There are lots of free WordPress themes available on the net, but how many of them really can suit your needs and having professional design and look? Today I came across with 2011 new WordPress theme which is designed by talented designers Ellen and Manuel from Elmastudio.

Yoko is a modern and flexible WordPress theme. Check out the features and documentations as below:-

• for WordPress 3.1 +
• Cross-browser compatible (tested in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer 9 and 8 )
• HTML5 (with fallback for IE responsive layout (CSS3 media queries not supported in IE 9 wordpress post format (aside, gallery, image, video, link and quote)
• Theme options, individual background, individual header image
• optional sub-
• Social Links Widget (for RSS, Twitter, Facebook, Google +, Flickr, Vimeo, LinkedIn and Delicious)
• Google web fonts (Droid Sans and Droid Serif)
• Nested comments with Gravatar images
• full width page template
• Short codes for multiple columns, info boxes in yellow, green or red and highlighted text

The theme is released under GPL. You can use it for all your projects for free and without any restrictions. It is free for download and check out the live demo here!

Google had officially announced their Google+, a new social network that would battle Facebook and the Google Plus button works like the popular Facebook like button. If you are thinking to add Google+ button to your post automatically in order to generate more traffic, then you can try to add the following codes to functions.php file.

add_filter('the_content', 'wpr_google_plusone');
function wpr_google_plusone($content) {
	$content = $content.'<div><g:plusone size="tall" href="'.get_permalink().'"></g:plusone></div>';
	return $content;
}
add_action ('wp_enqueue_scripts','wpr_google_plusone_script');
function wpr_google_plusone_script() {
	wp_enqueue_script('google-plusone', 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js', array(), null);
}

That’s all and thanks Spyre Studios for the great code!

If you want to display youtube video thumbnail on your website or WordPress blog, below is the code that you can use to do it. First, you need to create a shortcode by copying the code below and paste it into your functions.php file.

/*
    Shortcode to display youtube thumbnail on your wordpress blog.
    Usage:
    [youtube_thumb id="VIDEO_ID" img="0" align="left"]
    VIDEO_ID= Youtube video id
    img=0,1,2 or 3
    align= left,right,center
*/
function wp_youtube_video_thumbnail($atts) {
     extract(shortcode_atts(array(
          'id' => '',
          'img' => '0',
          'align'=>'left'
     ), $atts));
    $align_class='align'.$align;
    return '<img src="<a href="http://img.youtube.com/vi/'.$id.'/'.$img.'.jpg&quot" rel="nofollow">http://img.youtube.com/vi/'.$id.'/'.$img.'.jpg&quot</a>; alt="" />';
}
add_shortcode('youtube_thumb', 'wp_youtube_video_thumbnail');

Once done, you can use this shortcode and it only can accept 3 parameters: The video ID, the image size (0 for 480*360px, 1 for 120*90) and the image alignment.

[youtube_thumb id="rNWeBVBqo2c" img="0" align="center"]

Thanks to Gunay for the code!

It’s been a long time I didn’t share the good and free WordPress theme, and today I found a Free WordPress theme that you will like it a lot. This is Mini Hyper WordPress theme, and it is free for download.

Mini Hyper is a home-made free WordPress theme by WpStyles.org, made with a lot of love and an ambition to serve bloggers world wide. It comes with a basic theme options page where you can add your Analytics tracking code and change the logo. Other than that, Mini Hyper is widget ready and works in all browsers.

Theme Features
- Theme Options Page
- Widget Ready
- WordPress 3.0+ Ready
- Cross browser compatible
- Custom Nav Menus

Working part time can be a good way of balancing my work and personal commitments, this is why I still make money blogging although I’m full time worker now. After I join a new company, I really don’t have too much time to update my blogs. Luckily I’m working as Sales Executive, and most of the time I will travel outstation to meet and serve my customers. Once I have free time, I will use my iPhone to read some information from Internet and blogging by using WordPress Mobile App.

I believe that many bloggers prefer to use laptop or netbook for the heavy lifting, but sometimes bring laptop or netbook is not allowed and inconvenient like my situation, in this case you can use WordPress Mobile App for your blogging purpose. For those WordPress users who are using Apple iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Nokia cellphones, you can use WordPress Mobile App for your posting. Whether you’re blogging from your desktop or on the go, make sure to check out these other ways to post to your WordPress blog. I pretty love this mobile app!

I believe that all of us hate spam on your WordPress blog, and we know that Akismet is the best pre-install WordPress plugin that can help us to reduce spam on our WordPress blog, but do you know that .htaccess file also can help us to reduce spam on our WordPress blog?

Go to your root of your WordPress directory, then you should found .htaccess file. What you gonna to do for the next step? Yes, download your .htaccess file and make another copy for backup (you will be able to restore it if something went wrong), and then copy and paste the following code to .htaccess file, upload this .htaccess file to replace the existing ones.

Don’t forget to replace yourdomainname on line 5 by your real domain name.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} POST
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} .wp-comments-post\.php*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !.*yourdomainname.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^$
RewriteRule (.*) ^http://%{REMOTE_ADDR}/$ [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

Once this code is added, the spam bots will not be able to access your wp-comments-post.php file directly, and this will significantly reduce the spam amount.

Thanks to AllGuru for the great tips!

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms and CMS, many popular bloggers had using WordPress to run their blogs. If you are WordPress beginner user, there are several WordPress plugins that you should install after setting up your WordPress in order to maintain, speed up and monitoring your WordPress blog. Below are those useful WordPress plugins that you might need to explore and use.

1. WP-DBManager – Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up, optimizing and repairing of database. (You must backup your WordPress database periodically)

2. Askimet – Checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not. (Pre-install during WordPress setup, you must activate this plugin)

3. 404 Notifier – Log 404 (file not found) errors on your site and get them delivered to you via e-mail or RSS. If you’ve decided to move things around on your site, you might overlook a few redirects and end up with some broken URLs. This will help you catch those so you can take care of them or you can fix them by using (4.) Redirection plugin.

5. All in One SEO Pack – Automatically optimizes your WordPress blog for Search Engines (Search Engine Optimization).

6. WP Super Cache – A very fast caching engine for WordPress that produces static html files. This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

7. WP System Health – Provides a new Dashboard Widget (limit to administrators) that displays information provided by 5 different categories: System, PHP, WordPress, Translation, and Database.

8. Hosting Monitoring – Enables to display information on the system where your wordpress website is hosted.

9. Error Reporting – Logs Errors to file and/or Sends Error Notification emails. Records Ping Errors and displays them in a dashboard widget. Logs Errors to files and / or Sends Error Notification emails. Records Ping Errors and displays them in a dashboard widget.

Perhaps some of you don’t like the default fonts of WordPress Editor, you can change it to your favorite fonts by copying and pasting some short code in your functions.php file.

add_action( 'admin_head-post.php', 'devpress_fix_html_editor_font' );
add_action( 'admin_head-post-new.php', 'devpress_fix_html_editor_font' );

function devpress_fix_html_editor_font() { ?>
<style type="text/css">#editorcontainer #content, #wp_mce_fullscreen { font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", "Bitstream Charter", Times, serif; }</style>
<?php }

Thanks to DevPress for this tip!