Useful WordPress Tools, Themes And Plugins

If you’re looking for some great ways to improve your WordPress workflow, read on for a massive collection of free themes, plugins, tools and tutorials. These resources were all linked via the Smashing Magazine Twitter stream, Facebook stream, and other social-media streams around the Web.

These awesome resources have now been organized and consolidated for easy reference to help you get the most out of the world’s #1 publishing platform. Enjoy!

Free WordPress Themes

There are probably a billion WordPress themes available these days. But not all of them are worth using or even looking at. Fortunately our readers send in some amazing and beautifully designed themes for us to check out and share. So without further ado, here are some of the best WordPress themes we’ve discovered along the way, neatly summarized and linked for your surfing pleasure.

Grid Portfolio Theme
Beautiful minimal and modern WordPress themes. Design for illustrators, photographers and graphic designers.
The focus should be on your work, not the theme.

Foghorn Theme
Foghorn is a minimalist WordPress theme built off of the foundation of Twenty Eleven. It has a custom options panel for switching layouts, removing sidebars, uploading a logo, and changing footer text.

BonPress: WPZOOM
BonPress is the perfect personal blog theme. Packed with a post formats feature (for audio and video) and multiple custom widgets, like Twitter, Flickr, it will offer you a unique experience from blogging.

Roots WordPress Theme
Roots is a starting WordPress theme made for developers that is based on HTML5 Boilerplate, Starkers, and the most popular CSS frameworks.

NeueGrafik: A Free Modern WordPress Theme
This theme is totally unique and simple, its great for any graphic designer, illustrator or photographer to showcase their portfolio.

Free Minimal Swiss Design WordPress Themes (4 Themes)
In this post the authors release yet another freebie: an original set of four exclusive minimal, clean WordPress themes designed by Marios Lublinski and released for the Web design community.

Free HTML 4.01/HTML5 WordPress Theme: Spectacular
A free WordPress theme that aims to provide a warm and pleasurable atmosphere for personal musings and ramblings.

Scherzo: Free WordPress Theme
A clean, readable theme. Boasts a responsive design, which means it displays perfectly on all devices, including mobile phones (not just iPhones), tablets and desktops.

Unspoken WordPress Theme
Advanced WordPress Premium theme that was developed from your proceeding wishes. Unspoken is our first, clean, simple and easy to customize premium WordPress theme specifically designed for your news or magazine website.

Free WordPress 3.1 Theme: Splendio (With PSD Sources)
A new freebie: a beautiful theme, designed by Vlad and Elena Scanteie which was developed exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers.

Suburbia 1.1 WordPress Theme
Suburbia is a free premium WordPress theme for magazines. The layout is very clean and flexible and designed in a modest and minimalistic style.

Portfolium 1.1 WordPress Theme
Portfolium can be used on portfolio websites or blogs and has a minimalistic design that is perfect as is or as a foundation for your custom design.

Typominima: A gorgeous typography-based minimal WordPress theme
Neat and flexible grid-based theme for WordPress CMS and Portfolium that can be used on portfolio websites or blogs. If you are designer, artist, photographer, or other creative specialist, you can take a full advantage of Portfoliums fresh minimalistic design — perfect as is, or as a foundation for your custom design.

Modernist: Free WordPress theme with focus on typography
Yet another freebie: a beautiful Modernist WordPress theme, designed by Rodrigo Galindez, and released for Smashing Magazine and its readers. This theme is based on the design ideas of Jan Tschichold, Josef Mller-Brockmann, Dieter Rams, and other modernists.

Free HTML 5 Responsive WordPress Theme for Photographers
Photum is a theme to use with WordPress that will turn your site into a clean portfolio that you can use to show off your photos.

Renova WordPress Theme
Renova, a new single column theme for WordPress. The main design of Renova concentrates on a minimal style dedicated to those writers who need a simple layout, without the useless stuff. Just words… your words.

Free E-Commerce WordPress Theme: Balita: Smashing Magazine
In this post the authors release yet another freebie: the Balita WordPress theme, a theme dedicated to shops that sell products for children.

Ari WordPress Theme
A free WordPress theme for WordPress 3.0+ and translation-ready.

WordPress Anniversary Theme
On January 25, 2003, a seemingly one-off comment by “Mike” on Matt Mullenwegs blog started a chain reaction that resulted in the creation of WordPress. Today, WordPress powers millions of blogs and websites, making it incredibly easy to build a website!

