WordPress.org had their official theme viewer at http://themes.wordpress.net and it was largely stagnant for more than an year.
Now they have launched a brand new theme viewer !
It does not have many themes as of now, but eventually I believe people would fill it in with their themes.
If you want to upload your theme into the […]

It was just announced that WordPress 2.6.3 has been released due to a security issue in something called Snoopy. Snoopy is something that grabs the feeds that are displayed in your dashboard. It’s supposed to be a relatively minor risk. If you don’t want to download the whole upgrade, you can get the following 2 files from the release post:

• wp-includes/class-snoopy.php
• wp-includes/version.php

And replace them. I just upgraded and it was a pretty painless process.

Snapshot is a showcase-style theme, suitable for portfolio websites or photo galleries. It’s a rare free theme release from the WooThemes team, who usually produce paid WordPress themes exclusively. I’ll be going over this free WordPress theme in a review post.

And now onto the review…

My Expectations

Aside from a clean looking showcase-style design, I’m expecting to make use of some third-party plugins. In the demo I noticed what appeared to be WP-PostRatings. We’ll see if this plugin is required to use the theme or not. I’m also expecting to use some form of custom fields to call the images.

I’m also expecting not to get any help from WooThemes developers, since you have to pay for that, kind of like everything else on the site.

Setting Up

When you first upload and activate this theme, you’ll get a site that looks like this.

Not very pretty, is it?

To fix this, you’ll need to open up the Snapshot Options panel, select a theme stylesheet, and save the changes. I’m not sure why the default one isn’t activated by default, but I guess it’s easy enough to change if you know what you’re doing.

Options Panel

In the previously mentioned options page, you can also control a few other things:

• Choose between a photo or design gallery
• The theme stylesheet (default, coolblue, limefresh)
• Full URL to custom logo image
• Google Analytics code (or other tracking code)
• FeedBurner RSS URL

Required Plugins

On the theme’s documentation page, it’s states there are two required plugins: WP-PostRatings and WP-PageNavi. By default, you don’t necessarily need the PostRatings plugin. Although if you want any pagination functionality at all, you will need the PageNavi plugin. There doesn’t appear to be any fallback on the default WordPress pagination system.

Photo Gallery? Design Gallery?

The difference between the photo gallery and design gallery is that the photo gallery is designed to showcase your own images, and therefore will internally link to your own WordPress posts. The design gallery is programmed to function like one of those “best design galleries” and will link out to external sites instead.

How Do I Add Posts?

You can add posts like normal. Input the title and content, choose the category and add tags. With this theme, you’ll notice a new set of extra input fields in your write menu.

The screenshot is the image displayed on the homepage. The larger image is displayed on single post pages (in photo gallery mode only). The website URL is used for the external link in design gallery mode.

I think this is a nice alternative to custom fields, as those tend to confuse people. This new menu is much more straightforward.

Support

If you need any help with this theme, don’t bother contacting WooThemes about it, because they’ll ignore you if you don’t pay for access to the forums. Access to WooThemes’ support forums cost per year. Whether or not this is worth it is up to you. I didn’t encounter any major problems that required support in my experience with the Snapshot theme.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I really liked this theme, and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a showcase-style template. I think this one is a lot better than the last showcase-style theme I reviewed, Infinity, because Snapshot is much more “generic” and easier to get set up.

Another week has passed, which means more WordPress resources!

Building a Control Panel for Your WordPress Theme – For WordPress theme authors out there, Ahmad of Custom Theme Design goes over how to create a control panel for your WordPress theme in this detailed tutorial. Complete with code examples!

Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO – Nathan Rice has published a 10 part series (so far) on WordPress SEO. Goes over several edits you can make directly to any WordPress theme to make it more “SEO optimized.”

WP Recipes – A great new site created by Jean-Baptiste Jung with several quick WordPress hacks and tips. All of them seem very concise and easy to implement.

That’s all for this week. If you know of any other recently published WordPress resources, feel free to let me know in the comments.

For the past few days I’ve had some real trouble trying to comment on other blogs. I would make a comment, and it would seem like nothing happened. No “Your comment is awaiting moderation.” message would show up. Same story even with blogs I’ve had previously approved comments on.

I started to suspect that for some reason my comments weren’t getting through because I was being flagged by Akismet’s spam filter. I confirmed this suspicion this morning when I left a comment on a friend’s blog, and they informed me that I was indeed getting flagged by Akismet.

Remember, Akismet is used on thousands upon thousands of blogs to stop comment spam. Every time I would make a comment, it would be relegated “Akismet Spam” page. People don’t check this page as frequently as their non-spam comments. Although some may check it from time to time for the occasional false positive.

No, I didn’t overreact and start drafting some massive “Why you shouldn’t use Akismet” blog post. I simply posted this tweet and just a couple hours later, I received this response from Mark Riley of Automattic. This totally caught me by surprise, as I was definitely not expecting this issue to be resolved by a quick tweet.

So why was I marked as spam in the first place? I have no clue, other than the fact it had something to do with my URL (http://www.themelab.com). I’m just glad it could be resolved so quickly. Thanks Akismet!