You are about to read my honest review of Thesis Theme framework. This is something I always wanted to do, and I really blame myself having not reviewed Thesis before now since I have been using it heavily on my blog. I also depend on it to run several other projects, especially here at FamousBloggers.net and my other design project that relies on Thesis Themes  100%

So, prepare yourself, this won’t be a short review. I have tons of things to talk about as I will take it from my personal prospective and two years of experience with Thesis, mostly as a developer. I don’t have any intention to offend or annoy anyone, and I apologize if I do by accident!

I will tell you why I give it this sort of low rating, which could be shocking for all Thesis fans!

I am reviewing Thesis Theme as I see it today, time plays a big role here and reviews have to reflect the recent condition. I could give it a higher rating if I reviewed it two years ago, but today I am not so sure about that! However, my point of view may change any time, and you should see an update in the future.

Anyway, I worked hard enough with this theme to form an honest opinion, especially that there are a lot of crappy reviews on the web that have been published just to sell you Thesis and make commissions without even taking it for a test drive.

Before you continue reading, I will show you how much money I’ve earned in only one year of working and developing my Skins for Thesis Themes.  As  proof that I really don’t hate Thesis, I launched the ThesisAwesome.com site. I just feel  uncomfortable with the way people think of it, so I want to make it clear to help you with your decision!

Report generated by aMember membership software

As you can see in the image above, I’ve managed to make sales of $30,000 last year from developing and selling Thesis Skins at ThesisAwesome.com. That is almost 50% of my online business income, and it’s clear that I wouldn’t be profiting if Thesis Theme didn’t exist!

However, this doesn’t mean I should rate it 5 out 5 just because I am making good money out of it. There are a few things that I don’t like about Thesis, and I will mention them in my review below!

So, read on…

Thesis Theme is my own Teacher!

I’ve learned tons of useful tricks being a Thesis Theme user, it helped me to enter the WordPress development world in a sweet way. Probably no other WordPress theme or framework would teach me all that and help me establish a design business, but there is always an issue. I didn’t buy this theme to learn how to design cool things, I also never thought that I would be so involved in it working day and night to get the look and feel I wanted for my blog.

I didn’t want a white page! I wanted something that really works out of the box!

To be honest, Thesis Theme actually works out of the box, exactly the way it was explained, and that’s why I ran and quickly bought it, I was convinced!

But…

1. No one told me that I need to hire a designer!
2. No one told me that I need to get a developer
3. No one told me that I will have to spend nights and days working my butt off to get a unique design!

I didn’t buy Thesis Theme to learn cool stuff and be a professional web designer, or an avid developer!

So, if you need to learn, and you have time, then Buy Thesis Theme, it will simply teach you!

There is a always a catch, and a lot more to do. Thesis Theme’s trick was actually in its marketing message! And, that’s another reason for me to rate it lower!

Why Thesis Theme is not getting any updates!

This is one of the most annoying things for anyone who becomes part of a membership site. They promise you will get updates, but no time line. That’s fine and accepted, but one year with no critical upgrades, that’s not good at all! I mean the world is changing!

People keep asking Chris Pearson every day when he will release Thesis 2.0, and Chris keeps telling them “Thesis 2.0 is coming soon”, 2011 ended, but 2.0 has not been released.

I thought maybe he doesn’t want to release 2.0 for the public, and prefers to keep it for his Best Damn Blog on the Planet.

At the beginning I thought those people are just silly, why do they need an update? What’s the point of getting a new update for Thesis? Are they having a problem or they are just asking because they paid for future upgrades?!

I really didn’t understand their point the whole time! I also didn’t understand Chris‘s strategy!

I learned a lot of things while giving support to my ThesisAwesome.com members. I realized some interesting stuff that are maybe facts, or maybe I am just imagining these are facts!

People all the time ask me for updates…..do you know why? Simply because they want “new features”!

They think if they pay $100 for a design, they will keep getting new awesome features forever, and to the end of days! I must say this is impossible, I can’t give you new feature updates for ever. I prefer to focus more on enhancing what I have and make it work better. I add new features only when there is a big demand. Then I make time and work on it, but if I see it’s unnecessary, why should I bother?!

You know what?

I just think that… Chris sees Thesis Theme as a perfect creation, why should someone come up with a new update for something is already perfect?! You won’t get another update any time soon!

But then, I think again, and again, and I remember the Headway 3.0 launch that was considered a big fail for Headway Themes by many of their members. Everybody says it was released earlier than it should be. I really don’t want to see this happen to Thesis, and I hope that Chris knows what he is doing, or it will be a big problem for everyone who depends on Thesis!

Anyway, what do you expect from the Thesis Theme next update?

SEO features, should I use a plugin?

That’s how Thesis could be sold to over 40,000 people. Thesis Theme has solid SEO features, so you don’t need to use any SEO plugin if you are running Thesis Theme on your blog. However, you may want to empower your blog SEO with some plugin So let me tell you this… You simply don’t have the choice!

I’ve tried WordPress SEO by Yoast, and it’s a really awesome plugin, and I see good potential in using it, especially if this gives you more control over SEO. However, it didn’t work well for me as I am using Thesis. SEO features conflict and duplicate in some areas, and I was about to mess things up by editing some part of the framework or disable its SEO functionality so I can use the plugin instead, but I changed my mind, I really don’t need more headaches.

