I cam across this article on Mashable, 14 Free WordPress Themes. I am a big fan or WordPress and free WordPress themes. Some of these are excellent themes and some even allow you to get your feet wet with more of a WordPress framework. I have started developing a WordPress site using this free theme.

Read the entire 14 Free WordPress Themes article here on Mashable

WordPress has just released a great new theme. It is available on wordpress.com as a free theme in your presentation area. It is also available as a downloadable theme you can use on your self hosted WordPress blogs. It is an awesome addition that gives you the opportunity to create a Twitter-like real time communication system. I’m going to implement it on a new site I will work on this summer. Instead of having a forum I’ll use Prologue.

Here is a wordpress.tv video showing you it’s capabilities.

Here is an overview on wordpress.
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/01/28/introducing-prologue/
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/p2-the-new-prologue/

Tags: wordpressthemes, p2, prologue, twitter,

Use a simple plug in called WordPress Database Backup Plugin to create a backup of your blog database. You can then have it emailed to you as an attachment. If you use Gmail then you can set a filter so that it bypasses the inbox and gets archived with a label of your choosing. Of course most email programs allow filters but this was designed for use with Gmail.

We all know backup is essential but how many of us do it regularly? This way you can set it to back up and email to you once an hour, once a day, once a week. It is very handy. Never be at a loss in case of server failure.

Here is a post that describes the process in detail.

Here is the page for the plug in.

The dtabs plug in is very useful. It creates dynamic rounded corners tabs and a horizontal menu. It greatly simplifies the process for creating a menu of this sort. I tinkered with the plug in while tinkering with the Kubrick Tabs theme. You can add a little code to your own theme to enable this functionality. I am trying to modify Kubick Tabs beyond recognition and am finding it hard to do so I’ll probably end up using it in my final theme for France Tales. It beats using the jQuery library as some web hosts don’t support it. Try it out.

I have recently begun to redesign my own theme for my France Tales blog. I have gone through a couple of themes and have liked some parts of the themes and wished for other parts to be included in a WordPress theme. I have also been trying to get a job in web design and development here in France. PHP and/or Java seems to be a requirement so I thought I would begin to learn PHP by designing my own theme.

I started to learn PHP and to design my own WordPress theme by using this tutorial series at WPdesigner. It was very helpful to explain each of the PHP calls in the WordPress loop. I made a very simple theme that I may use to expand upon to make a fully featured theme.

Often I kept going back to the WordPress site to ask questions in the forums or for references. I rediscovered the WordPress Codex. There is a wealth of resources for all aspects of designing your own WordPress themes. I would recommend the above tutorial on WPdesigner to see if you really want to go through with it. Then if you decide you are going to commit to it, I’d recommend carefully going through the WordPress codex as it will cover in greater detail and accuracy all you need to know.

Do you know of any other great Design your own WordPress themes tutorials?