Newsportal is a nice, fast-loading 3 Column Wordpress theme designed by Kaushal Sheth which is ideal for a business or news type blog.

The theme has a fully fluid width structure to suit all screen resolutions. The big benefit of this theme, I believe, is that it is really fast-loading. There is no fancy graphic headers or unnecessary code to slow down its performance and would be ideal for text-heavy website, such as a news or article site. It would make a great business blog too.

By default the theme does not use a tagline, but that can be easily changed by editing the theme with the theme editor if required, see below. Another feature is that the Newsportal theme is fully Widget compatible.

Quick Theme Tweaks

As can be seen from the picture above, the page navigation menu bar is centered just below the main site title. I personally do not like the navigation to be centered like this, but it is very easy to change. To have the navigation menu on the left, it is simply a matter of changing one word in the stylesheet (style.css). In the Menu styles, #navlist section simply change the line text-align:center; to text-align:left; (or text-align:right;).

Also, to add a tagline to the theme it is simply a matter of adding the line < h2>< ?php bloginfo('description');?>< /h2> just below the main H1 title tag in the header.php theme file (ignore spaces when adding to theme). An example of the tweaks can be seen below.

To download the theme, visit the Newsportal page here.

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There are many ways to add Google Adsense to your blog - either hard-coding it into the theme itself, using special plugins and now you can use Widgets. This tutorial will focus on using Widgets as it a great way to quickly add Adsense to your blog as fast and easily as possible.

Many of the best Wordpress themes now support the Sidebar Widgets plugin and it is simply a matter of downloading the plugin, uploading to your plugins folder and activating in your blog plugin admin area. Widgets are great as you can completely re-arrange your sidebar to the way you want it!

The Google AdSense widget is designed to work with Widget Ready themes and it is very easy to install. Although it is possible to add AdSense (or any other kind of JavaScript) directly into the standard Text Widgets that comes built-in with Automattic’s Sidebar Widgets plugin, using the AdSense widget has several advantages. For example, the color, size and h2 title tag of the AdSense unit are fully customizable from within the sidebar widget tab in your theme admin area.

Requirements:

• Sidebar Widgets Plugin
• Widget Ready Wordpress theme

Widget Download:

• wp-widgets-adsense.zip

Installation:

1. Unzip and upload to your /wp-content/plugins/widgets directory
2. Activate the plugin from Plugins tab
3. Drag AdSense widget to your sidebar from Presentation tab > Sidebar Widgets
4. Click the configuration icon and enter your Google Adsense Client ID
5. Optional: Customize the color, size, and sidebar h2 title tag.

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Internet Broadcast is a great looking corporate type Wordpress theme by GFXEdit.com which is based on an excellent CSS template by Luka Cvrk. This is a really nice, quick loading theme and features a couple of nice built-in effects such as featuring a recent articles list / archives list just above the main content and also three separate highlight areas which can be individually customized from within the theme options panel.

While the fonts used in this theme are quite small, they are crisp and easy to read which is ideal for an article site or news site which would naturally feature a lot of text. The theme has been tested on Internet Explorer 6, Firefox 1.5+ & Opera 9 and works just fine.

Theme Features

• Widget Ready
• Quick Loading
• Supports multiple browsers - Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera & Camino.
• Features three highlight areas which can be edited in theme options.

Download

To download Internet Broadcast please visit here: GFXEdit.com

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One of the great things about Wordpress is the wide variety of themes that are available for it. However, often when I change my theme, I forget to change the Statcounter code that I had to manually put into the footer.php file of my original theme. This can become a real pain, so I went looking for a “Set and Forget” solution to changing themes without having worry about manually adding the Statcounter code each time. I found two plugins that will do the job and I will list them here for you;

#1. Citizen K’s Statcounter Plugin

The first plugin I found is simplicity itself. It’s by Citizen K who has developed this Statcounter Plugin. To use this plugin, simply download from here, upload to your wp-content/plugin directory, activate in the plugins admin area and then add your statcounter code in Admin Options/ Statcounter section. That’s it! Remember, that you will only need to add the invisible counter code that is provided by Statcounter.com.

