I recently found the YoxView plugin which takes the lightbox to a great new level using jQuery and some nifty animations. A client wanted to use it on his WordPress site, so I made it into a WordPress plugin.

It’s really simple to use.. Just upload the plugin to your plugins folder and activate it. It applies itself to any WordPress gallery using the standard .gallery selector.

Until it’s added to the WordPress Plugin directory, you can download the plugin here.

Please retweet this post if you found it helpful!

For the last 4 or 5 years that I’ve been using WordPress, I’ve managed to pick up a good few tips and tricks. 90% of my clients are sites who require content management systems, not blogs. And thus I’ve been able to create highly tweaked and customized WordPress content management systems that give my clients a great method of controlling their entire website via WordPress’s great user interface.

I thus decided to start WPGuru.co.za – a site that I will be using to blog cool tips & pointers on making a killer CMS with WordPress. I trust you’ll grab the feed and enjoy!

I couldn’t count the sites that claim to have the ‘best wordpress themes’ if I wanted to. There’s just too many. And most of them are crap. They’ve clearly been thrown together in a half-hour in a lame attempt to get some backlinking-footer action.

There are however, a few designers that actually put their back into it and have come up with some really impressive and innovative WordPress Themes. These are from designers who’ve gone beyond the straightforward main content and sidebar structure of the original K2 theme. These are themes that make use of the more indepth WordPress Features to make a unique theme that doesn’t have that templated/databased look.

In my travels, I’ve collected a bookmark folder of such high quality, worthwhile WordPress themes. Here’s a list of 7 themes that you’d do well to use.

1) Digital Pop WordPress Theme | Screenshot | Download

A funky, highly customizable theme that is at least, pretty lively and allows for plenty of pictures and colorfullness.

2) Grid Focus | Screenshot | Download

A clean and tidy theme that resembles a tightly clustered news type blog. With a bit of CSS knowledge you’d be able to add in a bit more color and of course a picture here and there.

3) Dark for WordPress | Screenshot | Download

Many blog readers will probably recognize this theme as being based on the previous site design of www.bartelme.at. He designed this beautiful theme and iLemoned made the coding work. It’s a stunning theme – almost calming.

4) Mimbo2 | Demo | Download

With lots of dedicated content areas that allow for specific content seperation, this is a great theme for bloggers who want to focus on various industry specific topics. Plenty pictures thanks to the joys of Custom Fields allow you to further customize the look and feel of this awesome theme.

5) The Morning After | Screenshot | Download

I’ve actually used this theme myself, so I can speak from personal experience in that this theme is awesomely customizable and really well engineered. Custom Fields make it easy to tag certain posts with certain images and thumbnails. Aside and Featured categories allow you to nicely split up your content for various usages. A great theme.

6) Rainbow | Download

This is a delightfully colorful theme and one of the few that make use of some nifty AJAX features. Thanks to the MooTools JS library, the Rainbow theme does some smooth scrolling which adds just that extra flair to this great design.

7) Revolution | Demo | Purchase

This is where the big guns come out. These guys have created such a high quality theme here. Ideal for a news/fashion/visual type blog site, this theme has all the angles covered and the developers have clearly gone to the enth degree to ensure that the theme is entirely flexible, styleable and customizable. For their efforts, they’re charging a fee for the download of this theme. From $59.95 (with footer links etc) to $249.95 for a developers license. A great option for web designers who could potentially build the cost of the theme into their quotation.

Be sure to check out these other resources for ‘OK’ WordPress themes. Granted not all of these are as hot as the ones listed above, these are worth a mention.

• Fresheezy | Free WordPress Themes
• WordPress Theme Generator | Generate a nasty looking quick WordPress theme on the fly
• Sandbox Designs | WordPress theme competion themes available for download & usage