Now it’s the end of the year, we are all busy buying gifts, sending cards and congratulating each other… I was supposed to schedule this post to be posted on Xmas eve but for some reason, with the new (upgraded and endlessly screwed) version of WP things don’t work the way they are supposed to work, so..

Dear Readers, we want to wish you Happy Holidays, (belated) Merry Christmas  and of course, best of luck in the upcoming 2009! Hope you will all have fun over the holidays, enjoy yourself and come back to read wordpressmania.org, we have plenty of new interesting content to share soon! By the way, many thanks to icondrawer.com for the awesome icons that helped us to decorate this blog for this Xmas!

If you haven’t already, we strongly suggest to spread the joy and avail of our FREE ecards services -

Best Free Cards & 28 Free Cards

A while ago I made a post with outstanding free wordpress themes which were all designed in Photoshop and now, since a lot of people don’t like the idea of “free” wordpress themes for different reasons, here is a top 10 of premium themes which you can purchase from $12 to $30 and won’t need to keep a trail of spammy links, or make do with poor coding that will destroy your blog..

1. “Our Community” Wordpress Theme

2. “Showcase Wordpress” Theme

3. “Blazen” Wordpress Theme (new)

4. “Wood World” Wordpress Theme

5. “Eat Fish Cat” Wordpress Theme

6. “Code Breaker” Wordpress theme (only $12)

7. “Aurora Borealis” Wordpress Theme

8. “Quick Tab” Wordpress Theme

9. “The Other Blog” Wordpress theme

10. “BMag” Wordpress theme ($12 Only)

So, this was my top 10 picks from the rapidly growing new network of wordpress themes - Theme Forest. Hope you will find something for your liking in this list.

Even if you have a blog, still you need people to visit it right. It is more challenging than you think to make thousands flock everyday to read your blog especially with the millions of blogs online. To make things even harder, blogs don’t have simple URLs or web addresses like websites. The blog URL usually is the name of the website hosting your blog then the name of your blog which turns up to be a very long URL.

Nevertheless, if there is a well there is a way! There are many effective techniques to use to promote your blog successfully. Some of these techniques are so simple that you will say to yourself why I didn’t think of that. Here proven free ways of promoting your blog:-

1 - Connecting with other blogs: - Blogs are a big community now. Even Google the biggest search engine has made a whole category by itself for searching for information in blogs. What I’m trying to say is you should connect with other blogs in the community to promote yours. You can visit other highly popular blogs and participate in discussions and make comments. Remember, every time you participate, leave your marks behind! Meaning a link to your own blog! Think of it as a piggy back approach. Also, other blog owners will be glad to put a link to your blog if you do the same.

2 - Your email signature: - Let me ask you this, how many emails you send a day? Or a better question will be how many in a week? I can safely say, at least 10 emails a week. There is this small section at the bottom of every email that you send and called the signature. Of course you know it! Your name, address, phone and other contacts are there right. Add your blog address too!

Blogging has provided an efficient and magnificent tool to publicize info about any company on the net. We have got so many blogging platforms and WordPress is one of them. WordPress has released its new version 2.6. WordPress 2.6 has got a no. of features for content creation and improvements. We will just take a look at the major and minor features of the newer version.

Here are the major important features of WordPress’s newer version:

Edit-Tracking: The new edit-tracking system will be quite handy for multi-author blogs. It allows you to see the changes made to a post and enable you to see who made what changes to a post and when. It also provides the option to revert back to the older version of a post, in case you make a mistake.

Press This: “Press This” is like a bookmark you can add to your toolbar. It offers a fast and smart popup to do postings to your WordPress blog. Suppose you are viewing a Youtube video and finds it relevant for your blog and want to post it on your blog, then what you have to do is to just click “Press this” button. It will automatically extract the embedded code and post it on your blog. In the same way you can post to your blog from anywhere on the net.

Google Gears Support: The most exciting feature of WordPress version 2.6 is support for Google Gears. Gears is an open source browser extension project provided by Google. You can cache the most important files of the WordPress management console to your local hard drive, by clicking the “Turbo” button in the upper right-hand corner of the WordPress administrative interface. It will allow the authors to keep blogging even if the network connectivity is temporarily lost.

WordPress is an open-source blog engine released under the GNU general public license. It allows users to easily create dynamic blogs with great content and many outstanding features. It is an ideal tool for developing blogs and though it is chiefly used for blogging, it can also be used as a complete CMS with very little effort. Its versatility and ease of use has attracted a large, enthusiastic, and helpful community of users.

This book walks through clear, step-by-step instructions to build a custom theme for the WordPress open-source blog engine. The author provides design tips and suggestions and covers setting up the WordPress sandbox, and reviews the best practices from setting up the theme’s template structure, through coding markup, testing, and debugging, to taking it live. The last three chapters cover additional tips, tricks, and various cookbook recipes for adding popular site enhancements to WordPress theme designs using 3rd-party plugins as well as creating API hooks to add custom plugins.

Expert WordPress is a new blogging system that allows bloggers to save time and get more done after they create a blog. Not only that, but the system is actually a full on blogging suite with your own WordPress theme, plugins, video tutorials and instructions, all packed into one. Expert WordPress was created for the WordPress community to counteract the limitations and problems they usually face when they want to create a blog.

The Expert WordPress system takes you by the hand and explains in detail what you need to do and when. Setting up a blog couldn’t be easier and more straightforward than this. Since WordPress is the number one choice blogging software on the market, most bloggers will eventually migrate to it, even if they first create a blog with one of the dozen of the free blogging tools available on the market.

