Web Concepts

Want to give your WordPress powered web site a wooden look and feel?  I have always been a big fan of the wood themes, mainly because they remind me of the old office chambers you remember in the old movies.  Where the room is surrounded in book, you have a large oak desk in the middle of the room, with a large executive-looking chair.  There is just something very professional about adding a wood finish to your theme. 

Here are four of the best looking wood related themes I have found for WordPress.

Dark Wood

Ground Floor

TouchWood

Kanata

That is it for this theme collection.  Know of another great wood theme?  Want to let us know which one of these wood themes you think is the best?  Sound off in the comments and share with us your thoughts.

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Original post by Mitch

Finding a red theme is never fun, because truth be told, there are not that many good looking red themes out there.  There are a lot of phpBB themes out there – however, finding free themes that are red is a difficult task, indeed.  I have searched the Web myself though, and I have returned with four of the greatest looking red phpBB skins in existence today.

Milky Way Red – Preview it – Download it

Sliced – Preview it – Download it

Reds – Preview it – Download it

RedSilver – Preview it – Download it

There you have it, some of the best looking red themes for the phpBB message board script.  Lunarpages comes ready to serve you in hosting a phpBB powered forum on just about every hosting plan we provide too.  Which one is your favorite?  Do you know of another red phpBB skin that is better?  Send in your comments and let us know what you think!

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Original post by Mitch

Possibly one of the best forum scripts out there to date, Simple Machines Forum, is more than welcome to be hosted here at Lunarpages, on many of our web hosting plans.   It is a free, professional grade software package that will have you setup with your own online community in just seconds. 

How to Install SMF? – Simple Machine Forum comes with both cPanel’s Fantastico and LPCP’s WebApps collections, respectfully.  You are also more than able to download the installation package from SMF’s official site, and install it yourself. 

• How to Install SMF Manually

Mods, Themes and Upgrades… oh my! – SMF, like many third party scripts we provide to you, comes ready, willing and able to handle a number of different plugins, or as they call them “modifications”.  These mods will add features, remove features and many more possibilities.  SMF is also no stranger to customized themes either.  You can browse through their directory of themes, or design your own.  The forum script is also very well written, and is kept up to date, as soon as a security (or any other) flaw arises. 

More SMF Tutorials and Help

Here are a few more SMF tutorials, tips and more we have collected:

• Simple Machine Forum FAQ
• How do I delete the Simple Machines logo on the default SMF theme?
• How do you add custom tabs to the Core (default) theme menu?
• Convert Current Forum Software to SMF
• What is repair_settings.php?

For more information, and help – be sure to check out the web hosting wiki.

Want to play with it, before you install it, yourself? Play with the demo that is hosted over at OpenSourceCMS.

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

Keep watching the Lunartics blog all throughout the month on November for even more third party script suggestions, tutorials, tips and more.  You can also get tons of information and details about just a handful of the third party scripts we support on the web hosting wiki.  We also have a special forum dedicated to third party script discussions over at the Lunarforums.  Subscribe today to the Lunartics RSS feed for instant updates when we release a new script suggestion!  

Related Tips and Tricks:

• WordPress Hosting at Lunarpages
• Vanilla Web Forum Hosting at Lunarpages
• Get bbPress Hosting at Lunarpages

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

All this month, on the Lunartics blog, we are going to be highlighting some of our favorite third party scripts.  From image galleries to message boards, there will be a little something for everybody.  To get things started, I thought I would discuss with you why WordPress is my absolute favorite blogging script.

WordPress truly is a state-of-the-art publishing platform that is easy enough for anybody to use.  It focuses on aesthetics, web standards and real usability.  Also, since it is totally free to use, that makes it even better.

WordPress is Easy to Install

At Lunarpages, you can easily install WordPress via cPanel or the LPCP control panels, so that gives you instant access.  If you would rather install the script yourself, you can do that too using WordPress’s world famous five minute install.

The Extras for WordPress are Awesome

As far as extras go, you can not overlook the WordPress plugins and WordPress themes.

Plugins – You can bring up how great WordPress is, without mentioning the slew of plugins that have been developed for it.  You can easily install plugins from the WordPress administrator interface (after you have it installed) or browse though all the plugins available at WordPress Plugins Directory.

Themes – There are many themes you can choose from too.  The world greatest designers have really given it their all to provide you some great looking designs.  You can browse though many of them at the WordPress Theme Directory, or even build your own theme to use. 

For more assistance and help with WordPress, be sure to check out our web hosting wiki page dedicated to this great blogging script. 

• WordPress Help, Tutorials and Tips on the Web Hosting Wiki!

Also, try the WordPress demo over at OpenSourceCMS to play with the administrator interface.

November is Lunarpages Script Month!

