cactusthemes, Author at CactusThemes Official blog

Jasper – Free WordPress Theme for Educational, Ecommerce Sites

March 25, 2016

Free WordPress Theme for Educational, Ecommerce Sites

Today we decided to give away our first and favourited theme – Jasper. Built on the famous and powerful Gantry Framework, Jasper is packed with tons of features and options.

Feature list

6 Sample colors

Unlimited custom colors

Unlimited Skin Customization – You can choose your own background photo

1. Fully Responsive Layout

2. Build pages easily with Powerful Gantry Framework

3. Built with Twitter Bootstrap Framework

4. E-commerce ready – Fully WooCommerce Integrated

5. Revolution Slider (worth 15$) + 2 Bonus Sliders (FlexSlider & NivoSlider)

6. 2 Sleek Portfolio styles

7. Fully Customized for Education Site With special custom post types: Professors, Event, Learning Courses

8. 18 Sidebars

9. Many Custom Widgets

- 4 built-in widgets
- Advanced Search included (worth $11)
- Latest Custom post type
- Jasper Recent Post
- Your Social Pages
- Many other widgets / plugins supported

10. Lots of Shortcodes including Easy Tab Widget by CactusThemes (worth $9)

12. Unlimited layout

13. Advanced Typography

14. 3 Compare table styles

15. 6 Post formats supported

16. Social ready

17. Detail Installation Guide with Video

18. Demo Content Ready

19. Translation Ready

20. 500+ Google Fonts

21. PSD files included

We appriciate if you share this awesome theme to your friend!

Check out our preimum themes:

University – Education, Event and Course Theme

Business-Hub – Responsive WordPress theme for Online Business

Check our portfolio at ThemeForest

Featured, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips

How to speed up your education WordPress theme

October 22, 2015

The article is a list of methods that will help you speed up your education WordPress theme. This doesn’t include server side optimization or WordPress optimization. This is to ensure your theme is well optimized.

Tips to speed up your education WordPress theme

Use custom fonts in the right way

Today, all people tend to use custom fonts on their sites. Fonts like Google fonts should be used for headings and small pieces of text and not throughout your theme’s content. The body content should be standard web font while you can make use of custom fonts for headings and sub headings.

Check for broken links or missing files

When you try to optimize the performance of your online education WordPress theme, you should make sure that there is no missing images or broken links. When the browser finds a broken link or missing image, it will look for the missing files resulting in extra CPU usage that makes your site slow. You just need to use the developer tools inside most browsers by pressing the F12 key. You also can monitor the browsers activity when the page is loaded to spot all the missing files or broken links.

Avoid utilizing unnecessary plugins

This is a common problem that relies on WordPress plugins to handle some of the functionality of your education WordPress theme. They are social sharing, image sliders and related post carousels that could bring down your website’s performance. So you should code it as most plugins rely on extra CSS and JS files.

Combine multiple CSS files

The purpose of combining multiple CSS files is to reduce the number of HTTP requests sent by the server. This means that with each CSS file used by your online education WordPress theme, a server request will be sent and we should avoid this. In order to reduce the number of HTTP requests, we should reduce the number of CSS files used inside the theme. By combining two or three CSS files into a single larger CSS file, you can reduce the number of CSS files.

Use image sprites

Another form of reducing server requests is using image sprites. Each image sprite is a collection of images out into a single larger image. So you should use image spites if there are a lot of different icons throughout your education WordPress theme. When there are too many images in a web page, it may take a long time to load and multiple server requests.

Place JS & CSS files in the right locations

Moving its JavaScript and CSS files to the right locations is an important way to improve the loading time of your WordPress education theme. That is because when you place JavaScript files in the head section of the theme’s HTML document, it will delay the rendering of the page until all those JavaScript files are loaded, which means that the page may take more time to load.

Normally the WordPress theme’s CSS and JS files are loaded automatically into the right locations only when it makes use of the enqueue and register functions to include the needed JavaScript files and style-sheets. If the files are in the wrong location, you should modify your education WordPress theme to specify where the files need to be placed: header or footer of the document.

Featured, WordPress Themes

Best WordPress themes for video magazine in October, 2015

October 22, 2015

The article introduces 3 best WordPress themes for video magazine. They are trending products on ThemeForest in October, 2015.