You can choose Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal and even the free option of http://WordPress.com for your blog, but none of them will give you the benefits and choices of the WordPress software that runs on a self hosted domain.

Self hosted WordPress blogs are by far the best blogs for search engine optimization, great placement and the ability to monetize them in many possible ways. Smart Internet marketers have recognized this fact a long time ago and wouldn’t ever go back to whatever they used prior to hosting their own WordPress blog.

Some features that really make the WordPress software stand apart from the others is the versatility of it. There are just so many options in which we can build WordPress blogs and with a bit of coding knowledge in HTML and PHP, anybody can actually design their own WordPress theme.

There are plugins, widgets and many other pieces of coding than can be integrated into WordPress. Best of all, nothing is set in stone. If you ever wanted to change the look of your WordPress blog you can do so easy with a few changes in the stylesheet.

To make the process of starting out to create a blog, by moving to your own self hosted WordPress blog a lot easier, Expert WordPress has been designed for you.

It is the system if you are sick of trying to lean code or spend hours finding the right plugins. The creators of the software have actually built in the required plugins to help you with your search engine rankings. All you need to do is activate them with a few clicks. This will not only save you a lot of time, but you won’t have to worry whether the plugins you use are the right ones.

Another benefit of using Expert WordPress opposed to doing it yourself is the fact that is comes with its own support forum. Should you ever get stuck you won’t need to purchase expensive eBooks or even search for answers online. You’ll have your very own help support community right at hand.

It’s up to you whether you want to create a blog the traditional way, or use Expert WordPress and fast track your blogging experience to something more pleasant. Either way, WordPress is the software to choose for sure.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

WordPress has become a hugely popular open source blogging and publishing platform. The abundance of free themes and plugins as well as its ease-of-use have contributed to the attraction and popularity for using WordPress. While there are some great free themes for WordPress, many only offer basic functionality and simplistic designs.

Since late 2007 however an increasing number of WordPress theme developers have been offering premium WordPress themes – themes which are offered for a fixed price. These premium WordPress themes are usually sold for between $50 to $250. Originally only a small number of talented and well-known WordPress theme designers created paid premium WordPress themes which were well designed, highly functional, top-quality themes that transformed a WordPress installation from a simple blog into a powerful content management system. However as the premium WordPress theme business concept spread, more and more WordPress theme designers have hopped on the bandwagon trying to cash on the new trend filling up their portfolio with premium (paid) wordpress themes.

However with greater variety and numbers of paid premium WordPress themes also comes varying levels of quality. So what specifically makes a premium WordPress theme premium? Some characteristics that should set a premium wordpress theme apart from a free theme are listed below:

Quality and Unique Design
Premium WordPress themes should be just that - Premium. They should look better and be of a much higher quality and unique design than compared to those available for free.

Features
While all themes are different, in general premium WordPress themes should have more “Features” than their free counterparts. What that means depends on the theme in question. However some features may include: “Featured Posts” areas, Multiple layout options for the home page, drop down menus, multiple customs templates for pages, custom field options, print style sheets etc.

Customization Options and Fexibility
People want options, so Premium WordPress themes should be customisable. Buying a premium theme will set you apart from the crowd significantly, but since other people will still be using the same theme, premium themes should be able to be easily customized further, whether it be for the layout, colours, images, or all of the above.

Live Preview or Demo
There should be a live demo or preview of the theme so you can test it and check it out before buying. If there is no live preview or demo that should be a warning sign. You should ask why don’t they want you to test the theme first? All reputable premium theme sellers will have a live demo full of content for you to test. Explore the live demo thoroughly, testing all pages to see that the theme works properly and there are no errors or mistakes.

Full Support
If you’re buying a premium WordPress theme it should also come with a certain degree of support from the designer. The level of support can vary however and will range from personalised individual support from the designer, to the provision of forums or blog comment sections for asking questions and obtaining support from the designer and other people who have purchased the theme.

Supporting Documentation
Premium WordPress themes should come with an instruction manual or document. This should explain how to upload and install the theme and how to manage any of the options that are built into the theme.

Free Updates
Wordpress is continually being updated and improved and a premium WordPress theme developer should be offering you free updates of the theme when required.

Well Coded and Error Free
There should be no coding errors, misspellings, X images, etc in a premium WordPress theme. The theme has cross browser compatible and been tested to work properly on all the major browsers, plus the theme should have clean and valid code and adhere to strict XHTML and CSS standards.

A comprehensive showcase of premium WordPress themes can be found at Premium WordPress

Enliven your blog with various calendar plugins! Probably all of you know Google calendar. But do you also know that you there is a Google calendar plugin for Wordpress? If not, check it out!
Another original calendar is WordPress TemplateTag plugin that displays yearly calendars containing 12 months weighed by their post counts, like the Tag Cloud.
This is calendar I really love! The timeline plugin allows you to view calendar as an horizontal, chronological, scrollable list of all posts. If you want to add clock widget to your wordpress theme then here is a link for you. With this plugin you can manage future events as an online calendar and display upcoming events in a dynamic calendar, on a listings page, or as a list in the sidebar.
Show your visitors what happens and when.

Many of us wants to have blog. A quality one. But what if we just “want” to have a blog but don’t know where to begin or about what to write. There is one solution, called video blogging. You don’t have to write articles, you don’t have to spend long time by reading boring stuff on internet that doesn’t tell you anything anyway. Just get yourself a blog and install revver plugin. You can submit your own videos , track them or for the laziest of us - we can wait for our subscribers to begin to publish their videos. If you motivate your visitors right way, you can build your own big video community. Don’t be sad if you don’t have your own database of movies. You can use the one that Revver offers you.