I still see some people using the SEO plugin with Thesis, this is just not right!

Joost says that SEO has to be controlled by a plugin, not a theme. or at least give users the option to enable/disable SEO options. Themes has to focus more on design and layout, I personally agree 100% with him.

Who won’t agree on that anyway?

Yes…

P.S. that’s an old tweet, but nothing has been changed since that time. Chris won’t lose the marketing key and refused to respond while other frameworks like Genesis and Headway have responded nicely to Joost and to their members who simply asked to have the choice to decide which SEO feature to use.

That being said, it has just added another reason for me to rate Thesis Theme lower!

Another Story About Respect!

Ok, while it’s hot and I got your full attention, let me tell you what happened with me when I first launched ThesisAwesome.com

Actually this happened before I launched the site. I tried to get in touch with Chris, the person who I thought I will be working with and needed his advice, as my idea was actually to develop for Thesis, and only Thesis! So, I asked him to DM his email so I can email him privately because I had a very important question for him. I really really needed some business advice atthat time, and simply he was the only person I thought could help me out!

I got a reply from him on Twitter, he told me to send my email via the DiyThemes support email.

And, guess what?

One year passed and I never got an answer to my question! I never heard from him!

No matter what I say, it won’t express my feelings at that time. I was really upset, I mean how can someone contact you and ask for  business advice, and you don’t reply to him? I am a Thesis Theme user, and I am part of your affiliate program, my idea should drive more sales. Any professional would reply to such an email!

There was no respect! And I won’t forget that!

Add everything to function.php file, what’s the problem?

You see, I put a lot of effort into this blog, I spent hours and hours coding for FamousBloggers.net. After two years of coding I ended up with a freaking scary and stupid file. I realized that not everything should be included in the theme’s function.php file, it’s not really the best practice. I have a lot of functions in that file and it became confusing. I didn’t know where to start, and where to go anymore, totally lost!

The best way to do this is to create your own functionality plugin.

I got this idea from Ryan Imel of WPCandy.com, and it makes a lot of sense. However, I haven’t had a chance to create my own functionality plugin yet, but at least I started with extracting my function.php file into a few small size file, and restructuring the Thesis Theme /custom/ folder to contain more files and folders that are simple to read, follow and understand.

Child Theme or Skin?

Call it whatever, but Thesis Skins are not Child Themes!

A WordPress child theme is a theme that inherits the functionality of another theme, called the parent theme, and allows you to modify, or add to, the functionality of that parent theme.

I will stick with that because I trust what WordPress.org says!

Thesis Skins is far more than that, so I will stop calling it Child Themes.

Thesis Header Image

In my opinion, this is the worst Thesis option ever since 1.8, why? It says in the option page:

Based on your current layout settings, the optimal header image width is 949 pixels. If your image is wider than this, don’t worry—Thesis will automatically resize it for you!

It’s just silly to resize the header image and fix its width to 949px, and even worse, cropping a header image? Wow! This is amazing! But, what’s the point here?

P.S. don’t worry, I am the last person to worry about this feature because I will never have to use it!

The problem is this particular option gave me a lot of headaches. It forced me to code a new option to solve it for my best selling skin, the BlogSkin, simply because the page width I’ve chosen for the skin is 980px, which this amazing header option thing doesn’t support!

Theme Support

I really don’t have anything against the theme support, all people who are working at DiyThemes.com are cool and they respond quickly, and I appreciate all they do to solve problems and help members. I always appreciate support because it’s really a hard job, I am sure you will know what I mean if you have ever been supporting members in forums.

Let’s say they are doing their “job” perfectly!

DiyThemes Blog

If you are a Thesis member, then I am sure you’ve read some posts on their blog.

Maybe I am the only one, but I am sick of the same boring and repeated stuff that is published on the blog,  too much triggers!

I don’t recognize DiyThemes blog anymore, I don’t know whether it’s a design blog or just another blog of Derek Halpern.

Don’t get me wrong, I like strong opinions, and I like Derek‘s work and appreciate the good advice, but the blog needs to have more fresh design related articles and tutorials written by professionals, not only marketing and converting tips. Here is a couple of suggestions:

1.  Having another player will spice up the blog and make it more exciting!
2. Inviting more guests to write for the blog, add new blood!

I am sorry to say that, but this is by far the worst blog ever, I lost interest!

Seriously, Who Makes Thesis Theme Awesome

I think web designers and developers who work in Thesis Theme development are the ones who actually make it awesome, Thesis has never been awesome without their contributions.

You can see a post from the past where I got a few quotes from top niche web designers who develop for Thesis.

Final Thoughts about Thesis Theme

While Thesis Theme is very reliable, at least for me and my business, I make money by solving problems “Thesis problems”, and by developing skins that add additional functionality to Thesis, which makes it awesome, if Thesis was perfect, I wouldn’t be making $30,000 in only one year! Period!

My Thesis Skins are selling because I solve people’s problems.

Marketing Thesis Theme as the best SEO framework is an old idea, it’s not valid anymore, and it shouldn’t be your focus when buying a theme for WordPress.

I really want to see a huge change in 2.0, however I am not sure if there will be a 2.0!  I don’t want to jump off the train unless I really have to!

I don’t hate Thesis!