#2. Luke’s Statcounter Plugin

The second plugin is slightly more advanced but it is also an Set and Forget method to get Statcounter set up on your blog. It’s by Luke and it can be found here. Luke developed this plugin based on the works of Ronald Heft and his Google Analyticator WordPress plugin.

As before, simply upload, activate and configure. The admin options for this Statcounter Plugin are slightly more involved than the one above. You need to add the three bits of information required and then enable the tracking for it to work. Again, this plugin does not create a user-viewable counter, it simply adds the proper javascript code for an invisible Statcounter.

Download

So, if want a simple solution to add Statcounter tracking to your blog, download the Citizen K version here. For a slightly more advanced option, you can download Luke’s statcounter plugin here. Both work great, so the choice is yours.

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A new book called the WordPress 2 Visual QuickStart Guide has been released. It features an easy to follow, step-by-step guide which shows you how to install, use and customize WordPress in order to get the most from your blog. It also includes tips that explain why certain techniques work better than others, how to avoid potential problems when blogging and lots more tips.

If you are fairly new to the world of blogging and would like a solid introduction to using Wordpress, this book will serve you well. The more experienced web developers will not find it as useful as it doesn’t cover the deep technical aspects of what makes Wordpress tick. However, if you have even a modest amount of web design experience, the WordPress 2 Visual QuickStart Guide book is a great way to get into blogging straight away.

Wordpress is simply the best blogging platform around at the moment and of course it is free to download from Wordpress.org. So, if you want to get started blogging and need a solid introduction to installing, using and customizing Wordpress, check out the WordPress 2 - Visual QuickStart Guide.

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Hoofei V4 is an excellent looking two column Wordpress theme with a blue, green and white color scheme. It is a simple and clear theme. If you are thinking of changing your own theme, this one is well worth looking at.

A live demo can be seen at www.hoofei.com

This is Hoofei’s 4th wordpress theme and they just keep getting better and better. The only slight drawback with this theme is the fact that this theme is not widget-ready. However, when a theme looks this good, it is easy to overcome this by getting creative with the clearly written sidebar.php code.

Installation

As usual, simply extract the hoofeiv4.zip file to your theme directory, wp-content/themes/. Then log in your wordpress Administration Panel and activate the theme.

Integrated Plugins

WP-PageNavi - Hoefei has integrated the WP-PageNavi Plugin by Lester Chan into this theme so you don’t need to download and install it. And don’t worry it will be wrong if you have installed this plugin before, I have renamed the function in plugin code. )

Required Plugins

Gravatar 2 - This is an updated version of the original Gravatars plugin by Skippy. Important: You must install this plugin for this theme.

Conculsion

An excellent and fast loading theme worthy of gracing your blog. To download please visit the Hoofei Version 4 Theme page. Have fun!

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I just came across two very useful resources for Wordpress Theme and Plugin customization. I found these on the excellent 480x.com blog which features a special Theme and Plugin Cheat Sheet that are very useful when you want to dive in and manually configure a theme or plugin.

These two cheat sheets are in PNG format and are designed to operate as a desktop wallpaper if anyone would like to do it that way. Actually, I decided to print these out onto glossy paper, and even laminate them, as they are a great reference for tweaking Wordpress to suit your own needs.

The Wordpress Theme Cheat Sheet (above) is for WordPress theme developers or theme customization and is 1280—1024 pixels and PNG format. It features a list of all the Template Tags (eg wptitle(), the_content() ) , Include Tags, BlogInfo function and a basic example of the entire Wordpress Loop.

The Wordpress Plugin Cheat Sheet (right) is also 1280—1024 pixels, PNG format and features a list of all the add_actions() and add_filters() functions which form the basis of all plugins. This cheat sheet is useful for Plugin customization or even creating a Plugin from scratch.

Tip: Print the two cheat sheets onto two pages of glossy paper, then place together with the glossy side up at the front and when you turn it around the other one is also glossy side up, then laminate the two sheets together.

This makes a very useful reference for tweaking Wordpress without having to go and search through the entire Wordpress documentation.

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