Wordpress Themes & Plug-ins

[dustinbrown]

Those of you that use Wordpress, I'm curious what some of your favorite themes and plug-ins are for portfolio purposes. Can be commercial or free tools, doesn't matter, I'm just curious what you guys like. I've seen some pretty simple yet slick stuff done with Wordpress just looking at people's websites here on PC.

[pior]

Yeah, Im curious about that too. I have been playing with Blogger but I don't really like the look of its themes ...

[Sean VanGorder]

I'm going to be purchasing a subscription to these guys. http://graphpaperpress.com/


Every theme they make is great, and would work well for portfolios with a little tweaking.

[[HP]]

I'm building my new folio with the help of a webdesigner, I was a little skeptical when he told me we would be better off building the website in wordpress. But after seeing this thing coming to life, I am amazed.
There's also loads of great themes that basically turn a wordpress blog into a fullblown website, and the fact that it has a backoffice for you to add or edit shit is great, so yeah, wordpress ftw.

[Kovac]

Ya graphpaperpress.com has some real nice layouts that are easy to set up.

www.justinkovac.net

It only took me about 20 mins to set up a while back and the rest of the time was adding posts and finding a script that let me custom order the posts.

Speaking of which... I need to make more art.

[Lamont]

Be warned about installing wordpress themes. Some can do crazy stuff like have backdoors and things.

I'm working on a new theme ATM, stripped down to what's needed and purdy word formatting.

[maze]

I like wordpress, but I prefer using expression engine for work, it is more solid and flexible imo.

[Maph]

I just made my own theme, not that hard you know. :)

[dustinbrown]

For my site I started with Grid Focus from 5THIRTYONE (http://5thirtyone.com/grid-focus/), and customized the heck out of it. I'm using NextGEN Gallery (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery/) for lightbox functionality.

Press75 (http://www.press75.com/) seems to have a nice selection of themes.

[BadgerBaiter]

Thats a nice looking theme, Dustin....
Been looking for a suitable lightbox for my soon to be portfolio page, but as my friend and I did our own php coding for our blogs, not sure how much of a fiddle that will be.
Need to get back to my site and add more content and update it once my exams are over especially with pagination - also my images take ages to load.......... I did them in a stupid way and they need fixing :p

[dustinbrown]

Wordpress is pretty amazing. You get a fantastic CMS and a huge selection of ways to customize. It isn't as WYSIWYG as Squarespace, but if you aren't afraid of getting your hands slightly dirty, it's definitely the way to go. I know next to nothing about HTML and CSS, but even I've been able to fashion something that works. Most IPPs at this point have a button in the control panel that will install the latest version of WP on your server automatically.

[m4dcow]

I was looking at some themes the other other day and I came across Photoria which is free.
http://www.wpzoom.com/themes/photoria/

Seems like it would make a good portfolio theme, has full width templates so you don't need to have a bunch of crap on the sidebar, and their featured slider works pretty well. I don't like the look of their menus though.

[Renaud Galand]

My (old) website is using the theme called "Black Minimalism 2.0" ( http://wordpresstemplate.org/?p=23 ) loosely based on http://getk2.com/download/ I always go for really clean and simple theme, anyways. If I had to change, I'd go for k2.

[Ace-Angel]

Is there a benefit for us free users with wordpress to go to wordpress, or should we stick to Blogger?

The reason I'm asking this is because with Bogger, I have several Journals under one account (my Gmail) and that seems useful, for Wordpress, I don't know what I have as a an option, and no idea on how to use it.

Advice for a loser like me?

[dustinbrown]

Wordpress 101: There's Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org.

Wordpress.com is free, it's hosted by Wordpress and it's relatively limited in terms of what you can do with it. You sign up and get a domain like www.wordpress.com/aceangel (http://www.wordpress.com/aceangel), then you can customize it a bit using the tools they provide.

Wordpress.org is where they distribute the Wordpress files, plug-ins, and themes for those that want to host it on their own web server. It's far more versatile because you can monkey around with the code. The Wordpress files themselves are free, but you would need to pay a hosting company annual fees for a domain and server space. I use GoDaddy, but you can use any host you wish. Domain registration is cheap as chips, and shared server space won't break the bank either. Considering this is your means of getting work, I see it as a sound investment.

Also, you can have multiple installs of Wordpress on your web server. So if you want more than one website or blog, no problem.

[adam]

i like polycounts theme :D

[dustinbrown]

Yes it's quite lovely :)

[Kwramm]

I only have 2 plugins running on my blog (http://blarg.robertkist.com) - WP captcha free, which lets you post without an annoying captcha yet at the same time making it hard for spammers. It works pretty well so far. No spam and I don't have to manually approve all the comments. (now please don't all spam my blog with comments just to try it out ;) )

Then I got Syntax Highlighter ComPress, which also works nicely.

The theme I use is called Emire, but I modified the CSS so it displays the icons next to the posts. I still want to change the design a little bit as I'm not 100% happy.

[redhart]

Personally i use a custom version of a joomla theme made by yootheme but they have the same for wordpress they are really great and rather easy to customize.

http://www.yootheme.com/