by Eric Martin.

WordPress 2.9 RC1 is released and the new post thumbnail function will not change until the final version hopefully.

With the release of 2.9 WordPress has added some new features and image crop is one of theme, this is a quick guide on how to use it.

Learn how to add a post thumbnail to your posts, no more custom fields needed.