cactusthemes, Author at CactusThemes Official blog

Reviewing some university sites using educational WordPress theme

September 29, 2015

WordPress has become a convenient tool for education organizations to create and manage their own website. In addition to taking advantage of free WordPress education blog themes, these organizations also choose to use premium ones or hire a designer to develop their own educational WordPress theme. And you may be interested in taking a deep look at their websites in order to draw inspiration for designing your site.

In this article, we review six WordPress sites of universities and colleges all over the world. Hope this will help you get more ideas.

Some university sites using educational WordPress theme

Nicholls State University This university is located in Thibodaux, Louisiana. It provides educational opportunities and services to the people in the center of Cajun country and beyond.

Nicholls State University is powered by WordPress Multisite with a custom WordPress education course theme using Suzy, SASS, and a variety of open source software in order to create a responsive education site. The Nicholls website takes advantage of WordPress’ ease of use to meet their needs.

Eastman School of Music

Eastman has been known for the high standards of scholarship, performance, creativity, and teaching. Its illustrious list of alums serves as a testament to a legacy that began around 80 years ago.

The school uses WordPress as a content management system and its site network is largely powered by WordPress Multisite with a custom educational WordPress theme and plugins.

Solo Practice University

Solo Practice University is a premium membership site powered by WordPress/BuddyPress. It focuses on building a professional and educational community for lawyers as well as law students.

With a focus on education for lawyers, this website takes advantages of the blogging features of WordPress Multisite and the social features of BuddyPress plugin. There are more than 40 virtual classrooms in the network. Each of those classes is a WordPress blog with a custom educational WordPress theme enhanced with multimedia plugins. Also, each classroom has a study group (powered by BuddyPress) where faculty and students can communicate with one another in many different ways. If students take part in the study group of any course, they will receive an automatic email notification every time a new lecture is posted for the course.

FIU College of Engineering and Computing

FIU College of Engineering and Computing (CEC) is the premier university in engineering and information science, ideally located in Miami.

This is a public research university with vibrant and student centered learning environment.

Georgia State University

Georgia State is an enterprising urban public research university. Powered by WordPress Multisite, it is a network of over 150 sites. This allows visitors to discover all information about Georgia State, from its nine colleges and institutes, more than 100 fields of study to its libraries and global engagement.

UCF College of Medicine

UCF College of Medicine is a medical school located in the United States. Its program epitomizes innovation, high-tech learning tools and a pioneering spirit to educate young doctors and scientists in a new and better way.

The UCF College of Medicine’s utilizes WordPress to develop a website emphasizing its high-tech learning environment. It uses a custom educational WordPress theme and customized backend to create a site which is easy to edit and maintain.

Featured, WordPress Themes

Video Theme WordPress 2015: Premium or Free?

September 28, 2015

For the past few years, video blogging has emerged as a new favorite trend in blogs and websites. And of course, such a strong web service like WordPress has so far developed various themes, both free and premium ones, as a response to this need. And ever since, there is also an ongoing controversy regarding the choice of one type over another. With this article, we will try to identify whether a free or premium item will make the best video theme WordPress 2015.

Premium WordPress video themes 2015

TrueMag – one of the most voted WordPress video themes 2015

It is generally believed that the premium themes are always good, as its name is self-evident. However, let’s discover both sides of the premium so that we can have a better overall perspective of it.

PROS

CONS

– Support. Overall speaking, premium video themes are always accompanied by exclusive support from the development team.

– Frequent updates.

– Unique features. Particularly for video blogging, users all need to be equipped with supporting features to enhance their visitors’ experience.

– Customization. Unlike the simply designed free video themes, premium ones offer users a high level of personalization to meet users’ needs and requirements.

– Security. Security is usually not the top priority in terms of free themes. However, when themes come with a price, this issue is always covered by the developers to ease their users’ worries.

– Budget. It is premium; thus, it comes with a price. This should be a great consideration for any users’ budget for their video blog/magazine. Surely enough, these themes will not fit free vloggers who have no specific commercial target in blogging.

– No official review. Premium WordPress video themes are developed by individuals or specific teams. Thus, users should bear in mind that there is no official WordPress repository.

