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Welcome to WPlight.com

Welcome to WPlight.com

Hello everyone and welcome to wplight.com, where we are dedicated in providing you with the latest news, tips and tricks, and essential info to help you get started with WordPress. The site is not only aimed at newbies, but also intermediate level progammers and coders. We provide info and discussion on WordPress, its themes, plugins and also provide in depth tutorials along with pictures to help you easily solve out the problems and get the desired result. Not only that we are always engaged in keeping you up to date with innovations taking place on the Internet and we also provide advise on Hosting (which is better suited for WordPress and your needs). Feel free to ask us anytime.
New users are always welcome to join our team by filling up the contact form with
Subject: Volunteer.

List of 5 best WordPress Responsive themes

List of 5 best WordPress Responsive themes

Are you looking for the 5 best WordPress Responsive themes? Well, besides its robust quantity of incredible plugins, this CMS also has some extremely high quality and attractive responsive themes. However, WordPress has designed a lot of such templates to make your site exceptionally attractive.
Here is the latest list of best 5 WordPress responsive themes. Check them out:

5 best WordPress Responsive themes 2016:

1. ColorMag:

This is a magazine style WordPress responsive theme that is perfect for sites of magazine, newspaper, business, publishing, news or any other kind. ColorMag makes your site very colourful by adding separate colour for different categories.

ColorMag has different spots for listing your own ads and different buttons for social media. Most part of the homepage has been built with widgets reducing time to place a gallery or add a new post. ColorMag is convenient for both beginners and professionals.

ColorMag

2. Himalayas:

The Himalayas WordPress responsive theme is a rock-solid parallax responsive template that expands user friendliness. Your visitors can now find all the required information on one single page instead of moving to other different pages. Himalayas theme is ideal for

  • Corporate
  • Portfolio
  • Agency
  • Freelancers
  • Photography

But you can also use for any other site as well. Some of its exclusive features include –

  1. a. Primary Color Options
  2. b. Multiple Color Options
  3. c. Excellent slider
  4. d. Translation ready feature
  5. e. Advanced typography with 600+ fonts
  6. f. Sticky header menu with both enable/disable feature

Presently, more than 4000 sites are being empowered by this Himalayas WordPress responsive theme.

Himalayas

3. Eighties:

Don’t go by the name, Eighties is actually an extremely modern day style that is progressively enhanced. It’s only the content in the front and center that a user sees. Its speciality is that, until you want to see the menu and sidebar, these would stay out of the way.

Again, header area in this template is quite big to consume a large space taking up most of the screen area. Eighties also gives the option of overlaying texts to inform visitors about your site or anything you want them to know.

Eighties

4. MorningTime Lite:

This responsive theme of WordPress is exclusive for personal blogging with its extremely unique look; equipped with wonderful features. It is an ideal template for displaying daily articles; however, it can also adapt to any niche only to improve the site. Some of the features include –

  • Multilingual feature ready
  • Has a page speed grade of A96%
  • Offers unlimited colour schemes
  • Offers unlimited widget areas
  • Amazing child theme is included
  • Based on Foundation 5
  • Technologies like SASS and Grunt are used.

MorningTime Lite also provides different formats to post your content and attract more visitors.

MorningTime Lite

5. Spacious:

If you are looking for a playful layout of WordPress responsive design, Spacious is one for you. The template gets its name as it has plenty of space for adding more content. It proves to be ideal for blogs, portfolios and even business sites. Spacious is actually a multi-purpose style. The speciality is, it has –

  • 4 page layouts
  • 2 page templates
  • 4 types of blog display
  • 5 custom widgets (that focuses on business template)
  • 13 widget areas
  • Wide and Boxed layout

Spacious


So, which is your favourite from this list of 5 best WordPress responsive themes?

List of 5 Best WordPress Plugins of 2016

List of 5 Best WordPress Plugins of 2016

Good news! The list of 5 best WordPress Plugins 2016 is here!

WordPress is known as an incredible and most popular Content Management Systems today because of its strong number of plugins enabling users to both customize and optimize their websites. Very recently, it has also crossed the mark of 25% in market share worldwide.

Although WordPress keeps on continuously modifying and developing their plugins, here are the best 5 of 2016. Let’s have a look:

5 best WordPress Plugins 2016:

1. WooCommerce: For eCommerce

woocommerceWooCommerce continues to remain at the top even in 2016. This very popular WordPress plugin is specifically for eCommerce that lets you sell your products and services with ease. The exclusive features include –

  • Can sell anything (real products, digital downloads, subscriptions and anything)
  • Sell anywhere in any country
  • 100% open source; hence highly developer friendly
  • Audited by plugin security leader Sucuri for security code
  • Can handle any payment mode
  • Powerful reporting options enable monitoring the sales anytime.

