WordPress 2013: themes & plugins

Last week I finished teaching an evening class called Dynamic Websites, which was designed to enable people with little or no experience of web design to build a site using WordPress.

During the various sessions we looked at a number of useful themes and plugins. What follows is a list of the principal ones that we worked with during the eight sessions.

Themes

There are literally thousands of WordPress themes. WE concentrated on two that are extensively customisable without any coding. Both of them have comprehensive control panels available from the WP admin section.

1. Mantra is available from inside WordPress, by searching in the Install Themes tab. The theme’s homepage can be found here.

2. Suffusion is also available from inside Worpdress. The theme’s homepage can be found here.

E-commerce plugins

WooCommerce has a homepage here.

WooCommerce is a fork of JogoShop. You can find the homepage of the original plugin here.

eShop is also used and recommended by many people. Its homepage is here.

Gift List plugins

We used My Wish List, which worked very well. Its home page and help can be found here.

Gift Registry is more complicated but is useful if you want the gift list to direct people to particular online stores. You can find details here.

Language Plugin

1. A number of people asked about making multilingual sites. We explored using QTranslate for this. You can find this by searching in the Install Plugin tab. The home page is here.

News Ticker plugin

There are surprisingly few news tickers. The best one I could find is News-Ticker. You can find information about it here.