3 best WordPress themes for video magazine

1. BuzzBlog

BuzzBlog is one of the best WordPress themes for video blogs. It is a simple, clean, modern and professional theme which is ideal for spreading stories. With a responsive design, it adapts to the screen of any device. The theme comes with a lot of great features, such as unlimited styles support with 11 predefined CSS styles, widget manager, header style and 15 custom page templates.

Furthermore, it offers a categorized image gallery with 2,3,4,5 columns, light-box, more than 60 short-codes, and eight custom widgets. BuzzBlog also features nine post formats (Standard, Gallery Grid, Aside, Gallery Slideshow, Image, Code, Link, Video, and Audio), powerful theme options and more.

Noticeable Features:

Responsive design: This is a common feature of the best WordPress themes for video magazine, including BuzzBlog. It gives your users full, intuitive site experience on all web-browsing devices, even desktops, tablets and mobiles.
Powerful Admin Panel: BuzzBlog has clear and understandable tabs layout. It also comes with unlimited colors, fonts, layout types, gallery settings, import and export theme options, and more.
Header styling: Each element of the theme header can be changed from its Theme Options Panel. You can choose between sticky and normal headers, and set image as header background.
Besides, BuzzBlog comes with seven blog layouts, 11 predefined CSS styles, WPML support, and translation readiness.

2. Jarida

Jarida is a responsive magazine, news and blog template. It is a great solution for magazine oriented site and one of the best WordPress themes for video sites. The theme comes with a clean design and powerful backend so you can customize everything you want.

Noticeable Features:

A responsive design: The theme layout will adjust on any screen device, from desktop, iPad to smartphone. It is easy to turn on and off the responsive mode in the Theme Options panel.
Flexible theme layout: You can choose the number of column (two or three) with Jarida. And you can easily choose from the boxed and full layouts in the Theme Options panel.
Retina ready: You or your users can enjoy your site on iPad, iPhone or any retina screen device without losing any details.
Translation ready: Jarida is ready to be translated into your language. Besides, it is compatible with WPML in case you need a multi-languages website.
bbPress & BuddyPress: Being one of the best WordPress themes for video blogs, Jarida is fully compatible with bbPress and BuddyPress plugins.
Customize your categories: You can customize your categories with Jarida by custom logo, background, color, slider and sidebar.
Social counter widget: This theme includes a built-in social counter widget which grabs the latest counts of your followers from Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, etc.
Homepage builder: Jarida includes a built-in drag and drop homepage builder which allows you to customize your homepage with nine boxes.

3. REHub

REHub is a modern theme with magazine, blog, directory, review, user generated, shop and affiliate options. It includes a lot of options for affiliate earnings, coupon and review website, and e-shops. This is also one of the best WordPress themes for video shops.

Noticeable Features:

Support and extended functions for three shop plugins: WooCommerce, EDD and Ecwid
Five different design layouts for WooCommerce shops
Coupon functions
Multivendor support
Extended money-making features for earnings on affiliate programs
Top review list constructor
Catalog constructor
Top tables constructor, top charts constructor
MDTF plugin is bundled with extended support. This plugin allows making your site content is searchable by taxonomies and meta fields.
Visual composer is bundled with more than 20 custom content modules
AccessPress Post PRO is bundled with theme. This plugin adds user submit to your site.
Tons unique short-codes such as: categories archive, reveal buttons, countdowns, price tables and offer lists.
Automatic auto contents short-code
User login/register popups
Extended user review system

WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes

5 teaching plugins should be included in WordPress education themes

October 21, 2015

WordPress is one of the most used platforms for academic researchers and the professionals who teaching online. To improve usability and productivity of WordPress education themes, there are interesting plugins designed for the field of education.

A plugin is basically an application that complements the functionality or content. They are generally easy to install and here you can find some of the best ones developed for WordPress education themes.