Around 30% of online stores are powered by WooCommerce. With its more than 300 free as well as paid extensions, a WooCommerce store can easily be enhanced with huge number of integrations and features.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/woocommerce/

2. Yoast SEO: For SEO

Out of all SEO plugins in WordPress, Yoast SEO is the uncontested champion worldwide for better SEO. It provides –

  • Stepwise instructions on every single aspect of SEO
  • Real-time feedback and content analysis
  • Snippet editor feature
  • Numerous optimization options
  • Easy to edit robots.txt and .htaccess file using Files editor

wordpress seo by yoast

You can get advanced features and support in the premium Yoast SEO plugin. Some of them are – redirect manager, all types of social previews, multiple focus keywords, etc.
While premium package has to be purchased, you can download the free version. This plugin can be conveniently used by both professionals and novices.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

3. W3 Total Cache: For caching

W3 Total Cache is the best WordPress plugin to optimize performance of browser, object, page, database, CDN support and minify.

  • It massively increases the loading speed of your site by creating cached HTML files.
  • W3 Total Cache can combine JavaScript files and CSS into small and compressed versions.
  • Transparent CDN management using theme files, media library and WordPress.
  • It has JavaScript embedding (non-blocking)
  • Caching in disc or memory
  • Minifies feeds, pages and posts

w3 total cache

With W3 Total Cache, you now don’t have to change any theme, template or content for a better user experience.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/

4. Redirection: For Redirecting Traffic

The best in redirecting traffic, this WordPress plugin is capable of managing as many as 301 redirects. It also keeps a track of 404 errors, interestingly without having to know Apache.
Redirection is reputed and best for affiliate links that are personally branded. Other features include –

redirections plugin

  • Can direct all URLs besides those that don’t exist
  • Provides complete regular expression support
  • Redirection statistics notifies the number of redirection occurrences and other related information.

The redirects are done based on login status, referrer and to random pages. Redirection is extremely useful when you are:

  • migrating pages from your old website
  • changing the WordPress directory installation

This plugin is available 100% free.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

5. Wordfence Security: For Security

Wordfence Security is that plugin of WordPress providing top-class security to your website and protecting it from attacks like malware and hacks.

  • Alerts immediately whenever the site is compromised
  • Provides real-time traffic view and attempts of hack

wordfence security

It also comes with Premium API key enabling scheduled scans, country blocking and password auditing. Wordfence Security checks whether your IP address is used for Spamvertizing. This WordPress plugin is also available for free.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordfence/
With these best 5 plugins of WordPress, it’s time to expand beyond!

Burning Feed and User Email Subscriptions

Burning Feed and User Email Subscriptions

RSS (Rich Site Summary, previously known as Really Simple Syndication) is a way for net savy users to stay in touch with the news and what’s going on their favorite websites in a quick way.

Unlike Business sites, blogs and news sites always keep getting updates and we cannot go to 50 sites and read everything on every day. This is where RSS comes in handy as it gives summary of each update on the website. Users subscribe to feeds and then use Google reader and other RSS reader applications to stay in touch. If they like the news/post they can open it from within RSS reader and go to site. This helps save time and also bandwidth.

Let’s see how we can easily burn a feed for our website or blog and manage it. The search Engine Giant Google, gives us an easy way to do that.

Step 1: Go to http://feedburner.google.com/ and Sign in

It will ask you for your Google username and password (which is same as your GMAIL).

Step 2: You will see a Burn a feed and then an empty field below it. You have to type your site’s address there. Click “Next”

Feedburner Tutorial 1

Feedburner Tutorial 2

Step 3: You will see Identify Feed Source screen and usually it will give you back two fields for feed. First one is simply site’s feed which is for site’s updates, second is for comments if you want to see comments in feed. We will choose site here and click next.

Example: https://wplight.com/feed

It will tell your feed title and address of feed where people can find your feed.
An example would be: http://feeds.feedburner.com/wplight/xbYF
It will show you a congrats screen informing you that your feed is live.

Feedburner Tutorial 3

You can go to that address to check and it will show you list of programs with which you can subscribe to feed.

Feedburner Tutorial 4

Coming back to Congrats screen, you can go to add additional feedburner stats from options or you can skip to feed management from here. Take some time to explore from here.

