Propulsion is a premium WordPress theme perfect for WordPress users who want to create business, e commerce, or a portfolio site. The theme comes with a number of options you can modify the layout, style, colors, and fonts directly from the backend. The theme offers three types of slideshows and twenty one predefined skins.

Best Features:

• Responsive design that can adapt to any device even mobile phones.
• Slideshows: Adaptavia, Fade Slider, Moving Slider that are optimized even for mobile devices.
• Built on top of woocommerce shop plug in and bbs forum plugin ready.

Pro Review – $37

ProReview is the most advanced review theme for WordPress websites. It uses WordPress’ custom post types that make this theme different from conventional review themes, and it has unique settings and display features.

Best Features:

Get full control of your website with the extensive options panel. It is an advanced options panel in which you can easily control the website in just a few clicks. Changeable backgrounds. You have 20 different customizable backgrounds to choose from.
Customizable Header.
100% Cross Browser compatible.

Aware – $35

Aware is an interactive, portfolio type theme perfect for freelancers, web designers, or photographers. The user-interactive interface enhances the most loved portfolio pieces you have.

Best Features

• Aware offers a responsive design that is made to fit mobile phones and tablets.
• It has more than 70 Google fonts, 6 featured section textures, and has featured tabs.

City Desk – $59

City Desk is a WordPress theme which offers four different category layouts, multiple header, multiple templates that are perfect for news-oriented WordPress Sites.

Best Features

• Smart Dimension. This offers a two-dimensional panel divided into sub-navigation items and the most recent topic.
• Ad Module. An advertisement module that includes category-based ad option. Using this option you can display different ads on different categories.
• Fully controllable sliders. You can enable, disable, enable auto rotation, set a number of posts and many other options for the sliders.
• Columnists. Display a slider for every writer you have.

Volt – $35

Volt is a WordPress theme designed for magazines, news, and other editorial ventures. The primary goal of this theme is to provide content readability, so if your website is full of content, this theme is best for you.

Best Features:

• Clean design and WordPress 3.3 ready Supports languages with right to left (RTL) orientation.

• 3 Layout styles

• Three Columnar: 460px content + 300px Sidebar A + 140px Sidebar B
  Two Columnar: 620px content + 300px Sidebar A
  Two Columnar: 780px content + 140px Sidebar B 7 widget areas

• custom page and posts panel
• simple theme options panel

• supports all main browsers

Top 5 Premium WordPress Themes – Collection 1 is a post from: WordPress News: Themes, Plugins & Hacks

10. Google (XML) Sitemaps

Your portfolio site is there for showing how good you are and what you can do. The no #1 way to bring some organic traffic to your site from search engine is to submit a proper sitemap to them. Google XML Sitemaps plugin will generate a special XML sitemap and submit to Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask.com and other major engines. Additionally it notifies all major search engines every time you create a post about the new content.
Visit Google (XML) Sitemaps

9. Sociable
Adding Social Media Buttons to your WordPress Website is an extremely important part of website promotion. Sociable plugin will let you add links to your favorite social bookmarking sites on your posts, pages and in your RSS feed. You can choose from 99 different social bookmarking sites.
Visit Sociable

8. Smush.it
Optimizing Images will make your site load fast and thus reduce page response time. Smush.it will reduce image file sizes and improve performance within WordPress. After installing, it optimizes new images automatically. Your portfolio loads faster and there’s less stress on your bandwidth.
Visit Smush.it

7. GD Star Rating
Star ratings on your portfolio will influence your visitor decision. GD Star Rating plugin allows you to set up rating and review system for posts, pages and comments in your blog. You can set many options for displaying the rating stars, and add widgets into the sidebars for displaying top ratings and other statistics generated by the plugin.
Visit GD Star Rating

6. cformsII
Use cformsII for setting up contact forms on your  portfolio site.   You don’t need to know any programming or write any code. You can visually build forms in the WordPress admin panel. You can set up required fields, default values, and there are plenty of styles to make your form to suit your requirements. Then you can easily insert the forms that you have made into your page. Update your page and you the form is live.
Visit cformsII