Top 5 teaching plugins should be included in WordPress education themes

1. Class Blogs

The Class Blogs plugin simplifies the creation of content in a classroom blog with all students. It facilitates organization and analysis of the work created by your students. With this plugin you can show:

Entries and comments recently published by students
A tag cloud formed from the labels used by students in their entries
YouTube videos embedded on student input
A randomly selected image entry from students
Links to watch the inputs of each student

One of the features making the plugin suitable for responsive WordPress education themes is that it provides additional management pages for teachers and students, which you’ll see when logging to create new content. These admin pages allow users to:

View a table with all input and feedback from students sorted by date
View the number of words on the inputs and comments of students, broken down by week
Disable comments on all current and future entries
The student also has an additional management page where they can:
Create a nickname or changing your username
See how many words they have written this week

This plugin also includes a new aesthetic for the blog in order to submit entries from students in a more clear and easy way to navigate. Instead of displaying the entries sorted by date, the main page shows the most recent entries grouped by student, with new content always appears first.

2. mTouch Quiz

The mTouchQuiz plugin allows you to add polls to your WordPress education themes and tests in order to see whether students have understood a topic or motivate a game show through questions and answers. This plugin is very versatile and very easy to use and adapted to mobile devices so that students can respond at any time. It also allows you to:

Include tracks when choosing the wrong answer
Add a detailed explanation of the solution
Offer multiple correct answers
Specify when correct answers are shown
Specify the number of attempts to answer the question
Specify the score achieved on each question

3. WP Document Revisions

Revisions Document WP is a document manager that allows a group of students or teachers to work together to edit files of any format (spreadsheets, text, images, etc.).

The plugin lets users see in an instant the progress of a team and change history, even with the option to return to a previous version. Also students can receive RSS notifications of any changes in the document. Each document is assigned a URL that can be private, password protected or public. It is highly customizable and very useful in the work of a thesis. So it should be included in WordPress education themes.

4. WP LaTeX

Write equations and formulas in a blog or web page can be complicated, but this plugin combines the power of LaTeX and simplicity of WordPress to teach mathematics in the classroom blog. If you want to create the best WordPress education themes with mathematical features then this plugin will help.

5. WP Hide Post

WP Hide Post allows full control over the visibility of any blog post on a WordPress site. By default, any input is immediately displayed on front page in the first position. Sometimes you may want to give information to students through the blog to expand a curriculum issue, but it does not mean that the entry has a prominent place on the blog. This plugin allows you to hide that entry on the home page and students can only access it if having its link.

What is the essential plugin that you have used for your WordPress education themes? Share yours now!

Featured, WordPress Themes

WordPress video blog themes for selling multimedia products

October 21, 2015

Since WordPress is popular and comes with a huge amount of themes and plugins, many businesses and persons are using this platform to manage their websites, where they sell multimedia products such as interactive digital television, interactive DVD movies or video games.

In line with that trend, today we will review three WordPress video blog themes which allow you to easily display and sell your multimedia products on your WordPress site.

3 WordPress video blog themes for selling multimedia products

Marketify

Marketify is one of the modern and clean WordPress video blog themes which are suitable for you to promote and sell multimedia products online. You can use this premium WordPress video blog theme in creating any type of online shop selling photographs, audio files, videos, or any other type of multimedia products. This video theme is fully responsive and mobile-friendly, so potential buyers or site visitors can access your site using computer or handheld device. Marketify is also highly customizable, its Theme Customizer will allow you to change the font, color, background image and many other elements of the theme. Being one of the popular WordPress video blog themes on ThemeForest, it is integrated with social logins to expedite the process of website registration, and has reviews and rating feature to help potential purchasers see how other customers think about the product. Also, the theme includes audio and video previews, front end submissions, wish-list and commissions splitting for sellers. Additionally, it supports Easy Digital Downloads add-on for the full marketplace functionality.

SquareCode

SquareCode is a premium WordPress video blog theme suitable for promoting and selling multimedia products such as videos, music, games, digital art, photos and so on. It is packed with functional features such as product price, inline Ajax cart, product information panel, sales count, preview buttons, social share links, product reviews and many more. With the full support for many add-ons of Easy Digital Downloads plugin, the theme let you easily sell multimedia products online. In addition, this theme is built with rock-solid codes and best SEO practices in mind. It also enables you to add and remove plugins. By using SquareCode, one of the great responsive WordPress video blog themes, you can easily create your own tech shop or create a multimedia marketplace.