Email / Newsletter Subscribe

Now here some users might also want that their subscribers will get email whenever there is new update on the website. It is just like a newsletter which will pop in their inboxes when any updates goes in feed.
Here’s how we allow subscribers to get mail:
Go in feed management. You will see four tabs here:
Analyze (You will see subscribers and other stats here)
Optimize (You can manage podcasting and also itunes settings for your feed from here)
Publicize (Feed Counts and email subscriptions along with options of republishing your feed as an HTML page)
Troubleshootize (You can get tips and help to fix problems in your feed and ping it from here)

We go to Publicize section and click on Email Subscriptions which appear on left side in blue.

Feedburner Tutorial 5

Feedburner Tutorial 6

WE click on the activate button so that we allow users to subscribe by email.
It will show us the subscription code which we can insert on our site so that when users click on that they will be redirected to FeedBurner email subscription where they enter their email and confirm the request.
Copy the code and insert it on the website wherever you want it to appear. Scroll down the page and click save.

Email Subscribe for Genesis Theme Users

Those using Genesis theme, can install the Genesis eNews Extended plugin to easily add mail subscribe form to their sites. The Genesis eNews which came built-in the Genesis framework is now deprecated since Genesis 1.9 was launched. So we use this plugin.

After you install this plugin you can go to widgets and you can put the Genesis eNews Extended widget to your desired sidebar. It will open up a list of options which you have to fill.

Feedburner Tutorial 7

The title will be the title of widget. Then the text which you want to be shown in the subscribe form. It will then ask you for your Feedburner ID. To find the ID, you go to Feedburner page and you go to the My Feeds section, which is usually shown right after you sign in. Then you click on the website feed of your site (Yes you can have more than one feeds here and each will have different id).
Open up the desired feed. In the URL Address bar, you will see your id, it will appear like this.
http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/dashboard?id= xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The xxx after the Id= is your Feedburner ID. Insert it in the widget of the plugin, and VIOLA! It works!!!

Your email subscribe form is ready and whenever you post something new on your site, you don’t have to worry about sending emails to each user you know.

StudioPress Themes (Genesis Framework)

StudioPress Themes (Genesis Framework)

Theme frameworks are designed to help the developers quickly churn out updates and create various themes without losing the main functionality.
StudioPress is a well-known company known for its famous Genesis Framework on which all of its themes are built. The themes are search-engine optimized and provide security along with regular updates to both theme and framework. Mark Jaquith who is a security expert and core WordPress developer has also made sure that Genesis Framework gets unbeatable security.

Studiopress offers over 40+ themes, which means a good variety available to check from. The theme used here on our site is “News” child theme based on the Genesis Framework. It is called child theme because it needs the Genesis framework to be installed first to run on. The themes of Studiopress can be so different that you cannot tell from first sight whether they are WordPress or HTML. Like for example in the pictures below:

Casinos Europe (casinoseurope.com) with the Genesis – News theme:

casinos in europe

EU Internet Marketing (eu-internet-marketing.com) with the Genesis – Freelance theme:

theme 01

Different themes can be customized by going to the genesis tab on the left side. You can toggle the automatic updates and change the color style of theme.

Theme Colors:

Many themes come with different colors to go with. The “News” theme comes up with upto 7 interchangeable colors. You can see the difference in the pics below.
Blue Color:
colors 1

Pink Color:
colors 2

Layout Style:

Not only the colors but you can change the layout to show in up to 6 different styles.
Content-Sidebar, Sidebar-Content, Content-Sidebar 1-Sidebar 2, and others as shown in pic below (the first one is the Content-Sidebar layout):

default layout 3

Navigation settings (Menu):

You can choose whether to include primary or secondary menu or to eliminate both as per your liking. There is a fancy dropdowns option that looks pretty cool when you have sub-menu’s within menus. If you are thinking of using a custom menu as for example in header right side, you can disable the primary and secondary menu and enable custom menu from widgets.

navigation menu 4

Content and Blog:

You can select how the posts show up in archives, whether you want to show their content or excerpts and whether the featured image be included or not. You can even set the post characters limit so that each post excerpt is of a specific number of characters. The blog page can be chosen to show specific categories, or exclude specific categories and show all others and limit the number of posts to show on each page.