Keep watching the Lunartics blog all throughout the month on November for even more third party script suggestions, tutorials, tips and more.  You can also get tons of information and details about just a handful of the third party scripts we support on the web hosting wiki.  We also have a special forum dedicated to third party script discussions over at the Lunarforums.  Subscribe today to the Lunartics RSS feed for instant updates when we release a new script suggestion!  

Related Tips and Tricks:

• Keep Your WordPress Plugins Up To Date
• Working with WordPress 2.7
• WordPress Theme Design Resources

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Also, don’t forget to follow @lunarpages on Twitter!

Original post by Mitch

I recently had a Lunartics reader e-mail me in search of a few good Joomla theme resources.  Looking around the Web, I started to search out some of the best Joomla theme resources out there, and here are the ones I found.

• Joomla-Themes.co.uk
• JoomlaPraise.com
• Joomla2u.net
• ThemesBase.com
• JoomlaTP.com
• ThemeBot.com
• Joomla24.com

Have another Joomla theme or template resource worth sharing?  Leave a comment, cause I would love to get a few more suggestions. 

Also be sure to check out our Joomla support page via the web hosting wiki.  Tons of more great information about Joomla there for you to use there, and tons more being added all the time.

Joomla is by far one of the easiest to use CMS (content management system) scripts out there, and there are tons of ways to make it your own by simply adding a new skin.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - Great web hosting with unlimited disk space and bandwith for only $4.95 per month? Check out the Winter Special!

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “Spent the Weekend with WordPress” Keeler

I spent my weekend knee deep in WordPress, updating themes on a few personal projects of mine.  WordPress 2.7 brought in a lot of nice new features, so to help others who might find themselves in the same boat I was – here are a series of links to help you get up to date with this latest version of WordPress.

+ Migrating Plugins and Themes to 2.7

+ WordPress Themes Compatible with WordPress 2.7

+ WordPress Plugins Compatible with WordPress 2.7

+ Help with Enhanced Comment Features in WordPress 2.7

+ Adding Style to the New Threaded Comments

Hopefully these will come in as handy for you as they were for me.

&copy Lunarpages Web Hosting - Great web hosting with unlimited disk space and bandwith for only $4.95 per month? Check out the Winter Special!

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “Tutorial Finder” Keeler

Now that the WordPress Design Contest (version 2!) is on its way I have been getting a lot of questions that sound a lot like this one:  I want to enter the contest, but I am not sure exactly how to create a theme for WordPress? As long as you know some things about web site design, CSS and working with templates - you should have little to no problem at all.  Here are a few tutorials though to get you started with the theme design process:

WordPress.org - Theme Development

WordPress.org -  Designing Themes for Public Release

Wordpress Tutorial: How to Create a Wordpress Theme

So you want to create WordPress themes huh?

How to Create a WordPress Template or Theme

Make Your Own WordPress Theme

Have any other favorite WordPress theme tutorials you would like to share?  Feel free to drop them into the comments!

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Original post by Mitch

By Mitch “Q & A” Keeler

As some of you may know, Joomla is yet another one of the great free content management systems out there from the Web that you can install and use to make your web site even better. It adds management options you never thought you wanted or you never knew you needed. Over the weekend though I got a Lunartics reader asking me where could they find some templates and themes for this CMS king?

Here are a few of my suggestions for theme databases for Joomla powered web sites:

Joomla-Themes.co.uk

JoomlaShack.com

OSSkins.com

ThemesBase.com

Joomla-Themes.biz

Have any more good ones? Feel free to send them my way or drop them in as a comment. Would love to get a few more opinions on where the best places are to get Joomla themes are.

© Lunarpages Web Hosting - $25 off Web Hosting! Coupon Code: blo⡕

Original post by Mitch

By Mitch "WordPress Guru" Keeler

WordPress might be one of the more popular blogging tools and scripts out there today, but there are still many unanswered questions about it.  Over the next few weeks I thought it might be a good idea to tackle some of these questions right here.  If you have a general WordPress question that has been keeping you up at night, feel free to send it my way to mitch.keeler@lunarpages.com.  Make sure you put in the title "Lunartics WordPress Question&quot so I can be sure to see it and also include your name and your Lunarpages hosted web site (if yo have one). 

As an example, lets tackle the question of changing your blog’s title. 

To change the name or title of your blog, you will need to login to the WordPress admin interface, usually found at:

yourdomain.com/wp-admin/

From there, click on Options and then the General tab. 

To change the title of your blog, find where it says "Blog title:" and put your own title into the text box next to it.  You can also change your in the text box under your title box.  Once you have done that, hit the "update options" button and you are done.

Remember to keep your questions general if possible, so that way everybody can get something out of the answer.  Have a WordPress question?  Send it my way and see it answered right here!

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Original post by Mitch