Below you will find articles for the intermediate and advanced blogger. If you are a beginner make sure to check out my easy guide to starting a blog first.
There are several reasons you may want to disable commenting in WordPress. The most common reason is that you are using WordPress for some type of site other than a blog.
There are a variety of workarounds to disable comments. The simplest is to go to “Settings ==> Discussion” and un-check the box that says “Allow people to post comments on new articles”.
Unfortunately, this can be a hit-or-miss because, as the warning on that page says, “These settings may be overridden for individual articles.”
Because of this, many find it easier to install a simple plugin that makes disabling comments easier to control. Here’s how to do it:
From your WordPress dashboard navigate to “Plugins ==> Add New”.
In the search box type “Disable Comments” and click “Search”
The “Disable Comments” plugin should be the first result. Click “Install Now” and then click “Activate Plugin” on the next page.
Navigate to “Settings ==> Disable Comments”. Select the options you want and click “Save Changes”
There are already well over one-thousand free WordPress themes available through the WordPress administrator dashboard itself, as well as many more both free and paid themes available elsewhere. While there is something to suit just about every website out there, you can find yourself being spoiled for choice. This article takes a look at some of the best free themes available right now for the world’s most popular blogging platform.
1 – vFlex
vFlex is a responsive theme which includes a number of additional customization options, including the built-in FlexSlider feature. This allows you to choose featured images, logos and more to truly make your blog your own. This theme is ideal both for conventional blogs and portfolio websites which showcase your best work. The layout is well optimized for cross-platform functionality, so it will look good on mobile phones, tablets and other devices.
2 – Appliance
If you are looking for a minimalistic theme which is great for conventional blogs, online magazines or portfolio presentations, this highly customizable free WordPress theme provides a clean and professional look. It presents your posts and pages in the form of tiles on the homepage, making it best suited to blogs with posts featuring eye-catching images. The design is very light on the coding as well, making it quick to load and suitable across all platforms.
3 – Noteworthy
Noteworthy is another professional theme which is great for showcasing content and online magazines thanks to its dark color palettes and responsive layout. The author of the theme claims that he was inspired by the style of the USA Today website. By default, your featured or recent posts will appear as tiles on the front page, and these tiles will be automatically rearranged depending on the size of the window or screen resolution of the device used to view it.
4 – Origin Lite
Origin Lite is another theme which takes a professional and minimalistic approach for blogs and websites which want minimal clutter hindering user interaction. This responsive theme is ideal for a wide variety of blogs and websites as well as portfolio presentations. It comes with a customizable image gallery on the front page, a two-column layout and a range of custom widgets. There is also a more feature-rich paid version of this plugin.
5 – Customizr
Customizr is one of the best themes currently available for those who want to make their blog look as unique as possible without having to design their own theme from scratch. The base design is minimalistic and professional, but users can customize all sorts of features including skins, logos, headers, social media profiles and page layouts. The theme is also available in fifteen languages. Customizr uses a responsive design layout for cross-platform compatibility.
6 – Swift Basic
Swift Basic is the free version of the popular Swift theme. This professional and responsive theme is designed to be quick loading and highly customizable. It is also one of the most advanced and effective SEO-orientated themes around. It supports a practically infinite number of different layouts thanks to its customization features, and it supports all of the built-in features which come with WordPress, including post types and formats and more.
7 – Attitude
Attitude’s simple and minimalistic responsive design makes it ideal for cross-platform use, and while the base theme might not look very inspiring in itself, it provides a wide range of customization options. You can choose between narrow and wide layouts as well as different layouts for different posts and pages. It provides five widget areas, four custom widgets, social media integration, custom backgrounds and headers and much more.
8 – Vantage
Vantage is another responsive multipurpose theme which also comes with some useful plugins such as Page Builder for optimizing responsive design layouts. It also provides great integration with the MetaSlider plugin and the WooCommerce plugin for online shops. This retina-ready theme is ideal for professional blogs and websites used to showcase content, market a business or operate an online store. It also supports custom backgrounds and fluid layouts.
9 – Virtue
One of the most versatile of the free themes currently out there, Virtue offers a vast range of customization options. The base design is clean, minimalistic and modern while using a responsive design so that your blog will look great on any screen of any size. It is also fully compatible with WooCommerce, making it ideal for online stores. The included options panel allows you to configure everything from the layout of your homepage to the configuration of custom fonts and color schemes.