I’ve said what’s on my mind, and what I kept in my heart for a long time! And, as you can see, this review is quite different than any other review that has been published about Thesis Theme. I haven’t paid too much attention to the functionality or features, simply because Thesis Theme doesn’t offer something different than other frameworks in the market, so I won’t be talking about the same thing over and over. And, as I mentioned before, I will be updating this review if I see it’s necessary.

I hope this helps you to make a better decision for your business.

Now it’s back to you, I will be glad to discuss this with you even more in the comments section, really!

Another cool WordPress plugin called  IM Graphics Plugin by Andy Bailey the creator of CommentLuv, this plugin solve a huge problem that most of us are facing while building landing pages or sales pages, which is finding and adding graphics to pages.

We all know that internet marketers are not designers, however there could be few skilled people, but most of marketers do not have the time to learn design to be able to create their own web graphics, however this is possiable, but dosn’t make sense! I mean there are tons of great design elements made by professional designers, so why wasting your time learning something you will use only a few times, it would make more sense if you go for a ready made solution that saves you time.

What to expect from IM Graphics Plugin

let me ask you…

1. What about a plugin that has many pre-made graphics that is ready for your to use on your landing pages or sales pages?
2. Also, what about an extremely easy way to insert these graphics into your pages?
3. And, what about having the ability to even use your own graphics in simple way?

All this can be found and done by the  IM Graphics Plugin.

By the way,

Being a web designer didn’t stop me from buying and paying for web design elements made by others, sometimes because I don’t have the time and I want to get things done quickly, some other times because I like a graphic or a web element and I decide to just have for one of my projects.

A great place to buy cheap and professional looking web elements is GraphicRiver.net

Is IM Graphics Plugin for me?

IM Graphics Plugin is useful for any internet marketer.

Even bloggers need web graphics for their blogs posts, so if you do any sort of marketing online, check out IM Graphics Plugin, it could save you from facing one of the biggest things that always comes up when ever you build a new site!

This plugin worth easily worth hundreds of dollars in saved designer fees. it’s a $97 product, but you can get it now for only $27 , and it worth every single dollar!

Grab this awesome package right now for the low price.

The Dating Game

What if you woke up, looked at the calendar on the wall, and all the blocks were blank? Or you glanced at your smartphone, only to discover everything date-related had disappeared? You wouldn’t think that little handheld was so smart, would you?

We know why knowing the date is important: appointments, deadlines, doctor visits, payday . . . So why do we think hiding the date on articles and blog posts is such a great idea?

I think the reason most people leave the date off is so that their content won’t appear “dated.” Dated is synomymous with “old,” and who wants their content to appear old when someone arrives for the first time? ”Old” online is a faulty anachronism: it’s the difference between ancient and antique. An antique is a desirable form of something from another time. It might be old, but it’s valuable and considered priceless by some.

Keeping That Date

The choice is always yours. Let’s look at some reasons to keep the date and make sure it is readily visible when someone drops in.

Being Relevant

Imagine stumbling across a news story that said something like “breaking news!” … You read the story and don’t realize this was something that happened over 2 years ago. — DialMe

“DialMe” makes a solid point in Timestamping Articles and Posts. Since your About Me or Contact pages are more or less static content, they don’t necessarily need to show when they were published. But adding a date to blog posts and articles will give readers an opportunity to decide for themselves if your content is relevant to their needs. It could also be the deciding factor in whether your visitor leaves a comment or asks an important question.

Being A Standup Kinda Guy (or Gal)

Content that has been around for a while could be considered anchor, pillar, or evergreen content — the kind of content that stands up to the passing of time. It provides information that is as relevant to the current time as it was when it was first written. A first-timer who lands on your article will be grateful to you — if you provide the answer she was seeking — no matter when it was written.

Examples of evergreen content include articles on how to increase customer referrals, hurricane survival tips, or how to leave a positive blogging legacy. Because this type of content is timely (and priceless), showing the date is less important than adding a date to blog posts where timestamping matters more.

Being on Time

I recently did a roundup of the best blog monetizing strategies over the past year. What if none of the articles had dates? My research would be screwed and my results would have been skewed! In fact, one of the strategies is about traffic generating contests and contests always have a start date and finite ending — so if the date of the post is left off, it could confuse would-be contestants.

Hey, Where’s My Date?

Blame it on the theme

Some themes don’t make it easy to add the date. Either the complexity of navigating options or the sheer number of options could effectively hide the feature. At the time of writing, I’m using the comprehensive Suffusion Theme by Sayontan Sinha. When I first installed it, it took me forever to locate the “show date” feature! However, once found, I was delighted to see a number of options for both displaying the date and leaving it hidden.

Lots of places to stash your date …

Your theme might allow you the freedom of displaying the date in lots of different ways or it might constrain you to only one or two locations. Here are some possible locations:

• above the blog post
• directly under the article title
• a small icon on the left side
• a small icon on the right side

Are you the one looking for a date?

What if you’re doing research for a topic and find an article you’d like to reference but it doesn’t have a date in one of the usual places? If you don’t see the date at first glance, try peeking in these unusual places.

• in the sidebar
• at the very bottom of the post
• in the footer

Lastly, check the comments . . .