Header and Footer Scripts:

Scripts can be inserted in header and footer without going through the code thanks to the framework. For example we can insert the Google Analytics script in the Header section in Framework.

header and footer script 5

Other Features:

The themes are ad ready, offering font changes, and SEO options out of the box along with featured posts which can completely change the look and feel of your site. Genesis offers custom widgets which offer flexibility and ease of use for new users. Custom widgets like Genesis – Tweets displays your latest tweets, while Genesis – User Profile shows the author profile. It offers breadcrumbs which are helpful not only for crawler bots but also users. The themes are mobile responsive and offer a lot of features. Even if you find some features missing as Contact Form or Slider, you can install them from Plugins easily. In fact Genesis Slider is a whole separate plugin which offers good compatibility with the Genesis Child themes.

License and Support:

You can get all the themes and Genesis Framework for around 250$ which in my opinion is a super saving. If you buy the framework and themes, they offer 100% GPL for everything that has been used, whether it’s CSS, PHP, design, XHTML or other element. So that means you can also develop your own themes based on the Genesis Framework easily. If you are having trouble with any of the StudioPress themes, you can join their community support forums where users like us can help you get through your problem and find a solution. If you are experiencing any problems with Genesis you can contact us by clicking here.

Conclusion:

In my opinion Genesis Framework and themes are the best that money can buy. Featuring regular updates and improved security and functionality, I am unable to leave this and try any other. You can go to Studiopress.com to view their themes collection.

How to Search and Install WordPress Themes

How to Search and Install WordPress Themes

WordPress has Twenty Twelve installed by default. You can change it by going in the Appearance tab on the left in Dashboard.

theme change

As you move your mouse over to the Appearance tab, a new menu will pop up, displaying a variety of options, including the first option “Themes”. Click on Themes, and then it will open the “Manage Themes” tab. There is a tab on its side namely “Install Themes”, click it. It will give you option to search. You can search theme by color combination, columns (number of columns), width (Fixed or flexible) and even search by features and subject of your blog.

install theme tutorial

Not only that you can also upload your own created themes or the downloaded premium themes. You can view featured themes (that are currently trending on WordPress) and also see the newest themes on the block by clicking on newest tab. The Recently Updated tab shows the themes that have been updated recently. A nice way to look at the themes which are getting updates regularly.

After you search a theme you are given three options. You can install it right away or you can preview it before installing and you can also view details of the theme.

theme details

As you click on install theme it will ask you to activate afterwards as in the picture below. Activate it and Enjoy.
theme install

Each theme you install gives you different options. Some give you header customization and menu option while some don’t support them. If header is changeable the header option along with theme options will appear in the sub-menu of Appearance tab.

theme options

You have to play with the theme options which vary with each theme so we cannot provide details for them for now as there are over thousands of themes. However feel free to send us your queries in mail and we will reply you as soon as possible.

How to Search and Install WordPress Plugins

How to Search and Install WordPress Plugins

As soon as you get bored with the normal functionality of the website and want to step further in the features and functions area, you go ahead and install the WordPress Plugins. There are over 22,000 plugins out there waiting for you. To search or install a plugin, you have to go to Plugins Tab that appears on the left in the Dashboard below the Appearance Tab.
Plugin Tab

Click on the Plugins Tab, and on the right you will see a new open tab, which will show you the currently installed plugins. Below each name will be a button to either activate or deactivate them. On the right side will be their description and creator name. Also there will be an option to visit the publisher’s site. You can see these in the picture below:

Plugin Tab options

As you can see in the picture, all the plugins here are activated. You can click on the “Add New” button in the upper left to add new plugins. You can also perform a search within the currently installed plugins (if you have installed too many). To delete a plugin you have to first deactivate it, and then the delete option will be available in the same place where we see the “Deactivate” and “Edit” buttons. You can also edit the plugin files if you are good at coding stuff.

As you click on the “Add New” button you will be presented with new screen (similar to themes install screen)

install plugins
You can search plugin according to your needs. If you need plugin for search engine optimization, you can search by keyword “SEO” and you will find lots of plugins. You can also try out by clicking the popular tags which appear below the search field. Click on Facebook and it will open a list of Facebook plugins.

You can also upload plugins as you did themes by just clicking on the upload button, searching for your files and uploading them. You can view featured and popular plugins too. As a starting example go ahead and try out a plugin by typing in the search field, “statpress visitors”. Install it by clicking on “Install Now” button. This plugin helps you in viewing visitor and spider statistics. It is great if you want to analyze which keywords are bringing traffic to your site and where you need focus on. It also tells you which browser was the user using and whether the visitor subscribed to feed or not.

Statpress Visitors (Version 1.5.3)

Statpress Visitors (Version 1.5.3)

Statpress Visitors provides visitor statistics for your website based on WordPress. This plugin after its installation makes a separate tab in the Dashboard left side, below the “Settings” tab. As you move your mouse over, it opens up a whole list of options to view.
statpress options 1

Let’s play with the first option. Click StatPressV. You will see a Blue graph being displayed on the right with lots of readings.