10 – Sixteen
Sixteen is a responsive theme with an artistic feel about it. The most notable feature of this WordPress theme is the customizable header images which support parallax scrolling effects. You can choose from a variety of grid layouts for the homepage and fully customize the headers and footers. The theme is available in a number of other languages as well.
There are almost 30,000 plugins available for WordPress through the administrator dashboard alone, and there are many more available elsewhere. Plugins add additional functionality to your blog, and all but the most basic of blogs will likely want to make use of at least half a dozen of them. This guide takes a look at ten of the best free plugins currently available.
WP-Optimize
Available for WordPress 3.0 and later, WP-Optimize is an important plugin for improving the performance of your website by cleaning up and optimizing the database. Unlike many similar plugins, it does not require PhpMyAdmin either. The latest version includes an experimental task scheduling feature, and a number of multilingual translations are also available. You will need PHP 5.1 and MySQL 5.1 or later for this plugin to work correctly.
WP-Polls
Adding polls to your website is a great way to get feedback, particularly since many visitors are more likely to spend a moment or two responding to a poll than writing a comment. WP-Polls is one of the most popular of such plugins available. It is easy to configure, and you can specify expiry and publication dates for your polls. Using the polls widget added by this plugin, you can add multiple polls to your blog. More advanced users can also customize the plugin using CSS styles and templates.
WordPress SEO by Yoast
While the base WordPress platform is quite good with regards to SEO by itself, the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast greatly extends SEO functionality making it one of the most popular SEO-related plugins available. This plugin allows you to specify which pages can be indexed by Google and which ones shouldn’t be. It also provides XML sitemaps, RSS optimization features, optimization for Meta tags and links, social media integration and much more.
Google XML Sitemaps
Google XML Sitemaps is another important SEO plugin which generates and XML sitemap for your blog. This sitemap will help the search engine crawlers to more effectively navigate around your blog and index its content. It supports all WordPress-generated pages and custom URLs. Another useful feature is that this plugin automatically alerts the major search engines whenever you publish a new post.
Disqus Commenting System
Disqus completely replaces the existing commenting system in WordPress, greatly increasing the functionality of your blog comments and discussions. It makes things like commenting easier, faster and more interactive while helping to connect multiple websites and commenters to make for a powerful discussion community. Comments may also be indexed by search engines. Disqus provides comment automatic synchronization to back up your comments.
Contact Form 7
Contact Form 7 allows you to add and manage multiple contact forms on your website. It supports Ajax-powered submissions, the Akismet spam filter included with WordPress and CAPTCHAs. The latest edition provides full support for language packs, an improved administrator interface, various accessibility and usability improvements and a number of bug fixes. The latest version is also compatible with WordPress 3.8 and later. You can see Contact Form 7 in action on The Blog Starter contact page.
WooCommerce
WooCommerce is one of the most popular eCommerce plugins for WordPress, and unlike many similar plugins, it is also completely free. This is a must-have plugin for any WordPress site which has an online shopping component. It provides essential security features, performance reports, tax and shipping information, store management, marketing features and search engine optimization. Various extensions are available for a fee as well.
NextGen Gallery
With over 7.5 million downloads, this media management plugin is one of the most popular WordPress plugins of all. It greatly improves the media management features built in to WordPress by offering a batch image uploader, a Meta data importer, thumbnail editor, image sorting, albums and much more. The latest major update was released in July, 2013, and it boasts a completely reworked interface and improved flexibility.
JetPack
JetPack is an official WordPress plugin which was previously only available to those who had their websites hosted on WordPress.com. The plugin is now available for self-hosted sites. This powerful and feature-rich plugin provides statistics, a social networking-powered commenting system, contact forms, site activity information, email subscriptions and more. JetPack basically integrates many of the features of other popular plugins into a single unit.
AddThis Share Buttons
Being one of the most crucial elements of online marketing, it is hardly any surprise that there are many social media plugins available for WordPress. Share Buttons by AddThis is one of the most popular plugins for automatically adding social media sharing buttons to your posts. It supports more than 330 social networks and bookmarking websites, and users can also sign up for a free account on addthis.com to see how their readers are sharing their content.