Why would you check the comments? They might have a clue! Check the date of the first comment as well as the last comment. The first one will give you an idea of when the post was written. The last one will give an idea of whether or not the content is still relevant.

This almost brings us to the end of our time together …

Ditching Your Date

Like most stories in life, there are two sides to this one, too. In the dating game, the case can also be made against showing the date or timestamp on your blog posts, articles, and tutorials.

Are you hiding something from me?

I already mentioned how certain pages don’t really need a date. That’s not so much about hiding the date as it is about making a practical decision. We also covered evergreen or pillar content, so you could turn the date off on those, too, if you want. But next up is a case in which these fellows really do have something to hide! Read on …

Uh, Google made me do it!

We decided that more often than not, we would want to hide the date . . . But . . . we wanted an option to keep the date on a post if we felt readers would benefit from knowing the date of publication. — Dan Johnson

Dan Johnson and his buddy Ben Hunt claimed that Google slapped them for having old content, until they realized their clickthrough rates were actually suffering because they had dates on the older articles. The gist of it is that Google now displays a date alongside search results (SERPs); thus, someone encountering your relevant (evergreen) article that is dated several years ago will be less inclined to visit your post if they assume your information is outdated.

Once they figured out why the SERPs were causing them pain, they created a tutorial on how to remove the dates from SERP Snippets.

Time to Pop the Question!

Adding dates to blog posts and articles assures visitors that your content is relevant to their needs. Yet, sometimes it might be appropriate to hide the dates.

Well, it’s time to say goodbye, but before you go, I’d like to hear your thoughts on this dating game . . . (and thanks for reading!)

• Do you include dates on your blog posts or do you leave them off? Why?
• Have you ever thought about it one way or the other?
• What are other reasons to add a date or skip including them?

Image: © Olivier Le Moal – Fotolia.com

PressTrends provides trends and analytics for how people use and interact with WordPress. I always wanted to try it, but there was chance as PressTrends was actually in a closed beta. The good news PressTrends is out of closed beta now and it’s ready for the public, and it’s Free to use. So I decided to check it out, especially that they have released a new WordPress plugin, which made things pretty much easy.

You can download the PressTrends plugin from WordPress plugins directory and check out how your blog is compared to other blogs in the community, it’s interesting to know what PressTrends got to say about your blog!

P.S. When I say community here, I mean all blogs that are using PressTrends API, not all WordPress blogs.

PressTrends on FamousBloggers

I’ve tested the plugin on my test blog that has only 6 blog posts, of course the PressTrends was shows a disaster :) So, I’ve installed the plugin on FamousBloggers.net, and here what I’ve got:

PressTrends - Get powerful trends and insights

This service is still new, I think that’s why my blog is doing a fantastic job and it has a great performance against other blogs in the community. However, I am sure that PressTrends will grow, and these trends and insights will change over time, so it’s kind of interesting to see how FamousBloggers.net will perform in the coming a few months, and I will be glad to share new stats with our blog readers.

Things I would like to see in PressTrends development

The PressTrends plugin is pretty simple, so maybe a dashboard widget is something I would like to have.

And, just to let you know, PressTrends is actually serving two communities, bloggers and theme developers, it also help theme developers as it allows them to track usage across different metrics for better insights, and to learn how their themes are being managed, this can be done by integrating PressTrends API into the theme, this could be useful for Theme developers.

However, I think that if you are a Theme developers, and you want to integrate this service into your theme, you should explain it well to your user, and at least include an option for theme users to accept tracking as some people won’t be interested in getting their blogs stats tracked by anyone.

Things doesn’t end here, there a lot more to know about PressTrends.

Think about it as a way of motivation!

Good job!

There are two ways to do this, the hard way and the easy way!

The hard way where you have to code and style to implement hreview in your WordPress theme, and the easy way where you simply install a plugin that gives you that power. So let me make things easy for you.

I’ve announced the under development product reviews plugin for Thesis Themes at ThesisAwesome.com blog, it’s a simple plugin that allow you to easily insert Google Rich Snippets for reviews and ratings to your posts and show rating stars in search results.

I call it the Thesis Theme Review Plugin.

Reviews examples

Here are a few examples of reviews I’ve made on the blog recently, and also some other reviews that I’ve updated from the past, you may look at them or search for them in Google and see how things looks like in the search results:

• Revenue Engine
• CommentLuv Premium
• PopUp Domination
• Engagement From Scratch
• Headway 3.0
• CurationSoft
• Market Samurai
• Gravity Forms

Also, notice the sidebar widget which has a list of recent reviews that I made especially for the plugin.

The future of Thesis Theme Review Plugin

As you can see from its name, the Thesis Theme Review Plugin works only with Thesis Themes, and it will be released as part of my ThesisAwesome.com membership site, this means if you are already a member and you did purchase any of my Thesis Child Themes, then you will have access to download the plugin for a very affordable price, plus the freedom to install it on any of your blogs. However, you also can purchase the plugin individually at a good low price.

Note: I don’t sell you a bunch of codes and files, I sell you my support, which means my time, so you are not actually paying me to download the plugin, but to get support and upgrades.

I will be updating you more on prices and when the plugin will be released for the public, this should’t take a lot of time. But for now I need beta testers, so keep reading.