Free WordPress 3.0 Theme for Portfolios and Magazines: JournalCrunch
In this post the authors release yet another freebie: JournalCrunch WordPress 3.0+ theme, a theme for either portfolios or magazines with an integrated journal.

Academica: Free WordPress 3.0 Theme For Educational Websites — Smashing Magazine
A free WordPress theme designed specifically for educational websites such as universities, schools, etc.

Free Theme: Quality Control, a Simple Ticket or Bug Tracker
This theme allows for the easy creation of a ticket / support system right within WordPress, and for free.

Free Designer Theme
Beautiful minimal and modern WordPress themes. Designs for illustrators, photographers and graphic designers. The focus should be on your work, not the theme.

HTML5Press
HTML5Press lives here. HTML5Press is a WordPress theme based on the HTML5 template by Jesper.

Landing pages, squeeze pages, sales pages, and A/B testing made easy for WordPress
The authors deliver high-quality premium WordPress themes and plugins that make it easy to take your website to the next level.

Bubblog Theme
A modern, clean WordPress theme. It has a management console, is widget ready, advertisement ready, and is an easily customizable theme to use.

WordPress Plugins

Besides themes, plugins are another way to customize your WordPress website with advanced functionality and interactivity. As with themes, there are plugins for just about everything you can possibly imagine. But also like themes, it can be difficult to sift through the fluff, and find those gems that truly improve your website.

When you do find a WordPress plugin that’s great, you just have to share it with others in the community. So put on your plugin-checking goggles, because it’s about to get interesting!

Event Organizer
Event Organiser adds event management that integrates well with your WordPress site. By using WordPress’ in-built ‘custom post type’, this plug-in allows you to create events that have the same functionality as posts, while adding further features that allow you to manage your events.

Ninja Forms: A New Free Plugin for Creating Forms in WordPress
Every website needs forms " its an integral part of visitor/customer communication. However, custom forms can be a downright pain to code.

Bookings: Zingiri
Bookings is a WordPress plugin allowing you to provide online booking services for your website.

How To Safely Store A Password
bcrypt uses a variant of the Blowfish encryption algorithms keying schedule, and introduces a work factor, which allows you to determine how expensive the hash function will be. Because of this, bcrypt can keep up with Moores law. As computers get faster, you can increase the work factor and the hash will get slower.

WordPress Welcome Pack WordPress Plugins
Welcome Pack is a BuddyPress plugin that enhances the new user’s experience

WordPress Pricing Table WordPress Plugins
WordPress Pricing Table plugin will help the admin to publish a pricing table on your WordPress page, or even to post content to it. WordPress Pricing Table plugin has a full-featured (but easy to use) administration option to create a pricing table.

WordPress Anti-Splog WordPress Plugins
The ultimate plugin and service to stop and kill splogs in WordPress Multisite and BuddyPress, from WPMU DEV.

WordPress Email Address Encoder WordPress Plugins
A lightweight plugin to protect email addresses from email-harvesting robots by encoding them into decimal and hexadecimal entities.

The Sweet Plugin: User Switching
Todays Sweet Plugin is User Switching, which has quickly become one of my all-time favorite plugins. It allows admins to easily switch to another user, skipping the log-in / log-out process, which can become quite time-consuming for testing the websites of different users. This is one plugin that is seriously worth checking out.

welaika/wordless – GitHub
Wordless is an opinionated WordPress plugin that dramatically speeds up and enhances your custom themes creation.

Pin, organize and show your favorite places through OpenStreetMap/WMTS, Google Maps/Earth (KML), GeoJSON or Augmented-Reality browsers Leaflet Maps Marker WordPress Plugin
The WordPress plugin Leaflet Maps Marker allows you to pin, organize and show your favorite places through OpenStreetMap on your blog and via different APIs on external websites or apps

Front End Upload, a New WordPress Plugin — Monday By Noon
Announcing Front End Upload, a New WordPress Plugin

Simple:Press
Welcome to Simple:Press — the feature-rich, completely integrated and fully scalable forum plugin for WordPress.

Types WordPress Plugin: Easy Custom Post Types

WordPress Wordgento WordPress Plugins

yolink — widgets / yolink Search for WordPress
Optimize your website search, maximize engagement, and position your website to drive organic search rankings with the most powerful search solution for WordPress.

More Fields More Plugins
More Fields is a WordPress plugin that adds boxes to the Write / Edit page. These boxes contains input fields, so that additional (more) fields can be added to a post. For example, if you write about books, you can add a box where you can enter the title and the author, etc. The boxes can be placed either to the right or to the left of the Write / Edit page.