– Discontinue. Users should also be informed that they will lose their money in case the author decides to discontinue their product. This is such a huge risk for any investment in a charged video theme.

deTube used to be among the top video themes on WordPress, but now it’s gone.

Free WordPress video themes 2015

A free-of-charge theme can be a reduced version of a premium theme, or a portfolio-related product of some new authors. Although they are all free, the features, in many cases, can be really impressive. Let’s check out the merits and demerits of these free versions.

PROS

CONS

– FREE! Of course the most prominent advantage is its free-of-charge nature. Especially for those who just try video blog for fun, these free themes are also a genuine present.

– By-products. Thanks to its prevalence, the plugins and configuration settings of these free themes are relatively well-developed. Particularly in such a special type as video website, these by-products are priceless in enhancing users’ experience.

– Official review. Only the free video themes provided on WordPress Admin are reviewed officially before publication. Thus, a free WordPress video theme must first meet a certain standards to be considered as an accredited free one.

– No warranty. Except free themes accessed through WordPress Admin, other ones from unknown sources are highly risky. It is not only the problem of limited support, but also the possibility of leaked information or mal-codes which can have severe impacts on the website.

– Infrequent updates.

– Less support.

– Lack of uniqueness. As a return for their free-of-charge, video themes WordPress 2015 which are free-of-charge are rather simple or even boring in design. Accordingly, the visual experience of free themes is considerably less significant. Besides, users also have little options in the customization or personalization.

A free video WordPress theme can be not very eye-catching like this.

Closing comments

Either the free or the premium video themes do have both pros and cons. The choice is dependent on users’ particular preferences for their video website/blog. For a professional video magazine, a premium video theme WordPress 2015 will be better-off. In case of an amateur vlogger, just try a free WordPress video theme before making any serious investment. And most importantly, users must carefully reflect on the pros and cons of each type to decide which advantages they want to leverage, and which disadvantages they can trade-off.

Featured, WordPress Themes

Best WordPress themes for video with front-end video submission

September 25, 2015

The following best WordPress themes for video come with front-end submission to allow users to share their images, videos, links, stories and other content.

The themes can be used to share websites such as video sharing, food recipes, info graphics, GIFs, quotes and other things, etc.

Best WordPress themes for video with front-end video submission

SocialChef

SocialChef is a premium WordPress theme for sharing recipes online. This theme is designed for readers to share and swap recipes. It is supported for all devices like Smartphones, tablets, iPad to give readers and followers optimal experience.

It features front-end recipe submission that allows users to submit their recipes, so other users can add content in your site. It allows users to add the preparation time, cooking time, skills, category, ingredients and nutrition facts of the recipes. Moreover, you can add steps of cooking so readers can easily follow each of steps. It also comes with advanced search feature that helps you easily search the results.

The theme is available with 12 color schemes, including a built-in callout bar, styled widgets and splendid social integration. SocialChef enables you to set up a forum for you and your friends to share different recipes together.

Basil Recipes

Basil Recipes is one of the best WordPress themes for video site. It is easy to use with devices like smartphones, tablets, iPads, etc. to provide users fantastic experience.

It comes with free Cooked plugin that allows you to create your own recipe website. It also includes a drag-and-drop recipe builder, unique recipe slider, body page builder, front-end submissions, favorite recipes list, pending recipe manager, user profile, custom login/registration form, nutrition fact, video support, and WooCommerce integration.

Neat

Neat is a minimalist and lightweight viral WordPress theme for video blog. The theme uses Bourbon neat framework that gets your website up and running in minutes. It is coded with clean SaaS for functionality and outstanding usability. This theme is fully responsive and mobile-friendly. Besides, the theme is retina ready to make your content look astounding and attractive on high resolution displays.

Neat comes with an array of color options, more than 600 Google fonts, more than 400 FontWwesome icons, cool post type templates, multiple parallax sections, custom widgets and powerful short-codes. Its highly developed admin panel powered by Redux Framework helps the theme personalize. It is integrated with Visual Composer drag and drop page builder to help you create the page layout. It also comes with Revolution Slider, a premium WordPress plugin that allows you to add unlimited slides with stunning animation via user-friendly interface. Neat is compatible with almost popular WordPress SEO plugins as well as JetPack plugin.