Become a beta tester

I’ve already tested out the Thesis Theme Review Plugin here on the blog and some other blogs, I need to do more testing before releasing it, I need beta testers who are willing to provide feedback and help me out to test the plugin on different blogs with different layouts, this is great for the development process and your help should make it a better plugin.

I am going to accept only 5 -10 beta testers, so if you are willing to install and use the plugin on your blog help me test it out, and provide feedback, it might be yours for free.

Want to be a beta tester? contact me now.

One last thing, it’s a good idea to join my affiliate program before releasing the plugin, this may help you make extra money.

Also, I will give you some information on how I created the news section in case you are interested in implementing it on your own blog, however I won’t get deep into technical stuff, but I will point you to the right direction.

What is a Community News?

If you don’t know what community news section is, then let me give you a quick view…

The Community News section is a way of sharing knowledge, basically you have a section dedicated to receive links submissions from the community and publish it on your own blog. It’s so close to the idea of social bookmarking sites, but the technique and tools are different.

This technique is very popular among design related blogs, probably this explains a little about why design blogs can attract more traffic on the web by submitting their awesome showcases, tutorials, and inspiration posts. Community News sections has been and still used in several different ways, For example, there are some blog owners who do it manually, you submit a link to an article along with a short description, and the owner of the blog publish it manually.

But, some smarter design related blog owners and webmasters went beyond the manual boring work and stat to develop ways to automate the process as much as possible. However, there is no complete solution that you could use out of the box, you must add your own development and invest some time to create a good community news system for your blog.

Being a web designer and developer, I have been part of many news sites, I did followed this technique for a long time, especially when I first started my blog, and I must say it’s a fantastic and easy way to drive traffic, the only hard thing is to actually write good and high quality content so that everyone will love to link back to it and proudly promote it.

Here is a few blogs that I loved to share my design and WordPress related articles on:

• SpeckyBoy.com
• TopDesignMag.com
• Designm.ag
• DesignsMag.com

The examples above is just to show you how the submission process works and how actually your article will be archived and linked to. Keep reading as I will explain to you the differences between these ways and my way!

How Submitting News to a Community News can help my blog?

The idea here is that you submit links to your own blog posts and articles, this is helpful by two ways, firstly it’s a chance for more traffic to your article, and secondly you get a link back to your article, which could help your ranking in search engines!

I have tested this many times, and it simply works.

Actually, I am amazed that a few of the links I submitted during the last week were gaining some decent visits, some links even got ranked well in Google! You got to try it out yourself to judge it, submit an article!

How Famous Bloggers Community News is different!

Among all the sites I’ve seen in the past couple of years, not even a single site gives you any type of power or control over the way they present your links or the way they actually linking back to your article. Most of the news sections are archived in way that doesn’t really help your ranking unless it’s published manually in a round up form. I think the main focus was on traffic, but really SEO, and probably the idea was invented before web designers start to realize SEO and care for it.

This explains the wrong use of anchor text in links, for example: “read full article“, links to “original source“, or link to the full post title as an anchor text. This is the same thing in most of social bookmarking sites, which doesn’t really help you to rank for a specific keyword.

So, I thought to change all that!

My technique is completely different, and the changes I’ve done was really simple, but effective!

I thought to make use of SEO power, Keywords and Anchor text in the submissions, so You control the way your links are presented when you submit it.

• You decide the SEO Title and Description that will be displayed in SERPs.
• You decide your best keyword that will be used to link to your article.
• Best if all, you get a link within content, the real body of the post!

What you think?

Technical setup for the Community News

As I told you before, I have done several experiments trying to find the best way to get news submissions. You may think this is easy, you just go and use whatever form building plugin and start receiving submission right away!

Well… I wish this is possible, but no! It’s not that easy!

I’ve used TDO Mini Forms plugin which I think is great, but as you may know, the plugin wasn’t lucky enough due to lack of updates, probably this is why it was removed from WordPress plugins directory. However, I am having an older version and it’s actually working, but with a few glitches and missing features! You can check it out if you would like too, here is a link to the submission page on my other site.

Anyways, there is no plugin for this job yet! There is no complete solution for me, so I had to create my own and get assistance of some other plugins as well to complete the submission circle and make it fast and easy for me to publish the submissions on the blog! What I needed was something that saves me time, a lot of time! And, because I believe  if there is nothing that help me to do what I want, then I need to invent it!

So, I started with creating my own community news custom post type plugin based on information provided at WP Post Types codex page, then I started to build on top of it.

I ended up with using thee plugins:

1. My own Community News Custom Post Type Plugin
2. Gravity Forms Plugin (Read my review of Gravity Forms plugin)
3. Gravity Forms + Custom Post Types add-on

Of course, there were a few lines of CSS and function modifications added to the custom Thesis Theme Skin I am using on my blog to get things to work together!

And, the most interesting thing is I don’t have to edit anything, I don’t have to modify anyways, the whole process is automated except the publishing part, I just have to check the quality of news or article before publishing, which is not really a big deal yet!

I won’t get into much details about technical stuff, but I will point you out to other…

Useful resources I came across:

• Great resource about Custom Post Types in WordPress by Justin Tadlock (recommended!)
• I’ve followed Yoast‘s Power User Tip: Custom Post Type Feeds & Google to create the Community News RSS Feed (perfect!)
• And, of course WordPress Post Types at the codex.