Bernate

Bernate is a minimalist premium WordPress video blog theme loaded with the powerful functionalities and features necessary for setting up an online shop for multimedia products. This theme is fully responsive, so your website will look beautiful and work flawlessly on any types of mobile devices. Bernate provides you with advanced theme options such as logo options, unlimited skins and various theme styles. It allows choosing from three different portfolio project layouts and come with an advanced portfolio video player. This is also one of the WordPress video blog themes which are built with SEO practices in mind and include child theme.

Featured, WordPress Themes

Responsive WordPress theme for videos – Responsive, what is it?

October 20, 2015

The development in the web design world is going at a fast pace. Lately, we see a trend of responsive WordPress theme for videos popping up everywhere. Responsive? What does this mean? Are these responsive themes better than others? Should your theme be responsive? Or is it simply just another passing fad?

A responsive video theme responds to the device the site is viewed. In short, by using a responsive WordPress theme for videos and images, your video site will look good on a regular PC or laptop, tablet and mobile phone, without any help from additional WordPress plugins. Previously, we do know plugins like WPtouch which makes your site fit for mobile phones. But such solutions are still somewhat limited because they are built to support one specific device: the mobile phone. Even earlier, we saw that even complete mobile websites were built, mostly by larger companies. The arrival of the responsive themes is the success for anyone to build a website that supports multiple devices.

Short History of Responsive Design

The term of responsive web design has introduced only on a few years recently. Since then, this term has rapidly become a hot topic that is followed by many people in the discussions and the applications. Responsive web design aims to give the users an optimal experience, regardless of the device that they are using. And hopefully, we do it so well that it even applies to future devices.

Responsive is one of the first responsive themes which are available for free on the official WordPress.org website. The theme is very popular and available in many languages. Though the structure of Responsive is quite simple, you can still use it as a simple WordPress theme for videos and images.

Why Should You Choose a Responsive WordPress Theme for Videos?

Opinions differ widely. The fact is that when you look at the visitors of your video website with a tool like Google Analytics, you’ll see that a lot of users who do not surf with a standard PC or laptop.

About 10% of the site visitors come from mobile devices. By using a responsive WordPress theme for videos, you will not have to be worry much about the way your video website looks.

Where to Find Responsive WordPress Video Themes

So now, you do want to take advantage of this new development? Fortunately, there is a wide range of responsive WordPress theme for videos and images on the market. You can choose the right WordPress theme for videos on the websites of reputable theme providers or marketplaces such as ThemeForest, Mojo Themes and Creative Market.

And here are some examples of responsive WordPress video themes on ThemeForest:

True Mag – WordPress Theme for Videos and Magazine
NewsTube – Magazine Blog & Video Theme
VideoPro – Video WordPress Theme

Of course, if you do not want to buy a commercial WordPress theme for videos, you can also choose a free one. The matter is what you do after that. Hope you are successful with your project. Enjoy!

Featured, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips

How Should We Develop Specialty WordPress Themes for Education?

October 20, 2015

Accompany with the popularity of WordPress platform, the number of WordPress themes and plugin also gain considerable fame in the market. The theme purchasers now have various choices for their websites. However, sometimes a general or multipurpose theme will not work for your project. In that case, you need a specialty theme whose design and functionality work together and fit your specific purpose.

There are a lot of different specialty themes for WordPress. But in the scope of this writing, we only take a look at WordPress themes for education. In particular, we will point out a few things you should consider when making specialty WordPress themes for education website. Hopefully it will help you who are new in the theme development.

How should we build specialty WordPress themes for education?

If you decide to develop a specialty theme for education field, you might want to consider the following things.

Use Actions and Filters to Make Your Education Theme Extendable

Filters and actions are part of the WordPress Plugin API; however, it does not mean that WordPress themes for education website cannot benefit from them. Currently, most of the popular WordPress theme frameworks use filters and actions in order that other developers are able to extend the frameworks. You can also follow their guidelines and make your education theme extendable with those hooks.

Make Your Education Theme Ready for Child Themes

If you want to diversify your theme’s design options, then make it ready for child themes. Build your base education theme and create child themes to provide users with different designs.

Use a PHP Library

If you feel that other WordPress themes for education are able to benefit from a part of your theme’s functionality, you should offer it as a plugin and require your users to install by using a PHP library. Though in most cases, the functionalities of specialty themes cannot be used with any other theme, you should keep in mind that other developers may build themes after you release your specialty theme. So, it is necessary to separate your theme’s functionality from its design.