Aruna

Aruna is considered as one of best WordPress theme for video site today. This theme is suitable for unique content sharing websites. It is HTML5 & CSS3 based, fully responsive and retina ready. It just takes 10 seconds to post an article using the theme’s post module, so you can easily build slider posts and more. Aruna is a completely different theme with loads of useful features for content sharing and socializing.

This is a highly customizable WordPress theme with several homepage layouts, unlimited color options and awesome typography and much more.

WordPress Themes

Best WordPress theme for video & magazine on Theme Directory this week

September 24, 2015

Today we take a deep look at Twenty Fourteen, this week’s best WordPress theme for video & magazine on WordPress.org Theme Directory.

Twenty Fourteen is the default theme for WordPress released in 2014. It is knows as a magazine theme which allows users to display their content in a magazine layout. However, you can use it as a video theme to embed and display your favorite videos on your WordPress site.

The theme has a modern, sleek and responsive design and is suitable for content-rich websites. It allows you to highlight specific videos and posts on the home page.

This best WordPress theme for video blog focuses on readability with the balance between line length and line height as well as the use of Lato font, which not only looks great when used in large sizes (like page titles), but also remains elegant in body text. In addition, it is loaded with many useful features that you can see as below.

Features of Twenty Fourteen – Free & Best WordPress Theme for Video Blog

Fixed Header

The theme’s header is fixed to the top of the page. It means that when you scroll down a page, you still can access the header menu directly with no need to scroll back up.

Featured content support

Twenty Fourteen allows you to features six posts on your home page. You are able to display those posts in a grid or a header slider. This will helps your best posts attract more readers and your site grab attention of visitors.

Page Templates

In addition to default page templates, this best responsive WordPress theme for video offers two special page templates, including a full-width page with no right sidebar and a Contributor page for spotlighting the site’s authors.

Widgets

Twenty Fourteen comes with three widget-ready areas: one in the footer and two in the sidebars. The default sidebar is on the left, and an optional sidebar is on the right of the page. Also, the theme provides you with a built-in Ephemera widget to show your latest videos, music audios, links, and much more.

Easy Customization

You can customize the theme easily to create a simple but unique video site. In particular, you are able to set up menus in two locations: a navigation menu in the header area and another menu in the left sidebar. Besides, you can also add a header image and a background image, or change background color as your liking. Nevertheless, remember that the background image may only show on large screens.

Final Thoughts

In general, though Twenty Fourteen is a default theme for WordPress, it still offers you enough features in order to create a simple video site. If you only need to publish video posts, embed videos from YouTube or Vimeo, and show off your latest videos, then Twenty Fourteen is one of the best choices for you. On the contrary, if you want to have a sophisticated video website, go for a premium WordPress video theme to get more advanced features.

Featured, WordPress Plugins

LearnDash – A Plugin Compatible with Best Education WordPress Themes

September 22, 2015

WordPress users who own educational sites are all familiar with LearnDash, a plugin that best education WordPress themes usually support. Now, with LearnDash, you can create learning management system for your own as it provide perfect and complete solution for online courses. At the end of this article, we also mention about another powerful plugin for your preference.

LEARNDASH – LMS plugin compatible with best education WordPress themes

This plugin lets you use any medium to create and deliver your courses. The platform is sale integrated. It includes forums that can be private or public, and also specific course. You can set preconditions and multilevel classes. It has lesson timers, advanced quizzes, group management, multisite, and tons more. It is sensitive and works with any theme in general and any best WordPress themes for online education in particular

It is a demonstration site where you can see what lessons might look like. The structure of the lesson is smooth and easy to navigate. You can see the contents of the course, take the game, and see your achievements. You can define simple or complex hierarchical structure for the courses, and it will label them as complete before allowing students to continue in the course.

This is a premium plugin. The basic package is $99 and includes an unlimited license with 1-year support. The complete package is $129 and adds the pro panel.