5. WordPress Super Cache
Caching is a technique to improve performance of Web applications. Consider a case where you are not caching your pages, then every time a visitor comes to your site, WordPress has to pull together various pieces of information out of a database to put your page together. If you have a high traffic site, this is can really a costly loss of server resources. WP Super Cache plugin will store a copy of each of the pages on your website to serve to most of your users. This plugin will speed up your site and reduce the load on your server. It’s a lot quicker than serving normal WordPress php scripts and a really useful for image-heavy sites like your portfolio.
Visit WordPress Super Cache

4. WEBphysiology Portfolio

This plugin will create an expanded-list styled or a grid-styled page containing images and supporting detail. From wordpress admin you can customize user interface via CSS and there are options for specifying some customizable settings  like the number of entries to display per page. The plugin also supports video media types.
Visit WEBphysiology Portfolio

3. Simple Portfolio
Simple and easy to use plugin to manage your portfolio. You can add your project information and any media from YouTube, code snippets or your wordpress built-in Media Library. You can easily integrate your portfolio items in your theme.
Visit Simple Portfolio

2. HM Portfolio
HM Portfolio allows you to manage a gallery of images from the Add New/Edit Entry Page of the WordPress admin. It also creates a Portfolio post type that can be used to keep it separate from the main blog posts.
Visit HM Portfolio

1. Portfolio Slideshow
Using a slide show to present your portfolio item is an awesome way to stand out from all the others to be noticed. You can easily add a clean and simple javascript slideshow of all image attachments on a post or page to your site. The slideshow integrates well into any design, supports fluid-width themes, and offers lots of options for power users.
Visit Portfolio Slideshow

Create a portfolio site with wordpress is a post from: WordPress News: Themes, Plugins & Hacks

1. WP e-Commerce – a free WordPress Shopping Cart Plugin. Main features: 100% Customizable, easy to  modify templates, different payment gateways, Flexible coupon/discount pricing rules, multiple shipping options, Multi-tier pricing for quantity discounts, 100% Search Engine Friendly, sell Downloadable/Digital Products, easy Catalog Management, simple drag n drop shopping process and more.
2. eShop – is another free e-commerce system for WordPress. Main features includes: easy and simple admin panel, various product listing options, sell downloadable products, add various discount options, various shipping options, different merchant gateways ect.
3. Shopp – is a shopping cart plugin that adds a feature-rich online store to your WordPress site. Main features: Supports both remote and on-site checkout systems, accept multiple offline payment options, theme widgets for drag-and-drop shopping experience customization, Search engine optimized shopping pages, powerful and easy to manage admin, Support for selling digital & physical products and donations. Price: Single domain starts at $55; add-on tools start at $25.
4. Zingiri Web Shop – is a free WordPress plugin to sell products and manage content. Main features include: Ajax powered shopping cart & one page checkout, multilingual support, different payment gateways, Sell digital and physical products ect.
5. Cart66 – is another WordPress ecommerce plugin. Cart66 has a free version called Cart66 Lite, as well as paid version called Cart66 Professional (price: $89—$399). Cart66 comes with a powerful administration panel to do various tasks like set your currency, choose which countries you want to sell to, charge tax by zip code ranges or states, manage orders, view sales reports, and track your inventory ect. Professional version supports recurring payments, subscriptions, and membership access features ect.
6. Ecwid Shopping Cart – is a free shopping cart that can easily be added to any blog.

Excellent WordPress E-Commerce Plugins is a post from: WordPress News: Themes, Plugins & Hacks

1. Free or Self-Hosted?

WordPress has 2 kinds of hosting service, free and self-hosted. If you are unsure, go for the free option first. But do take note that if you are planning to earn money from your site or blog is that to immediately look for a WordPress web hosting provider for site ranking reasons. If you do not do it, your websites rank will start from scratch when you transferred from WordPress free hosting site to a paid hosting provider.

2. Should I buy Domain names in WordPress?

You can have your domain name registered in WordPress for only $14 per year but here are some reasons why you should register a domain name in third-party WordPress web hosting providers rather than on WordPress itself.