Give it a try and tell me what you think!

Speaking about traffic, this is a great way, you submit your links, and I do the promotion, we both get traffic!

Click Here to Submit News

I don’t want to end up dealing with spam, so I decided to make the submission form available and free only for FamousBloggers.net’s contributors! However the plan can change any time, but at the mean time it won’t be a available for the public any time soon, as a way to guarantee that only quality articles will be shared.

This is great, but managing a blog contest takes a lot of work and time. There are a few real challenges to face when organizing a blog contest that you have to think of.

Seriously, there are huge tasks and things to do! I realized this after launching a few competitions, and decided not to do it anymore unless I find a solution that saves me time and effort. I had to think of changing the way I manage contests and overcome its pain. But nothing that I know could help with that really!

So, I decided to make my own solution!

I’ve tried many times in the last 6 months to find a way out of this, especially because I like to organize contests on the blog, (actually my blog readers motivate me and ask me about new contests all the time!) So, I thought about developing a WordPress plugin that could help and reduce the required tasks. But, it’s something I really can’t do alone as I have tons of things going on all the time.

Finally, I talked with my partner Mohamed of BloggersNetwork.net about the idea, and actually I had to fly to California to meet him and brainstorm the idea!

And Yes!

Mohamed and I started to work together on bringing up a new freaking awesome WordPress plugin to manage blog competitions. With this brand new plugin, most of the pain of organising contests has now been taken care of.

We call our new plugin CompResult!

And, as you can see from it’s name, the ComPesult plugin was created to take care of all the dirty work, painful tasks, and boring stuff that you will have to do to launch a successful blog contest.

You Can Not Compete with Time, but…

CompResult Widget

There is a fact I believe in, you can not compete with time… But you actually can save some of it!

Take a look at this list of things that you must do to launch a successful blog contest:

1. Make a plan
2. Find sponsors
3. Do a quick blog maintenance
4. Put some pages on your blog
5. Create some creatives
6. Spread the word about your contest
7. Reply to tons of emails
8. Publish posts
9. Calculate results
10. Announce winners & deliver prizes

Cool! mmm…

Yeah, the list can be longer, or maybe you can shrink yours a little, but it is still a freaking painful job, and many people won’t believe it till they do it themselves or at least participate in a contest.

If you are planning to organize a contest or a competition on your blog, then you really have to think twice about how you will manage your time. Time is your main challenge, so you will need to save as much time as you can to do your other daily blogging tasks. I means it doesn’t make any sense that you will spend all your time managing a blog contest and forget about your business.

Yeah, I’ve used Excel spreadsheet, Google docs, main mapping apps, my calculator and even pan & papers!

But, honestly, it didn’t work!

Good News are Always Welcome!

The CompResult plugin manages your blog contest, however you still need a plan

We are getting ready to release the new plugin, after testing it for the first time here on the blog. Check out the blog contests page to see it in action.

Here are some screen shots of the plugin admin page and post editor custom meta box that has been added, plus the results page that can be displayed using a simple short-code, and also the awesome widget that is customizable to allow you to display entries from the contest on your blog sidebar.

Create and manage unlimited contests:

CompResult Setup

Customize each contest blog the way you like:

Customize each blog contest the way you like

You can enable/disable results in table columns for each contest:

Enable/Disable Results Table Columns

CompResult Plugin is Almost Here!

There is a plan to give the new plugin a shot as soon as we have a beta release that is ready for testing. I must tell you that it will be released as a premium plugin with great support, not only for the plugin itself, but other things like helping you  organize your contest by giving you great advice, and maybe send a few bloody awesome sponsors your way!

So, if you are interested in testing this plugin and/or planning to organize a blog contest any time soon, visit the plugin website and leave your contact. We can then notify you when it’s ready and pick a few bloggers for the test!

If you would like to be notified when we launch CompResult, just visit the site and leave your email address.

If you have any question, post them in the comments and I will reply to you!

Anyways, I figure out what caused the error! However, not all people will get this error though, but apparently it’s cause by a plugin.

So, if you’ve decided to upgrade to WordPress 3.3 and enjoy the new awesome features that I won’t mention here, then take it easy!

Maybe you will get this error:

Alright, let’s get into business…

How to Solve the Fatal error: Call to undefined function is_rtl()

It’s pretty simple, let’s follow these steps and discover what cause the error:

1. The first thing to do is to disable all plugins on your WordPress installation. A simply way to disable all plugins is to access your server files via FTP and rename your “plugins” folder to something else (for example: “_plugins” or “old_plugins”), then create a new empty folder and call it “plugins”.
2. Now, try to login to your WordPress dashboard!
3. This time you will get a request from WordPress asking you to upgrade your database, go a head do the upgrade by clicking on the upgrade button, you should be fine after that.
4. Once you get inside your WordPress dashboard, go to your plugins page, you will find red messages telling you that plugins was deactivated, don’t worry about it!
5. Go to your FTP again, and remove the empty “plugins” folder you’ve created, then rename the original folder that has your plugins back to “plugins”.
6. Go to your WordPress plugins page and enable plugins one by one till you find the one that caused the issue.
7. Once you discover it, probably you won’t be able to login to your dashboard again, you will need to deactivate the plugin that caused the error. You will need to FTP again and rename its folder to something else to be able to disable it.