Some Examples of Specialty WordPress Themes for Education

There are many popular specialty WordPress themes for education website on the Internet. And the following are some of them. You can easily find out these WordPress themes for education by visiting ThemeForest marketplace and go for WordPress > Education category.

WPLMS – Learning Management System Theme
Pekaboo – WordPress Theme for Child Education
Academy – Learning Management System Theme
Grand College – WordPress Theme for Education
University – WordPress Education, Event and Course Theme

If you have any question about this topic, please leave your comments below. Also, share this post with your friends if you like it.

Featured, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tutorials

Guidelines for Choosing a Premium Responsive Video Theme for WordPress

October 19, 2015

Buying a premium responsive video theme for WordPress is usually safer than using a free one. However, that does not mean you cannot still go wrong. To end up with the right premium responsive video sharing theme and not just an expensive mistake, you should follow the guidelines below.

Guidelines for Picking a Premium Responsive Video Theme for WordPress

Select a video theme whose price stay balance with your actual income. In other words, you should estimate the revenue can be generated through your purchased theme. This is a note for both businesses and freelancers: get the responsive video theme you need and make sure you are generating enough revenue to justify it.

Only purchase the responsive video sharing theme of the most reputable WordPress authors or marketplaces. There are a lot of theme authors out there who do not care about their products’ quality; instead, they just care about sales. Avoid falling for persuasive copy or ads. You should read the purchasers’ reviews and comments, and choose an author/marketplace with a great track record for excellence. Also, you need to check for their business vital signs to ensure that they are active.

Check out the theme author’ support system to ensure that it meets your needs. Every premium responsive video theme comes with the author’s support. However, not all support teams are good enough to satisfy your demands. You should find the one with a good reputation for customer satisfaction. There is nothing worse than waiting around while your support ticket is unnoticed for days.

Choose a responsive video sharing theme that matches your content. In particular, you need to determine which post formats you want to publish on your website, how many columns your site layout will have, whether you need an image slider or not, and many more.

Finally, select a responsive video theme with portability in mind. This is very important. Do not let yourself get trapped by features which cannot be ported to other themes. If you are forced to switch to another theme, then you will encounter a big problem.

Quality Premium Theme Examples

Here are two of popular responsive WordPress video themes in 2015. Just experience their demos and pick the right one or get ideas for your video websites.

True Mag – Responsive WordPress Video Blog Theme

True Mag is a modern and clean WordPress theme for video blog, video portfolio and magazine. This responsive video theme is built with the best practices of UI, UX and SEO. It also comes with great features for videos: Built-in Video Ads plugin, Video Short-codes, Video Auto Play, Front-end Video Submission and Self-hosted Video Support.

NewsTube – Responsive Magazine Blog & Video Theme

This is a clean and fully responsive theme for blogs, online magazines and video websites. It comes with flexible layouts and extensive Theme Options panel. The responsive video theme also supports videos from popular video sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo. NewsTube allows you to create great video playlists and channels, as well as your users to submit videos from front-end.

Older Posts

Newer Posts

Archives

Feature list

Tips to speed up your education WordPress theme

Use custom fonts in the right way

Check for broken links or missing files

Avoid utilizing unnecessary plugins

Combine multiple CSS files

Use image sprites

Place JS & CSS files in the right locations

3 best WordPress themes for video magazine

1. BuzzBlog

2. Jarida

3. REHub

Top 5 teaching plugins should be included in WordPress education themes

1. Class Blogs

2. mTouch Quiz

3. WP Document Revisions

4. WP LaTeX

5. WP Hide Post

3 WordPress video blog themes for selling multimedia products

Marketify

SquareCode

Bernate

Short History of Responsive Design

Why Should You Choose a Responsive WordPress Theme for Videos?

Where to Find Responsive WordPress Video Themes

How should we build specialty WordPress themes for education?

Use Actions and Filters to Make Your Education Theme Extendable

Make Your Education Theme Ready for Child Themes

Use a PHP Library

Some Examples of Specialty WordPress Themes for Education

Guidelines for Picking a Premium Responsive Video Theme for WordPress

Quality Premium Theme Examples

About CactusThemes

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