1. You are still in WordPress, which means you don’t have the right to put ads in your free site.
2. You won’t get that www. instead yourdomainname.com.

3. Why Opt-in For WordPress Web Hosting Providers?

• First WordPress is free but limted, once your website/blog became popular, WordPress will request you to opt-in for their own hosting service which is 100x more expensive than commercially available web hosting providers.
• Get rid of the WordPress limitations. Do whatever you like put ads, install plugins, or do whatever content you like that WordPress restricts in their free service. Moreover, violate one of WordPress’ TOS and your blog will get deleted.
• Other than limitation, there are also a ton of customization options that WordPress do not add in their free service, having your own web service provider means that you can do whatever customization you like.

• Other than looking professional because of a registered domain name, your website or blog will be faster, can take more visitors without the heavy traffic, you can install plugins and use automated scripts to help with your blog or website.

4. How To Find The Best WordPress Web Hosting Provider?

The first thing to look for is that it must meet or exceed WordPress’ minimum requirements. Next is that it should have the lates version of Apache, MySQL and PHP installed. It should be compatible with the latest WordPress version, or should be able to update to the latest WordPress version without hassles. And it should offer quick install script for easy WordPress installation.

5. What Other Things Should I Look For in A WordPress Web Hosting Provider?

Other than the price, here are the important things to look for in a web hosting provider:

Uptime. The uptime is the availability of the servers. If servers are down most of the time, this is bad for your business. Recommended uptime is 99.9% and should not go lower than that.

Customer Service. In a web hosting provider, having superb customer service is a must. Customer support should not outsource staff,should be knowledgeable at what they do, and should be fast and reliable at all times. Also, have a look at their list of methods where you can ask for support.

WordPress Web Hosting: 5 Must-Know Tips is a post from: WordPress News: Themes, Plugins & Hacks

1. Delete post revision
   WordPress version 2.6 and above has a very useful function that creates a revision of that post or page during the publishing of an article. You will be able to see this in the same page as you write the blog post. For eg. see the image below.
   
   The post revision is a good way to document any changes to your post. But it can also be a waste of database and server resources. You can either turn off post-revision or limit the number of revisions saved per post by adding a line to the wp_config.php file.
   To turn off post-revision
define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, false);


To limit the number of revisions to 6
define(‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 6);
   There are many plugins available to delete the existing post revision. If you do not want to disable this feature, just run this once every few months to clean up your database.
   Plugin available to delete post revision: delete-revision, WP Cleanup, WP-Optimize
2. Remove all spam comments and all unapproved comments
   You may receive tons of spam comments every day. These spam comments and unapproved comments could be taking up a lot of database space.
   Plugin available to remove all spam comments and all unapproved comments: Cleanup-wp, WP Cleanup, WP-Optimize
3. Remove all unused tags
   Tags are recorded on the wp_terms table. Plugin: WP Cleanup will search and delete all unused tags in your WordPress database. Alternately if you are a techie guy, run the following query to show all unused tags from wp_terms table. Then you can delete them. 

   SELECT * From wp_terms wt INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy wtt ON wt.term_id=wtt.term_id WHERE wtt.taxonomy='post_tag' AND wtt.count=0;

4. Remove all unused post meta and Comments Meta
   ( i ) When you remove blog posts from your blog, WordPress will leave some post meta in your database which is not used anymore. Plugin: WP Cleanup will search and delete all unused post meta in your WordPress database.
   ( ii ) Clean up wp_commentmeta entries which have no relation to wp_comments Access your database from PhpMyAdmin and run the following SQL.
   SELECT * FROM wp_commentmeta WHERE comment_id
NOT IN (
SELECT comment_id
FROM wp_comments
)
DELETE FROM wp_commentmeta WHERE comment_id
NOT IN (
SELECT comment_id
FROM wp_comments
)

   clean up Akismet related metadata in wp_commentmeta table.
   SELECT * FROM wp_commentmeta WHERE meta_key
LIKE "%akismet%"
DELETE FROM wp_commentmeta WHERE meta_key
LIKE "%akismet%"

