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Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers

By Jacob Goldman, July 2nd, 2009 in Developer's Toolbox | 77 Comments

With its latest releases, WordPress has extended its potential well beyond blogging, moving toward an advanced, robust and very powerful content management solution. By default, WordPress delivers a very lightweight, minimal system that offers only basic functionalities. But where the WordPress core falls short, there are a wealth of plug-ins that extend its limitations.

Plug-ins often offer simple solutions, but they are not always elegant solutions: in particular, they can add a noticable overhead, e.g. if they offer more functionality than needed. In fact, some general and frequently needed WordPress-functionalities can be added to the engine without bloated plugins, using the software itself.

This article presents 8 tips for WordPress template developers that address common CMS implementation challenges, with little to no plug-in dependence. These examples are written for WordPress 2.7+ and should also work in the latest WordPress-version.

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6 Free PSD/(X)HTML-Templates

By Smashing Editorial, June 4th, 2009 in Freebies | 187 Comments

We love our readers. We respect the hard work of designers and developers across the globe. And we do our best to make the web design community stronger and the Web a little bit prettier. Therefore we ask talented artists and creative professionals to showcase their skills and release something unique and beautiful as a gift to the community. And when designers agree, truly impressive works see the light of day.

A couple of weeks ago we released DelliStore, a professional CSS/(X)HTML-template with PSD-sources. In the poll and in the comments to this post our readers asked for more (X)HTML/CSS-template, so here are 6 more professional template that you can use without any restriction for your private or commerical projects. The template were designed by Templateworld and released for free especially for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

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25+ Magento Templates For Your E-Commerce Business

By Dkumar M., May 5th, 2009 in Developer's Toolbox | 120 Comments

Magento is a popular open source e-commerce software platform that has a modular architecture and is extremely flexible. It comes with a number of online shop maintenance capabilities. It is also simple to configure and easy to customize. And despite the fact that it was launched just last year, it has been gaining more and more popularity among Web designers and e-business owners.

Magento has a ton of credentials in its pocket from some very big e-solution players. Magento Enterprise Edition, a commercial version aimed at larger companies, was launched just a month ago. The CMS includes such advanced features as marketing, promotional and SEO tools; analytics and reporting; mobile commerce; catalog-management tools. And Magento users have the freedom to customize their store with new themes, templates and plug-ins.

Below you'll find a showcase of excellent Magento templates and resources for your e-commerce business. Hopefully, these templates and resources will serve you either as an inspiration for your themes, or as the foundation for your customized themes.

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DelliStore: A Free Professional CSS/XHTML/PSD-Template

By Smashing Editorial, May 2nd, 2009 in Freebies | 89 Comments

Over the last months we’ve heard numerous complaints about the lack of quality in our freebie releases. We are aware that our readers have high expectations and we try to do our best to meet them in our posts. In this post we release a beautiful high-quality (X)HTML/CSS-template (including its PSD-source) that will hopefully meet your expectations and come in handy in your projects.

This template, designed by the design agency Dellustrations and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers, is a full px-based, cross-browser-compliant (X)HTML/CSS-template (IE 6, IE 7, Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome). It consists of 4 custom pages; the PSD-source is included in the release package. You may modify this template for a e-commerce web site, restaurant, pool and spa web-sites and other caters, ventures and facilities.

You may be interested in other freebies that were released on Smashing Magazine recently:
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35 Beautiful Commercial And Free Joomla Templates

By Cyrus Patten, April 11th, 2009 in Developer's Toolbox | 80 Comments

Joomla is one of the most powerful, robust and feature-rich content management systems out there. Besides being open-source, Joomla is capable of some really stunning designs through the use of modules and built-in display customizations. Below, we present a list of 20 35 of the coolest, slickest, most eye-catching Joomla template designs.

Mynxx (presented above) incorporates the popular Joomla ecommerce / shopping component, Virtuemart. This integration is applied in a variety of platforms, such as modules, a custom virtuemart theme and template coding. The custom Virtuemart theme allows us to override the core output, which results in a more seamless integrated with the Virtuemart shopping component.

Also consider our previous article:
- Joomla Developer's Toolbox, which outlines some of the most useful tools when working with Joomla.
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35 Free High-Quality E-Commerce Templates

By Steven Snell, January 25th, 2009 in Developer's Toolbox | 125 Comments

For website owners who are evaluating e-commerce solutions, there are several good options for powering websites and shopping carts. Regardless of which option you chose, deciding on a design brings with it even more decisions to make. Of course, a custom design is always an option, but for those who want to keep costs down, templates are a popular choice. Premium e-commerce themes are easy to find, but they can be expensive. Free e-commerce templates are difficult to find, and quality free templates are even harder to find.

