I just received an email from the administrators of the WPZipper.com website to let me know that they’ve updated their site and also added the AWSOM plugins to their database. WPZipper.com is a website designed to take plugins and themes and add them to a Wordpress install archive so that you have a fully set up file set to upload to your web server (instead of having to add all of the stuff yourself individually).

If you happen to need to set up multiple sites with the same configuration it’s a real time saver. Heck, the fact that they have a ton of plugins and themes in one spot makes it a decent search database even if you don’t care about the archive building function.

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The Developers of the ComicPress theme for Wordpress are looking for feedback about what features people want for the next version of the theme. If you are using this theme or are considering it you should let them know what you want.

link: http://mindfaucet.com/comicpress/2007/06/03/comicpress-21-development/

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Since many people who will be visiting Awsom.org may be new to web development or using Wordpress I think it’s a good idea to have some examples available of what you can do when developing an Art or Webcomic site. The guys at Applegeeks.com are using Wordpress for their webcomic, and they’ve done quite a few modifications to the basic theme and flow of Wordpress to enhance their site. (One thing I need to find out is how they’re doing that progress bar in their sidebar!)

I’ll feature more people using Wordpress over time so that you guys can get more ideas for your own development.

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Canvas is a CSS based theme editor plugin for Wordpress that looks to be an awesome development when it becomes more stable and authoratative. The concept is that you will be able to simply drag and drop whole areas to create your theme without having to resort to using code (imagine using the sidebar widgets but for your whole theme–you did go get those for your site right?). A grand idea in the early stages. I’ll definitely keep you all updated as it develops.

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Wordpress has a ton of options for how it displays posts and pages on your site. At first it can seem overwhelming, with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets-an element of HTML) and other options making different things different colors, sizes, etc. What you might want to do to cut down on the work of setting up your site is go here: The Wordpress theme database. There are tons of themes available with different configurations of sidebars (those 1 or 2 columns on the left and right of your main posts area), navigation links (on top or on the left or right sides), and other customizable ways of doing your website. I would suggest looking around until you see something that looks sort of like what you want, then download it and add it to the folder wp-content/themes.

Heck, download as many as you want, Wordpress doesn’t care how many you put in the themes folder. (BTW, make sure your theme is only one level deep in a folder inside the themes folder on your server, sometimes they zip the theme files inside a second folder inside their folder, they won’t appear in the Admin area if they are too deep inside folders) Once they are in that folder you can go to the Admin “Presentation” area theme section and change between the themes by clicking on a theme to make it your current theme. (If you also want to edit the files using the Theme Editor function in Wordpress you need to set the file permissions properly for this, see this tutorial to get info on how to do that)

The thing to pay attention to is where things are and how the page overall looks, you’ll probably change the images and maybe some colors so don’t worry as much about that stuff. The skeleton of the page is most important. The theme tutorial series that will be up here soon will help you do the final tweaking to the theme to make it just what you want anyway.

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