GOOD LMS – Learning Management System WordPress Plugin

This is a learning management system and complete course delivery. It has a great appearance and many helpful options to create courses and quiz. The plugin also allows site owners to put a rating system in each course so students can evaluate this one.

The courses show a progress bar so that students know their current position in the course. The course itself may be a mixture of text and video. As the students go through the pages, progress will change to follow.

At the end of the course, the students can take a timed quiz, which can be a combination of multiple choice and written. There is a system of certificates and badges so you can choose the type of recipient students receive at the end of the course. You can see this feature in the plugin demo.

There are several different payment methods, including PayPal, Stripe, Paymill, Authorized.net, bank transfer, etc. You can even have on-site courses and just use the system as a secure means of payment and monitoring. The plugin also have commission rate for instructors.

The plugin costs $30 for use on a single site.

In short, whatever type of school site you choose to build, whether it is an information site or a full online school, WordPress has the best education WordPress themes and tools to make them work and look great. You can add courses to your site, create comprehensive school structure navigation, or create a site with information about the school.

Your turn! Have you created a school website with WordPress? Have you used the plugins compatible with best education WordPress themes that this article mentions here? Or have we missed your favorite? We would like to hear about it in the comments below!

Featured, WordPress Themes

Key features of popular WordPress video themes on ThemeForest

September 21, 2015

ThemeForest is considered one of the major online marketplaces for website templates, where you can find the best WordPress video themes, responsive templates and more. The question is: what makes those themes popular?

This article will summarize some common features of popular WordPress responsive video themes on ThemeForest. Let’s have a look at them and you will understand the reason why those ones become the best-selling video WordPress themes.

Key features of the best WordPress responsive video themes on ThemeForest

Modern and beautiful design

Design is the first thing attracting viewers’ eyes. Also, the best WordPress themes on ThemeForest, including responsive video themes, have an impressive design that get the attention of customers at first sight. They are beautiful from font, color to layouts and images.

Each video theme will give a distinct look and feel to your site, helping your school or training center stand out of the rest.

Clean code

A significant part of WordPress users have the demand for customize themes’ code. They sometimes want to add some CSS or modify PHP codes. Therefore, unless a WordPress theme’s code is clean and well-organized, users may feel difficult to customize it. As a result, they will exclude it from their list.

Fortunately, ThemeForest has its own requirements for WordPress core API, features and assets. Therefore, its themes, especially popular ones, usually have well-organized code.

Powerful video features

Being the best WordPress responsive video themes, they certainly support powerful features for different types of video content. Some of the key features include:

Embed videos from popular video sharing sites (YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, etc.)
Self-hosted video support
Video playlist & video channel
Built-in widgets for video
Video sliders
Short-codes for video
Custom video players support
Video auto-play
Video page layouts

Besides, each popular WordPress responsive video theme on ThemeForest has its own unique video features, which differentiates it from other themes, such as video ads support and video submission.

Easy Customization

One of the attractive features of ThemeForest WordPress themes, especially video ones, is that they offer the easy-to-use Theme Options Panel and drag-drop page builder. This allows you to take full control and easily customize various aspects of your theme – even if you are not tech-savvy. For example, you are able to change page layouts, logo, favicon, fonts, colors and much more without coding knowledge.

Sustainable Item Support

Envato always try to improve all aspects of how buyers get post-sale support on ThemeForest. In particular, they provide better tools and feedback for authors, and a simpler, more convenient process for buyers.

Wrapping it up

This writing explains the features that best-selling WordPress responsive video themes on ThemeForest usually offer, including: impressive design, clean code, powerful video features, easy customization and sustainable technical support.

So, here are six eye-catching ThemeForest WordPress video themes (responsive) which you may want to consider for your video content:

Invictus – Full-screen Photography WordPress Theme
Studiofolio – Versatile Video Blog Theme
Soundboard – Responsive WordPress Music Video Theme
True Mag – WordPress Theme for Video and Magazine
Right Now – Full-width WordPress Video Theme
Clubber – Events, Music & Video WordPress Theme

Featured, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tutorials

Beginners’ guide: How to find the right WordPress video theme on ThemeForest

September 18, 2015

Suppose that you start to redesign your WordPress site and want to turn it into a mobile-friendly, video-focused one. So you visit ThemeForest marketplace, where browses a lot of versatile and high quality themes, in order to find the right theme for your video site. However, the process is not easy because you are challenged by the vast number of themes and templates here.