Usernoise Modal Feedback: A Free WordPress Contact Form That Just Works
WordPress websites are always in need of a good contact form. Are you looking for a feedback / contact form that works right out of the box? Should it have an attractive aesthetic, with a simple yet full-featured form? Look no further than the free Usernoise Modal Feedback Contact Form plugin.

WordPress SEO by Yoast, version 1.0 — Yoast
The SEO plugin by Yoast helps all our editors add SEO juice to their post fast and easy. Editors should focus on writing content, not gaming results. But they are the ones most suitable to write descriptions and titles for their own stories. This plug-in allows them to do just that without needing an SEO expert to walk them through the process. An invaluable tool for any professional blog.

Michael Fields Post Format Queries

WP Document Revisions — Document Management for WordPress
WP Document Revisions is a document management and version control plugin for the popular content management system, WordPress. Built for time-sensitive and mission-critical projects, teams can collaboratively edit files in any format — text documents, spreadsheets, images, sheet music anything, while seamlessly tracking the documents progress as it moves through your organizations existing workflow.

WordPress Tools

Beyond themes and plugins, there are tools and resources to further help with improving the presentation, organization, and functionality of your WordPress-powered website. Here is our growing collection of WordPress tools that we’ve collected from around the Web:

Manage WordPress Websites from One Dashboard — ManageWP.com

WordPress Mobile Pack
The WordPress Mobile Pack is a complete toolkit to help mobilize your WordPress website and blog. It includes a mobile switcher to select themes based on the type of user that is visiting the website, a selection of mobile themes, extra widgets, device adaptation, and a mobile administration panel to allow users to edit their website, or write new posts when they are out and about.

zencoder/html5-boilerplate-for-wordpress
This theme is built on the HTML5 Boilerplate by Paul Irish and Divya Manian. The sole purpose of this theme is to save developers the time it takes to apply the HTML5 Boilerplate to WordPress. The “HTML5 Boilerplate” name is used with permission from Paul Irish.

Default WordPress Generated CSS Cheat Sheet for Beginners
The goal of this cheat sheet is to assist beginners who are looking to get into WordPress theme styling.

Reverie: Versatile HTML5 WordPress Framework

HTML Sitemap for WordPress
There are plenty of plugins out there that will help you make an HTML sitemap

Web Design WordPress Function List

WordPress TextMate Bundle
The WordPress TextMate Bundle is a TextMate bundle that is built with the sole purpose of reducing the amount of time spent digging around the WordPress core to look up those little things that we work with every day.

WordPress 3 Template Hierarchy
The idea is that WordPress will look for files in a theme that will be used to render the current page in a specific order.

OnSwipe — Insanely Easy Tablet Publishing
Make your blog look beautiful on tablet Web browsers in under 3 minutes.

WordPress Initialization

Wonderflux — WordPress free, open source theme framework

WordPress Widget Boilerplate
The WordPress Widget Boilerplate features file organization, documented code, and is built with the WordPress API for best practices.

Force Reload of Scripts and Stylesheets in your Plugin or Theme — tutorial plugin theme — WP Engineer
Force Reload of Scripts and Stylesheets in your Plugin or Theme

Instant WordPress
Instant WordPress is a complete standalone, portable WordPress development environment. It turns any Windows machine into a WordPress development server. It can even run from a USB key.

Reverie: Versatile HTML5 WordPress Framework
Reverie Framework is an extremely versatile HTML5 WordPress framework based on ZURB’s Foundation, a powerful tool for building prototypes on any kind of device. Reverie follows HTML5 Boilerplate standards, and is hNews microformat ready. It is optimized for search engines, while at the same time improves readability.

andreascreten/wp-cli — GitHub
A set of tools for controlling WordPress installations from the command line.

WordPress Tutorials

Wrapping up these super-useful themes, plugins, and tutorials, here is a hand-picked collection of some great WordPress tutorials:

Using TextMate for WordPress Code Cleanup
In this post, the author will show you how to add two useful commands to TextMate, then move through the steps taken for theme code cleanup, finally putting the commands into practice.

WordPress Internals: How WordPress Boots Up — Theme.fm
The authors have written their own Twitter (or other service feed plugins / widgets), to those who are simply interested in PHP and software architecture. They invite you to join us on a journey deep into WordPress core code.

Conceptually, the idea is simple: import the data to create actual users for a WordPress-powered website. The trick is to clean up the data as much as possible to ensure valid username and password information. Once the data is good, importing it is easy, using a plugin.