Now you are good to go, but without that particular plugin, I assume you can live without it.

However, you can contact the plugin support and let them know about the error, if this is a premium plugin, you should get a quick fix.

P.S. If you still have same issue, then rename your active theme folder, this should force WordPress to use the default theme (example: twentyeleven).

In my case, the issue was cause by the Popup Domination plugin, I had to disable it as both version are causing same issue (PD 2 and 3). So, if you would like to continue using the plugin on your blog, don’t upgrade to WordPress 3.3 now, just wait for some time and make sure this issue was fixed before you upgrade.

I appreciate if you share which plugins are breaking your blog!

Happy blogging, and yes I love WordPress 3.3 Sonny , it looks pretty awesome, I love the new media uploader and the admin menu, I also believe that I will make use of the is multi author function in a way or another.

Check the full feature update.

One of the most unique plugins in the history of WordPress, the CommentLuv Premium plugin provides a simple way to increase comments, and social sharing of your blog posts, plus other great features included in the CommentLuv Premium version.

I’ve been using the free version of CommentLuv plugin on my blogs for more than three years since I first started blogging. I remember that I’ve published a lot of posts about the plugin in the past, but I haven’t done a review post for it, so here is my review of the awesome CommentLuv Premium.

What is CommentLuv Premium

CommentLuv is a unique piece of code developed for the WordPress CMS that gives you the ability as a blog owner to award your visitors by allowing them to leave a comment to their own recent blog posts, so basically this was the main idea of the plugin.

But Andy -the founder and developer of the CommentLuv- realized the power of social media and added cool new feature to CommentLuv, this actually leaded to a brand new premium version of the plugin.

So, now that you’ve enabled CommentLuv Premium on your blog, you will be able to benefit by doing some easy social media marketing. Well, actually you won’t be doing anything, but your blog readers and visitor will do!

They will find your CommentLuv Blog!

It’s pretty easy, you just need to install and configure the plugin, and …wait! Don’t even bother to call your friends or scream loud asking your people to comment on your amazing and informative blog posts, all what you have to do it to wait!

How they will find you? They will search trying to find CommentLuv enabled blogs.

So yes, they will find you, they will comment on your blog, and they will probably share your post to unlock the RSS feed menu so they can pick a link to one of their recent blog posts.

This makes the CommentLuv Premium social, and really smart plugin!

Hit many birds with only one CommentLuv plugin!

CommentLuv Premium is not really one plugin, however you can consider it one plugin, but in fact; it’s a set of useful plugins combined into one!

Here are the main parts :

CommentLuv

CommentLuv will automatically add the users last blog post to the end of the comment that they make on your site provided that they include their URL and it has a feed available. It can also show information about each link left when a user hovers their mouse over the link.

TwitterLink

TwitterLink comments will add an extra field to your comment form to allow your visitors to add their twitter username along with their comment. The TwitterLink used to be a stand alone plugin, but it’s included now in the CommentLuv Premium.

GASP

GASP is extremely effective at combatting spambots and trackback spam.

SpamBots trawl websites and leave automated spam messages within comments. Because they are bots, it is unusual for them to be able to view things that are generated with javascript. This plugin will use javascript to generate a checkbox on your comment form asking people to click it before allowing their comment to be accepted and should eliminate 99% of bot generated spam, that’s another cool addition to the CommentLuv Premium, once you install it, you’ve got a pretty awesome spam fighter.

Keyword Name

Keyword Name provides similar functions to the popular KeywordLuv plugin but does it in a way that keeps the name of comment author “clean” by storing the keywords separately to the name in the database.

Recommend read about CommentLuv

Here are some useful related read from the blog:

• Find CommentLuv Premium Blogs in Your Niche
• The Biggest Blog Commenting Folder in the History of Blogging
• Integrate CommentLuv’s TwitterLink into Thesis Theme
• Strengthen Your Article Marketing With CommentLuv Links
• Top CommentLuv Premium Blogs For Daily Engagement
• CommentLuv for Better Interaction Around Blogosphere

There are 1000s of blogs out there using CommentLuv, I highly recommend it, so consider enabling it on your blog and give some luv.

For sure, I don’t want to ignore SEO, this makes me think of WordPress posts vs pages for SEO!

So, I’ve tried to discover the real difference between post and page regarding search engines optimization, and which one has more SEO privileges.

A quick look into WordPress Posts VS Pages

Before we start, let’s assume that we have two sites, both have exact everything, and they are equal in terms of content, plugins, theme, and other search engine optimization stuff like (titles, URLs, structure, keyword research, backlinks, etc.).

A very interesting thing to mention is that any WordPress site built primarily with posts will perform much better in search engines than one built mostly with pages, of course assuming that both sites has the exact everything and they are equal. This is not imagining, it’s based on my personal experience.

If you look at the WordPress post vs page comparison at WordPress.com support, you will find out some differences like…

WordPress blog posts

Posts are entries listed in reverse chronological order on the blog home page or on the posts page if you have set one in Settings > Reading. If you have created any sticky posts, those will appear before the other posts. Posts can be found in the Archives, Categories, Recent Posts, and other widgets. Posts are also displayed in the RSS feed of the blog. You can control how many posts are displayed at a time in the Reading Settings. Read more about posts.