We've done the research for you, and in this post we present 35 of the highest-quality free e-commerce templates available. There are templates specifically for WordPress, Prestashop, osCommerce, Magento, Zen Cart, CubeCart, and CRE Loaded, as well as a number of general e-commerce templates. Please notice that these templates aren't intended to be used 1:1, but should rather be used as a skeleton for your own shop and hence saves a lot of work, because otherwise you would have to start from scratch.

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100 Free High-Quality XHTML/CSS Templates

By Steven Snell, December 1st, 2008 in Developer's Toolbox | 172 Comments

If you haven’t taken a look at the (X)HTML/CSS templates that are available for free from a variety of sources, you may be surprised by the quality you can find. WordPress themes tend to get a lot of exposure and attention in the design community right now, but there is also a wide variety of high-quality (X)HTML/CSS templates that are free of charge.

In this post, we’ll showcase 100 free high-quality templates. Hopefully some of them will save you some time in your design and development. While they are generally free for personal or commercial use, always remember to check the license first for any restrictions or guidelines.

You may want to take a look at other collections as well (some are from Smashing Magazine, some are not):
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Best Of March 2008

By Smashing Editorial, March 27th, 2008 in Best of the Month | 60 Comments

Every month we take a look around and select some of the most interesting web-development-related web-sites. We read articles, check out tools, analyze the advantages of new resources. Below you’ll find useful references, tutorials, services, tools, techniques and articles we’ve found over the last 30 days - an overview of web-sites you shouldn’t have missed in March 2008.

All images can be clicked and lead to the sites from which the screenshots have been taken. And please, please, don't forget to check out the last link. You won't regret it.

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Blog Headers For Free Download

By Smashing Editorial, March 5th, 2008 in Freebies | 355 Comments

One month ago we've asked our readers to help us create a gallery of blog header graphics which every designer could use for free and without any restrictions whatsoever. We've announced a Header Graphics Contest and now, one month later, it's time to present the most interesting, creative and beautiful works we've received.

38 graphic designers and artists participated; as a result we've received over 100 truly outstanding entries. The best ones are displayed below. Some of the participants will be randomly awarded with Poser 7, Anime Studio, and Manga Studio provided by Smith Micro Graphics. Participants, please stay tuned — we'll contact the winners within the next 24 hours.

This post presents the results of the contest — 45 beautiful blog header designs you can use for free. Below the designers have described their themes, intentions and shown us some examples of how header graphics can be used.

Please notice that
- often also the source image (.ai or .psd) can be downloaded,
- all images are clickable and lead to the full-size image of the header,
- full-size images have the resolution of 850×200 px,
- and you can also download graphics together with source files using corresponding links in the description.
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Best Of February 2008

By Smashing Editorial, February 29th, 2008 in Best of the Month | 84 Comments

Every month we take a look around and select some of the most interesting web-development-related web-sites. We read articles, check out tools, analyze the advantages of new resources. Below you’ll find useful references, tutorials, services, tools, techniques and articles we’ve found over the last 30 days - an overview of web-sites you shouldn’t have missed in February 2008.

All images can be clicked and lead to the sites from which the screenshots have been taken.

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100 Excellent Free WordPress Themes

By Smashing Editorial, January 8th, 2008 in Developer's Toolbox | 1,343 Comments

High-quality WordPress themes always come in handy. Whether you are looking for some design inspiration or professional coding solutions — in both cases you can learn a lot, you can apply them and you can build customized designs upon them without reinventing the wheel all the time.

In this article we present 100 free high-quality WordPress themes. Together with hundreds of other designs, these themes have been manually selected, installed and tested over the last weeks. They all can be downloaded, customized and used for free in both personal and commercial projects. Links to demo-versions provide a direct preview of a theme.

Please notice that the listed WordPress themes are presented in 8 sections: vibrant themes, simple & minimalistic themes, magazine style, grid-based, clean and legible, advanced, experimental, photoblog & videoblog.

You might also want to take a look at our previous selections:
- 83 Beautiful WordPress Themes
  An overview of beautiful, but rather unknown themes you might have missed.
- 21 Fresh, Usable and Elegant Themes
  A quite pretty selection of elegant yet well thought-out themes.
- 10 Fresh and Clean Themes
  The beauty of these themes lies in their clean look supported by a legible content presentation.
You want them — you get them. This page may take a while to load; therefore please be patient and don't hit "Reload" too often.