How to Redirect Logged-In Users
WordPress provides a variety of ways to redirect logged-in users. In this DiW post, we explain each of these methods along with some useful tips and tricks along the way. These techniques enable you to redirect logged-in users to internal pages, external pages, and even return them to the current page.

How to Build a Shortened URL Service with WordPress Custom Post Type
The point of this tutorial is to push the limits of WordPress, and thats going to take some real thought!

Ajax-Powered Error Logs for WordPress
This tutorial shows you how to set up dynamic error monitoring on any typical website. But the script will require some tweaking to get it to work with WordPress.

Scaling WordPress for High-Traffic
This talk (presented by Envatos very own developer extraordinaire, Ryan Allen), will detail some of the potential pitfalls and solutions when maintaining massive WordPress blogs, such as “Tuts+”.

How to optimize plugin loading — Practical
This tutorial is primarily for plugin developers, but it can also be useful reading for anyone working with WordPress, to help them better understand how plugins load, and what can be done to improve them.

WordPress Optimization — DreamHost
There are many reasons why you may want to optimize your WordPress blog — primarily, you want your website to load quickly. That of course encompasses a number of other things such as wanting to make sure your website can handle large volumes of traffic without choking, and making sure your website’s processes aren’t being killed due to using too many server resources.

WordPress HTTP API — easily GET or POST in WordPress — Yoast
The WordPress HTTP API makes fetching from (or posting to) remote servers a breeze. It does this by allowing you to be transport agnostic when you either fetch or post something. The HTTP API will choose the fastest and most reliable method out of the five different transports available in PHP. It will take care of discovering what transports are allowed on that server at that time.

WordPress SEO Tips — WPShout.com

Admin Bar Tricks
In this DigWP post, the authors round up a ton of tips, tricks, and plugins for ultimately mastering the WordPress admin bar.

Optimizing WordPress Permalinks with htaccess
The topic of this post is how to use htaccess to optimize WordPress permalinks.

Writing Unit Tests For WordPress Plugins
When my WordPress plugin had only three users, it didnt matter much when it broke down. By the time I reached 100,000 downloads, every new update made my palms sweat. My first goal for the WordPress Editorial Calendar was to make it do anything useful. I was new to JavaScript as well as PHP, and didnt really know what I could pull off. In a few days I had a proof of the concept. In a few more days I had a working version, and was asking friends to install it. The calendar worked sort of. I spent three times as much time fixing bugs as I did with coding. Once the plugin worked, I wrote unit tests to make sure it kept working. The unit tests for my calendar use QUnit, but they really use just three functions: test, expect, and ok. This article shows you how to integrate unit tests into your WordPress plugin, where to write unit tests, and how they can help you.

How to Setup Your Own Nginx Powered WordPress Server
Nginx is a Web server software that allows your server to serve files. Nginx is fairly new to Web server work, relative to other popular Web servers. If you look at the graph below, you can see Apache as the top dog (going all the way back to before 1995), while Nginx just started showing up in March, 2007.

Group WordPress Project: A Purpose & A Name
This time, the author is looking to narrow things down a bit, and needs your help to determine the overall purpose of the theme, and to start thinking about a possible name.

Inside WordPress Actions and Filters

How To Create Custom Post Meta Boxes In WordPress
Creating custom meta boxes is extremely simple — at least it is once youve created your first one using the tools baked into WordPress core code. In this tutorial, the author will walk you through everything you need to know about meta boxes.

How to use Ajax in WordPress
AJAX is the technology that lets you update the contents of a page without actually having to reload that page in the browser.

Limiting The Visibility Of Posts In WordPress Via Usernames — Smashing WordPress

How to Sync A Local And Remote WordPress Blog
If you prefer to work on your WordPress projects locally, but have to get them to sync remotely, then this tutorial is for you.

WordPress Multisite: Practical Functions And Methods — Smashing WordPress
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.

The Definitive Check List for Publishing Your WordPress Plugin
This tutorial will guide you through publishing your plugin in the WordPress plugin directory. It works as a check list to help you make sure the plugin will be ready for the prime time by the time you hit publish.

Last Click

More than 40 Keyboard Shortcuts to Use in the WordPress Editor

WordPress functions.php Snippets

WordPress Snippets
Code snippets for WordPress developers

Huge Collection of Code Snippets: HTAccess, PHP, WordPress, jQuery, HTML, CSS
There are all sorts of different types of code and snippets that just keep growing and growing… and finally it gets to a point where I just need to dump everything, and start over again fresh. That’s the purpose of this post.

(jvb) (il)

Smashing Editorial Team for Smashing Magazine, 2012.