WordPress blog pages

Pages are static and are not listed by date. Pages do not use tags or categories. An About page is the classic example. Pages can be displayed in the sidebar using the Pages widget, and some themes display pages in tabs at the top of the blog. If you have 50 pages and you use the Pages widget, then all pages will be listed all the time. Read more about pages.

Additional information

The description of posts and pages above is very short and general as they just made this information available for WordPress.com users, and it has nothing about SEO, but I have an important comment here…

They say Pages are static. This is not really the way it is. You must know that every single piece of content presented by WordPress is -in fact- a web page. that has been created dynamically. The term “static” was used here to presents the meaning of “static content” or “content is not changing often”, this is confusing, but it’s not hard to understand! Let me explain it more…

Every WP page is dynamic, as WP pulls content from database, so basically WP Page is just another virtual page that doesn’t really exists till someone call it (a visitor jumped on the page url)!

So, back to the explanation of “static page”, this means the content of pages are not likely to be changed or edited for long time. (You don’t edit your About page every day, don’t you?!)

Here are a few other things to consider while comparing posts and pages:

• WordPress posts and pages both pings other sites when they created or updated (both should be indexed well).
• Both has same SEO options.
• Pages do not cycle through by date, but this doesn’t mean it has no publishing date. (I wonder how Google will deal with it regarding microdata)
• Pages are not included in RSS feed, but this plugin can include WordPress pages in RSS feed.
• Pages has nothing to do with the blog, it’s not hanged to anything (only sub pages) It’s an awesome flying piece of content!
• Use pages to for content you want people to see every time they visit your blog.

Check out this quick example that I’ve created to explain the very basic WordPress blog structure, this may help to see how your blog looks like:

Now, you think about it!

You can easily get all posts on the blog plus other pages to link to a particular page simply by adding a link to that page in the blog navigation menu. However, you can do the same thing for posts, but it’s not a perfect idea. In my opinion, navigation should only link to pages and categories! Mainly put links to the stuff you would like your visitors to see all the time!

Technically speaking, both pages and posts are stored exactly the same way in WordPress database, in the same table, The only difference is the post_type field which is set to page for pages, and post for posts, and basically bot have same data saved, including SEO data.

Pages or Posts for better SEO ?

I don’t know, but I think the question is wrong; I am just not comfortable with it, maybe because every wrong question is likely to have a wrong answer!

I think Google won’t care that much whither you publish a post or page, but probably Google prefers posts, that’s why Google still considering how you tagged your blog posts.

Considering that most WordPress sites link to their Pages from every other url within their site, we could came up with a nice conclusion, Pages are more important for SEO.

Wait a minute!

Ana, wrote a nice post on SEO-Group.net sharing some SEO trick! But hey…

Please don’t tell me that you will turn your posts into pages for better SEO or ranking!

Why?

The right answer (for the wrong question) is you must have both -posts and pages- on your blog to actually rank well, they both work together some how! Pages are used to define your main focus, important information, and what’s your blog is about. It’s for your main keywords, while Posts are the publishing platform, it’s what you should use to ping search engines and get a RSS!

But, turning your blog posts into pages? I think this isn’t right, especially if your post got already some comments and shares!.

I won’t be turning a blog post into a page just to rank it higher, I would do this only to include this post into the core of my blog, but I don’t see this as a useful SEO practice. The way I see it right is to create a custom post type for product reviews.

P.S. What’s you’ve read above presents my personal opinion!  (I respect the experiment, I appreciate it when someone take the time to share good stuff).

Why Should I use Custom Post Types

Before we get to answer this question, we probably need to understand types of content we can have in WordPress, and what are custom post types, so take a look here to understand posts types.

1. Posts: the main type used by the blog.
2. Pages: are like posts, but lives outside the normal time based structure of posts.
3. Attachments: a special post that holds information about files uploaded through the Media upload system.
4. Revisions: hold draft posts as well as any past revisions of existing posts or pages.
5. Nav Menus: holds information about a single item in the Navigation Menu system.
6. Custom Post Types: allow you to define the post type and how it operates within WordPress.

As you see, WordPress have a few post types and more than one way to deliver content, since WordPress 3.0 version, you’ve got the capability to add your own custom post types and to use them in different ways, for example: products, events, people, testimonials, podcasts, reviews, ratings, movies, cars, offers, places, etc.

The cool thing I see about custom posts types is the ability to add  microdata and rich snippets, this will allow Google and other search engines to get to know your content better. Also, you can have RSS feed for your custom post types and feed it to Google, here is a post on how to create custom post type feed that is really useful.

Finally, I’ve got stars

I’ve succeeded on getting the stars for my reviews in Google results, check out this screenshot of my ThirstyAffiliates review:

It looks pretty cool, ha?

But it took me several weeks of coding and playing around till finally I’ve got it to work, but this is not the important thing, really! The important thing to me is the knowledge of how to write power reviews and get them indexed with stars in Google. I finally got it, but it’s horribly coded in my Thesis theme I am using on this blog.

Now that I know how it works, I will be able to start over and re-code the whole thing into a custom post type!

Conclusion

Pages and Posts has the same exact SEO features, but I think Google will look more seriously into blogs that are implementing microdata and rich snippets.

I wish I could go back in time and re-structure my blog.

I recommend custom post type for reviewing products.