To help you overcome the challenge, this article will share the process of how to pick the appropriate ThemeForest WordPress video theme.

Find the Right WordPress Video Theme – ThemeForest

First, you should hover over the WordPress tab on the top menu of ThemeForest, and click on a category for the types of layouts you would like to have. If you are a blogger, you may want to look at the Blog/Magazine category.

Next, you hit the Tags widget on the left sidebar and choose “video” tag. Now you may want to sort those WordPress video themes by newest items, trending items, best sellers, best rated or price. The price perhaps is not a big priority because you can get a great WordPress video theme for around $50 and the prices do not go that much lower from there. However, it is important to make sure that those themes are ordered by rating. This helps you avoid buying any item from ThemeForest that has not been purchased at least a double-digit number of times and had five star ratings.

Once you have a shorten list, you should start to review each ThemeForest WordPress video theme by hovering your mouse over it and see a preview before you click. This will save you a lot of time.

If you find one that could be suitable for your video site, you can check its live preview. Also, you should go to the ThemeForest purchase page of the item and look at the purchasers’ comments. This helps you understand more about the theme’s design and functionality, see a lot of problems as well as know whether they are solved.

When checking those comments you can also see URLs of the sites activating this theme. Remember to take a look at those sites so as to see what the ThemeForest WordPress video theme looks like in use. If the theme looks wildly different to the live preview and you are not confident in customizing it, then this one is probably not a good choice for you. In contrast, when you see a video website (using the theme) without the perfect design (like the theme demo) and you still love it, then you should choose this item.

That is all about how to find the perfect WordPress video theme. ThemeForest is no doubt one of the best theme marketplaces; nevertheless, to ensure that the chosen theme is the best suit one, you had better follow those steps.

WordPress Themes

ThemeForest: 4 most popular WordPress video themes of all time

September 17, 2015

After more than 5 years in the field of selling WordPress themes for websites (and, for various content management consoles such as WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and even for the purchase of web template Photoshop) ThemeForest has positioned as a major player in selling this product online. It is said that, ThemeForest is one of the most important online marketplaces for commercial WordPress themes.

What differentiates ThemeForest from other theme marketplaces is its development with so many professional themes increasing at breakneck speed!

So now are you looking for the perfect video theme? WordPress ThemeForest themes will definitely satisfy you.

You will surely enjoy our list of WordPress templates which displays the most ergonomically possible and focuses on the distribution of videos. Most of these themes allow users to easily embed YouTube links, Vimeo links, etc. directly into the WordPress to publish your videos as easily as possible.

Hopefully this list will enlighten you in finding the perfect WordPress theme for you or your company.

BLOG, MAGAZINE, EDUCATION & VIDEO WORDPRESS THEMES

Archives

Reviewing some university sites using educational WordPress theme

Some university sites using educational WordPress theme

Video Theme WordPress 2015: Premium or Free?

Premium WordPress video themes 2015

Free WordPress video themes 2015

Closing comments

Best WordPress themes for video with front-end video submission

Best WordPress themes for video with front-end video submission

SocialChef

Basil Recipes

Neat

Aruna

Best WordPress theme for video & magazine on Theme Directory this week

Features of Twenty Fourteen – Free & Best WordPress Theme for Video Blog

Final Thoughts

LearnDash – A Plugin Compatible with Best Education WordPress Themes

LEARNDASH – LMS plugin compatible with best education WordPress themes

GOOD LMS – Learning Management System WordPress Plugin

Key features of popular WordPress video themes on ThemeForest

Key features of the best WordPress responsive video themes on ThemeForest

Modern and beautiful design

Clean code

Powerful video features

Easy Customization

Sustainable Item Support

Wrapping it up

Beginners’ guide: How to find the right WordPress video theme on ThemeForest

Find the Right WordPress Video Theme – ThemeForest

ThemeForest: 4 most popular WordPress video themes of all time

Top ThemeForest WordPress themes for video

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