The Simplicity Wordpress Theme is a basic yet effective theme which we have released under the Creative Commons License. To see the theme in action please visit the Simplicity Demo Page.

By default the sidebar only has 3 areas : Subscription, Recent Comments and Recent Posts. The theme is widget ready so you can add more to the sidebar very easily however I wanted to keep things simple with this theme. I think this would be a great theme for anyone looking to launch a journal or personal blog.

For full details…

When you write a post on WordPress a visitor can see this post on a variety of pages - the front page, the category page(s) that the post is under, the archive page, the author’s page, the tag page(s), plus, of course, the single post page. If you display the full post on each of those pages then there’s the potential for duplicate content issues. That aside it also doesn’t allow for easy navigation through your site to older posts.

Instead of thinking of your archive/category/tag/author pages as another version of…

Following on from last weeks post on highlighting your comments, I figured another useful post would be about setting up your comments to have alternating styles. We do this by adding an additional CSS class to every other comment, then you can style this class in your stylesheet with, perhaps, a different background colour, a border, or even put the user’s gravatar on the opposite side of the comment to normal.

To work out which comments to alternate we use a basic PHP “if statement” to determine which comment is being…

Over the last few days I have been looking into the user roles you can assign people to in Wordpress. WordPress currently has 5 different user levels : Subscriber, Contributor, Author, Editor and Administrator. I have always believed that this user system was sufficient for what most blog owners needed however the more I looked into it the more I realised how limited this user system actually is because by default, you are not able to increase or decrease the capabilities certain user roles have.

If you are the only one…

Keith Dsouza from Techie Buzz emailed me today to let me know about a new wordpress plugin he has released called Better Tag Manager. Keith decided to completely remove categories from his blog and and instead uses tags. Visitors can then search for posts using his Tag Cloud.

Better Tags Manager WordPress Plugin

Basically, this plugin lets you edit the tags of your posts more easily. More specifically, it allows you to edit the tags of posts from the main post area ie. you don’t have to go into each post indvidually to…