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45 Excellent Blog Designs

By Smashing Editorial, August 28th, 2007 in Design Showcase | 340 Comments

Designing a blog is easy. Whatever engine you are using and whatever style you prefer, you'll always find a number of templates you can apply to your weblog in seconds. No styling is necessary, no playing with colors is needed and no mind jogging about content presentation is required. However, not every weblog should look like a typical blog. After all, not every blogger wants his or her site to look exactly like hundreds of other ones. In fact, there is a small bunch of creative, outstanding and individually designed from scratch blogs.
In this post we didn't try to showcase some eye-candy (although sometimes eye-candy is indeed offered); the designs listed below were selected for their attention to small details. Pretty and colourful header-graphics doesn't make a good blog. The blog needs a solid visual structure, a profound hierarchy of site elements; it also has to be able to build some kind of a bridge between the content and its presentation. To do this, you need to think about precision, minimalism and sound use of illustration. These criteria were the ones we've used to select the designs listed below. All these aspects make the designs we've selected look... well, not always beautiful, but outstanding, almost excellent in their own kind. Mostly it's the idea the designers used to make the weblog as usable as possible - not the implementation of this idea - which we've been after.
Below you'll find 45 excellent blog designs which impress with creative approaches and attention to details; hopefully you'll find new ideas you can develop further in your own designs. Notice that the screenshots we've provided may give you a wrong impression about the whole design of the sites; in doubt you should take a closer look at headers, footers, comment-areas, site structure and further site elements. Please also notice that you can click on screenshots to get to the sites from which the screenshots have been taken. We've missed something? Definitely! Let us know in the comments!
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21 Fresh, Usable and Elegant Wordpress Themes

By Smashing Editorial, June 26th, 2007 in Design Showcase | 236 Comments

Sometimes it's just amazing to see, how developers use creative approaches to design amazing layouts, based upon a simple Wordpress template. Every now and again we take a look around, and select Wordpress themes, which offer thought-out design, flexible template structure and conform to the basic principles of usability. The choice is big enough, but the search is worth it. We invest our time, browsing through dozens of web-sites, news aggregators and design-communities and put enhanced solutions together, so you don't have to.
$Impressive Wordpress Themes - Dark_Black Release at {one more revision}$

Let's take a look at 21 23 fresh, usable, simple and and elegant WordPress themes, which have been released over the last few months. Among other things, we've also selected some of the new minimalistic solutions - all of them make use of clear and precise typography. They're definitely worth a look. You can also take a look at
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Free Design Templates

By Smashing Editorial, February 14th, 2007 in Developer's Toolbox | 192 Comments

Free design templates don't have to be unattractive, inaccurate and boring. Some web-sites offer high quality templates for the best price you would ever get - for free. You can download Flash-based templates as well as CSS-based layouts absolutely free; furthermore, you can use them for your personal and commercial projects without any restrictions whatsoever. Still, before using some of the templates, throw a glance at the license agreements - they're changing all the time.
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83 Beautiful Wordpress Themes You (Probably) Haven’t Seen

By Smashing Editorial, February 9th, 2007 in Design Showcase | 1,161 Comments

Sometimes it's just like searching for a needle in a haystack: if you've ever googled for free and quality Wordpress Themes, you know exactly what we're talking about. Most designers love to create Wordpress themes, so they can demonstrate the quality of their work and add some fresh works to their portfolios. However, most Wordpress themes are either used too often (Kubrick theme, now K2, is definitely overused) or just have nothing to offer - particularly, if you are looking for a free, impressive and professional design. However, sometimes search is worth it. In the gallery below you'll find 83 free Wordpress Themes you probably haven't seen yet. All themes offer quality, elegance and a user-friendly interface.
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Free CSS Layouts And Templates

By Smashing Editorial, January 12th, 2007 in CSS | 146 Comments

As a web-developer you don't have to re-invent the wheel all the time. If it just has to work, and has to be valid, and has to have a nice, visually appealing design hierarchy, you just can use css-techniques developed in the web-dev-community over the last few years. If you take a look around, you'll find many templates, which include basic (X)HTML/CSS-markup.

You can start from there, learning and exploring the possibilities of CSS and modifying templates for your exquisite taste. Below you'll find a list of resources which offer free, gorgeous and valid CSS-based templates - usually with images and full layout structure, such as headers, navigation bars, content containers, sidebars and footers.

Usually developers require a link to the site where the template was downloaded from. So before using these templates it might be useful to take a look at the license agreement the developer provides.

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(X)HTML template systems in PHP

By Smashing Editorial, October 1st, 2006 in Developer's Toolbox | 19 Comments

Web developers find themselves sooner or later in a dire situation: their scripts become an entangled mess of code. Program logic, presentation logic and in a worst case scenario even layout and design are so interconnected with each other that the further development becomes difficult. Would one have thought ahead and had created a clear [...]
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