If you run an online magazine, most of your readers will never go through your archive, even if you design a neat archive page. It’s not you; it’s just that going through archives is not very popular these days. So, how do you actually make readers dig in without forcing them? How do you invite them to (re)read in a way that’s not boring? How do you make your WordPress magazine more interactive?

The WordPress plugin “Leaflet Maps Marker” allows you to pin, organize & show your favorite places through OpenStreetMap on your blog and via different APIs on external websites or apps.

I know there are plenty of articles about themes for WordPress and at tripwire magazine we have also published our share. The reason is simple – WordPress is awesome and it just gets better and better. Further there are new themes released and new designers and vendors entering the market every day. This is good for everyone using WordPress, but it has almost come to a point where the massive supply makes it hard to make a decision and filter the good themes from the bad ones. One option to get around this problem is to take a look at premium theme vendors as they typically have fewer, but very high quality themes that can be customized easily. In contrast you can go to the large theme directories and search for a theme that fits your requirements for look and feel. While this may be more time consuming it will not cost you a single dollar. As you can understand it isit is important to start searching using the sites that have good search capabilities, good previews and detailed descriptions of theme features. This article does not list a single WordPress theme, but it gives you an overview of some of the best premium theme vendors and free theme directories currently available. The article has been divided into two main sections – Premium Theme Vendors and Free Themes Directories. Make sure you check out the Coupon Code section at the bottom if you plan to buy a premium theme! You can also check out some of our list posts showcasing wordpress themes e.g. WordPress CMS themes, WordPress photography theme and WordPress photo theme.

We delivered top quality, cutting edge WordPress themes and superior customer support. Give your WordPress powered website a professional new look, and be up and running in no time at all.

Computing is full of buzzwords, “cloud computing” being the latest one. But unlike most trends that fizzle out after the initial surge, cloud computing is here to stay. This article goes over Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service and guides you to implementing a WordPress plugin that backs up your WordPress database to Amazon’s S3 cloud. Note that this is not a tutorial on creating a WordPress plugin from scratch, so some familiarity with plugin development is assumed.

Multisite is a powerful new feature that arrived with the release of WordPress 3.0. It allows website managers to host multiple independent websites with a single installation of WordPress. Although each “website” in a network is independent, there are many ways to share settings, code and content throughout the entire network.

A script for deploying Wordpress sites. Not as clever or as sophisiticated as capistrano; not terrible.

Creating WordPress tutorials is a fantastic way to help build the WordPress community and to increase your Web traffic. That’s no secret. Just Google “wordpress tutorial” and you’ll see hundreds of results. The complete novice will find scores of well-written tutorials clearly demonstrating the basics of the WordPress dashboard and of activating the default template, in simple jargon-free language.

Whatever type of website you operate, its success will probably hinge on your interaction with your audience. If executed well, one of the most effective tools can be a simple email.

WordPress users are in luck, since WordPress already has easy-to-use and extendable functions to give you a lot of power and flexibility in handling your website’s emails.

In order to create our own system, we will be doing four things. First, we will create a nice email template to use. We will then modify the mailer function so that it uses our new custom template. We will then modify the actual text of some of the built-in emails. Then we will proceed to hook our own emails into different events in order to send some custom emails. Let’s get started!

People everywhere complain that Wordpress is slow, or that they can’t survive a digg. They die if they get more than 10,000 visitors a day, their hosting providers ban them for using too many resources, and they cry because they have to purchase expensive hosting plans. If this describes your plight, before you run over to Survive Digg hosting and plunk down even more money, take a look at your Wordpress setup and LAMP stack. You can make them better.

If you're using a Wordpress blog, one thing you can do to significantly improve performance is install the WP Super Cache plugin. This will store static copies of pages accessed by users who don't require any dynamic content generation (e.g., users who haven't logged in or posted a comment) which should make up the vast majority of your visitors if your site is getting a lot of traffic. These static copies are set up on the filesystem so that they are easily accessible via some simple rewrite rules, so if the cache file already exists the web server can just serve it directly - the request never needs to be passed to PHP. This effectively turns your blog into a static site, allowing you to handle a lot of traffic using very few resources.

If you're using a Wordpress blog, one thing you can do to significantly improve performance is install the WP Super Cache plugin. This will store static copies of pages accessed by users who don't require any dynamic content generation (e.g., users who haven't logged in or posted a comment) which should make up the vast majority of your visitors if your site is getting a lot of traffic. These static copies are set up on the filesystem so that they are easily accessible via some simple rewrite rules, so if the cache file already exists the web server can just serve it directly - the request never needs to be passed to PHP. This effectively turns your blog into a static site, allowing you to handle a lot of traffic using very few resources.

It can easily be a time consuming and difficult job to find the best WordPress theme for a blog, site, web shop etc. There are tons of cool themes available for WordPress both free and premium. This is one of the main reasons for its dominating market share and new awesome themes are released all the time! The huge availability of both free and premium themes for WordPress may however  make it a challenge to find the best theme for the site you are building.

A good place to start is to decide if you are willing to pay for the theme. In many cases this pays off long term when you need support. E.g. when WordPress needs to be upgraded. Most WordPress sites and blogs start op with a free or premium theme that have been altered a bit to make it distinctive. This can be by changing colors, header graphics etc. There are many websites dedicated to help you find the WordPress theme that is best for you. This is a good place to start.

I recently set up a new server to host website for my clients. I took the opportunity to re-think how I have been serving sites and optimize the whole software stack for better performance. Rather than the usual LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack, I decided to go with LEMP, switching Apache out for Nginx. Although most common PHP applications recommend Apache, they will actually run faster on Nginx. Usually all you just need to do is translate the .htaccess file rules into Nginx’s configuration file.

My first order of business once the new server was set up was to get WordPress running and to optimize its performance. The first few sites that would be going on the new hardware were using WordPress so although I will be going through a similar process for Expression Engine soon, WordPress was my test-case.

I always run the W3 Total Cache plugin with my WordPress installations. By storing copies of each rendered page to disk (as well as many other optimizations), W3TC dramatically decreases the load on the server under heavy traffic. This is particularly the case with the Nginx configuration I am about to show you, which lets most requests be handled by Nginx alone. Nginx was designed first and foremost as a reverse proxy, so it serves static files almost instantly and with minimal processor or memory usage. There are a number of sample configurations around the web for running WordPress with W3TC on Nginx, but none of them quite did it for me. For one thing, they all rely heavily on if statements, which are evil. So here is my take on it….