5. Delete unwanted plugin
   Delete the unwanted plugin from your blog dashboard.
6. Remove unused themes
   You might have tried out different themes on your site and now you picked the one you like the most. Each time you install a theme, you are adding new information to your database and when you uninstall a theme you are not removing the information from your database table . So you need to delete these themes to clean your database.
7. Remove Orphaned Options
   When you deactivated/uninstall a plugin or theme the options or the tables that the plugin/theme created are not removed. The Clean Options plugin will determine which options are orphaned. You will be able to view them and decide which ones you want to remove from the options table.
8. Delete unused images
   When you upload an image to WordPress blog, it will automatically resize and create thumbnail and medium size images. Some times you do not use them in the post. These unused images could cause unnecessarily burden to the server and database. The DUI (Delete Unused Images) plugin scans your WordPress blog and find those images that are not used or referenced to by any of the posts/pages. It then proceeds to delete them from the database/server.
9. Optimize your WordPress database
   It is always good practice to optimize your blog’s database to keep your database running smoothly and thus improve the site performance. You can use wordpress plugins: WP-DBManager, Optimize DB.

WP Cleanup, WP-Optimize WordPress plugin will perform the following actions.

• Remove all post revisions
• Remove all spam comments
• Remove all unapproved comments
• Remove all unused tags
• Remove all unused post meta
• Optimize MySQL tables by removing all unused table space

Note:  Consider a list of  best wordpress web hosting companies for best wordpress hosting.

9 ways to clean up WordPress database is a post from: WordPress News: Themes, Plugins & Hacks

• 123 Flash Chat – lets you add a chat room to your WordPress blog. There are two modes available. One a HTML based mode that can be embedded to the WordPress sidebar and second one is the Flash client can popup from a chat link.
• Banckle Live Chat – is a free live chat plugin for wordpress. Various options are available for the placement of the Banckle Live Chat button on your website.
• Chatroll WordPress Chat – It is very easy to add chat service to your blog. Simply copy and paste the one-line Chatroll Module code into your existing blog. Main features: Powerful management tools, works on all web-enabled mobile devices, including iPhone, Android, iPad and tablet computers,Social network integration ect. Free and paid options are available.
• WordPress Chat Plugin – Works perfectly with WordPress & WordPress Multisite. Just drop in this plugin, activate it and you can easily run as many live chats as you want, on any page or post on your WordPress.
• Custom Google Talk Chatback – let you add custom start chat link and offline text . Widget, Shortcode and Template Tag support.
• Quick Chat – can be used as elegant sidebar widget or can be embedded into your post or page using WordPress shortcode. Quick Chat supports unlimited number of separate chat rooms on same or separate pages or posts.
• OpenTok Video Chat – add live, group video conversations directly on your WordPress site. Ability to chat with 10 participants simultaneously. Other features include bad words filtering, emoticons, chat participants list, gravatars, translation and more.
• Live Chat by ContactUsPlus – Service multiple visitors simultaneously, attach files to a chat, Complete chat history available, price: $20.00 / Month.
• HelpDen Free Live Support Chat – Simple and easy to install. Fee version and paid version available.

9+ Live Chat Software for WordPress is a post from: WordPress News: Themes, Plugins & Hacks

• PHP version 5.2.4 or higher.
• MySQL version 5.0 or greater.

Apache or Nginx is the most robust and feature rich  server for running WordPress but any server that has supports PHP and MySQL will be enough. If unsure, you can ask if your host supports WordPress, here is a letter you can send to them(copy and paste):

I’m interested in running the open-source WordPress <http://wordpress.org/> blogging software and I was wondering if my account supported the following: PHP 5.2.4 or greater MySQL 5.0 or greater The mod_rewrite Apache module Thanks!

For hassle-free WordPress hosting, I recommend you use the best WordPress hosting around because they all offer easy ways to install or transfer your blog/website from your current host to one of the best WordPress hosts.

How To Setup WordPress in BlueHost

BlueHost is the recommended web hosting of WordPress. It is probably the best WordPress hosting because of its one-click auto install and WordPress update are made available within 24 hours.