Statpress graph 2

As you see in the pic, on the top are the different tabs that were also accessible from the mouse over position on the StatPress tab. If you look below them, you will see Visitors. Then the total number of visitors is shown. On the right side, visitors of Today and Yesterday are shown. Not only visitors but Statpress provides statistics for Visitor RSS Feed Subscribes, pageviews, and spiders that have crawled through the site. Below these is the Average calculated for visitors, rss, pageviews and spiders.

You can now click on latest Hits. Each tab you click will be empty at first until you select the number of rows to show from the dropdown menu. After that you will see the date of visit, time, IP of the visitor, which page he/she viewed from which operating system and which browser. This information is quite useful if you want to know whether your site is accessed more through tablets or PCs and from which country it is more frequently visited.

You can click on the Latest Search Terms to know which keywords got you the visitors so you can concentrate on key areas more and get your potential clients ultimately generating sales if you are running a business/ecommerce site.

latest Search terms 3

In the 6th column are the search terms and in the last is the search engine from which they were referred. To clear the confusion: the site in the example is about funny pictures.

What is WordPress?

What is WordPress?

Licensed under GPL and built primarily on PHP and MySQL WordPress has become a strong content management system since its birth in 2001. It has refined itself into a more stable blogging platform than any other out there.

Installation:

wordpress logo wplightThe best thing about it is that even computer newbies can easily use it and build up a site in a matter of minutes. With its popular 5-minute Installation (that is available on their website and here also), setting up a WordPress site is as easy as 1-2-3, depending on if your host supports it. If the host is running atleast PHP version 5.2.4 or higher that means it supports WordPress. You can talk to your host and enquire about it. You can also use third party software that is sometimes available in the “CPanel” provided to you by your host. Software like “Fantastico”, Softaculous” and “1-Click Install” is usually provided by some hosts to ease the installation process.

Features:

WordPress offers users easy features such as option to change theme of site, and plugins which help you to achieve many objectives which were not possible before without going to the code and editing it. However that does not mean that we cannot mess with code at all. We have the option to tinker and tweak the code to our liking. In fact the themes that come bundled in WordPress are quite open for editing and tweaking to your needs if you can handle the code. You can also edit the plugins. The site header can be changed easily by going to header section.
You can change the visibility of posts that show up on the index page. You can also change the permalink structure so that the future links of posts/pages are made as you want them to be. By default they are made by number form.
For Example: abc.com/?p=123

Inserting a picture or movie in WordPress is quite easy. After clicking on the media upload button, you practically have to just drag and drop the file and that’s it. There are two editors while writing post.
1. Visual (WYSIWYG)
2. HTML (If you want to add/edit some html coding in the post you can go from here)

Note: With WordPress version 3.5, HTML editor is now named as “Text”.

The WordPress community is a strong growing community which is ready to help whenever you get stuck. They are friendly and provide support free of cost with in-depth tutorials and details.

Development with Time:

Michel Valdrighi (the founder of wordpress) started with blog system named as b2 cafelog (which was the founding stone for this unique blogging system). With the passage of time, WordPress saw the birth of many features in it. The UI has changed much since the start. The Plugins feature entered in the early version 1.2, while the Static Page and Themes came with the version 1.5. Also introduced in that version was the user-role function which helps us to define the user levels and permissions.

The Dashboard was introduced in version 2.5 and then the built-in theme installer came in version 2.8. In 2011 we were introduced with the Admin Bar, which helped us to create new post/page without going to the dashboard, and also helped in providing shortcut to Themes, Widgets and Plugins page right from the Admin Bar.

With the recent launch of WordPress 3.5 (code-named “Elvin”), Twenty Twelve theme has been bundled in it along with many other enhancements. The dashboard has become HiDPI (retina display ready). Screen Reader is supported more which opens more ease of access for the visually impaired. There has been complete overhauling on the Media section with major updates to Media Uploader and Gallery. As soon as you install/upgrade version 3.5 you are presented with a new Welcome Screen which offers help if you get confused. The color picker has also been updated.

Conclusion:

WordPress is by far the best blogging and content management platform that we have seen in years. As time goes by it is only getting better and better. Most of the popular sites are opting to it due to its friendly user interface and ease of access. Sites like of BBC and Casinoseurope, Tribune Media Group, Best Buy Mobile and Adobe Blogs, are already on the WordPress bandwagon. So When are you going for it?