1. Go to cPanel Software/Services, this is where Simple Scripts icon is located. 2. Click on WordPress. 3. Click Install Now button. 4. Select a version to install. 5. Then select the domain name you want it installed. 6. You can set up subfolder as a blog or leave it blank for its default settings. 7. Fill in the forms required and then uncheck Generate me an Administrator Login, located in Advanced Configuration so that you have the freedom to choose your own username and password. 8. Enter your own username and password and remember that it must be different from your cPanel login information. 9. Carefully read the license and service agreements and check the box once done. 10. Then click the Complete button

• Meet above server requirements and completely adhere to all wordpress hosting system requirements

How To Setup WordPress in iPage

WordPress is available on all iPageHosting accounts, they offer 1-click easy install for WordPress accounts so let’s see how this goes. This guide is assumed that you already have your iPage account, if not please register first.

1. Login to your iPage control panel. 2. Go to Scripting and Add-Ons tab and click InstallCentral 3. Click on the Blogs tab and select WordPress. 4. Click on Begin Installation 5. Fill in the supplied fields. 6. Click Install Now once done, after that Wordpess is installed in your iPage.

• Meet above server requirements and completely adhere to all wordpress hosting system requirements

How To Setup WordPress in DreamHost

Dreamhost is a shared and dedicated hosting network that has Apache, nginx, and lighttpd with servers running in Debian operating system. It also has one-click install so you only need to click one button to set up WordPress.

1. Go to Goodies section and click One Click Install. 2. Fill in the WordPress Install Form. 3. Then click Install it for me now. And that’s it, done in just 3 easy steps.   Convinced now? Then sign up for any of the following best web hosting companies optimized for WordPress: BlueHost iPage DreamHost

How To Install WordPress on the Best WordPress Hosting Providers is a post from: WordPress News: Themes, Plugins & Hacks

1. Smooth Real Estate Theme Price: $39.95
   

   Buy Now

   Google Street View Multi Category Search Contact Agent Print your listing Featured Property Slideshow Individual Agent Photo Upload Individual Agent pages with Agent bio Unlimited photo galleries Finance Calculator Autohide Slider

2. AgentPress Theme Price: $99.95
   

   Buy now

   Includes the AgentPress Theme Unlimited Updates, Support & Sites Access to Detailed Tutorials

3. Open House Theme Price: $39.95
   

   Buy Now

   8 Color Styles Carousel Property Slider Google Maps Integration Compatible with all markets Single or Multiple Agents Individual Agents page with listings and bio Contact agent from property page Easy Listings Management (Custom Script) Advertisement Banner Management Financing Calculator

4. Agent Real Estate Theme Price: $39.95
   

   Buy now

   Google Street View 5 Color Styles Contact Agent Single or Multi Agent Google Maps Integration Single Property Slideshow Individual Agent pages with Agent bio

5. de Casa Theme
   

   Buy now

   Featured Properties Slider Image Gallery Custom Search Panel Google Maps integration

6. Estate Theme Price: $200
   

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   Featured Properties Slider Image Gallery Advanced Search Google Maps integration

7. Homeowner Real Estate Theme
   

   Price: $39.95 Buy Now

8. decondo
   

   Price: €39 Buy Now

9. Real Estate Theme
   

   Buy Now

10+ Premium WordPress Real Estate Themes is a post from: WordPress News: Themes, Plugins & Hacks

Main features:

• Simple layout with 1 sidebar on the right.
• Videos are resized automatically
• Integration of the WP-PostRatings plugin to let visitors to rate the post and video
• A completely widgetized sidebar with custom widgets included in the theme packaging.
• 7 different color schemes to chose from
• Theme Price $70.00
• Buy Wootube wordpress video theme

Wootube wordpress video theme is a post from: WordPress News: Themes, Plugins & Hacks

A screenshot that displays the sliding content. This can improve pageviews of your website for sure.

related content wordpress plugin from simplereach

Learn more about The Slide’s features/technology and download it on from website (simplereach.com) or in the WordPress Plugin Directory (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simplereach-slide/).

Recommend related posts widget – Slide by SimpleReach is a post from: WordPress News: Themes, Plugins & Hacks