Articles
The Results of Project Icon
The community has voted, and the votes have been tallied. The winner of Project Icon, with 35% of the votes, is Entry ID “BD,” otherwise known as Ben Dunkle. Congratulations, Ben! The runner-up was VS, otherwise known as Verena Segert, so we’ll be attaching that set to the alternate color palette that is selectable from the profile screen. As we prepare for RC1, Ben and Verena will be revising a couple of their icons so that both sets will use the same metaphors, creating the colored “on” states, and creating the larger size of each icon for use in the h2 screen headers. We are very grateful to have had the opportunity to select from so many great options, and would like to express again our appreciation for all the designers who participated in the contest. Thanks also to the more than 3700 people who completed the voting survey and took the time to weigh on on the individual icon sets.
| Q.18 Which one of the sets do you think we should use as a basis for the 2.7 icons? | ||
| Icon Set | # of votes | % of votes |
| BD | 1285 | 35% |
| VS | 1080 | 29% |
| GB2 | 424 | 11% |
| OSD | 376 | 10% |
| LS | 300 | 8% |
| GB1 | 235 | 6% |
The wide lead of BD and VS made it clear that voters had a clear preference for these sets.
| Q.20 If you could choose a runner-up, which would you choose? | ||
| Icon Set | # of votes | % of votes |
| VS | 916 | 27% |
| BD | 647 | 19% |
| LS | 522 | 16% |
| OSD | 488 | 14% |
| GB2 | 462 | 14% |
| GB1 | 331 | 10% |
Question 20 was not mandatory, so a few hundred people skipped it, but the responses we did get (3366 of them) reinforced the fact that the two most popular sets were also the most popular 2nd choices, which made the decision of the judges to go with the popular vote an easy one (take that, electoral college!).
A few of the individual icon metaphors also had a significant lead over the other choices.
Dashboard: 1333 voters (40%) chose a house as the best metaphor. We agree, so both Ben and Verena will be replacing their Dashboard icons.
Media: 2097 voters (65%) chose the combination camera + musical note icon, which was part of Ben’s set. We also really loved it, and Verena will amend her media icon to incorporate this idea.
Plugins: 1682 voters (53%) selected the outlet plug metaphor, which both Ben and Verena used in their sets.
Tools: 1581 voters (49%) liked the combination of two tools better than anything else, so Ben and Verena will try this approach.
So those are the results, and soon you’ll see the new icons coming to a 2.7 installation near you.
Need another look at the entries to remember which one you liked best? Here are some reminder images, as well as the identity of each set’s creator.
| BD was Ben Dunkle, a designer, professor and artist from upstate/western New York State. In case you’ve already forgotten, Ben’s icon set is the winner of Project Icon and will become the default icon set after a few minor changes. |
 VS was Verena Segert, our runner-up, a designer from Germany who presented sets in both grayscale and blue. Her blue icons received more specific voter comments than the gray ones, so we’re planning the second color palette to be in shades of blue so that we can use the blue icon set. |
  GB was Guillaume Berry, a designer from France who submitted two sets in the same style in order to propose a couple of different metaphors. One of his sets came in third while the other came in last, but whether you only look at the higher scoring set or you combine their votes, Guillaume had the next highest percentage of votes, and many people liked the metaphors he used for various icons. In fact, given the enthusiasm of the community for Guillaume’s icons, we think a great plugin would be one that would allow the user to upload the icon set of their choice. Any volunteers? |
|
 OSD was the Open Source Design class at Parson’s in New york City, taught by Mushon Zer-Aviv and consisting of students Alexandra Zsigmond, Ed Nacional, Karen Messing, Khurram Bajwa, Leonie Leibenfrost. Teacher and students worked together to determine their metaphors and visual style. |
 LS was Luke Smith, a designer from Iowa who specializes in icons among his other design pursuits. |
If you need to hire an icon designer any time soon, we highly recommend our Project Icon contestants, who all delivered great work in a very short timeframe. It was great to work with all of them, even for such a short assignment.
So, to sum up:
- The winning icon sets by Ben Dunkle and Verena Segert will be incorporated into WordPress 2.7 RC1.
- Someone should write a plugin that would allow anyone to upload a custom icon set (I bet the other contestants could be convinced to release their icon sets for such a purpose).
- 2.7 is still trucking away, but we can always use help with patches, especially for IE6! (I know, that wasn’t in the main post, but it’s true, so hmph)
Thanks again to everyone who participated in this experiment, and we hope you enjoyed it as much as we did. And congratulations again to Ben and Verena!
WordPress has emerged as not only a leading blogging platform but also a content management system for many Web publishers. Now there is a simple plugin available that will turn your blog into a paid membership site.
The WP-Membership plugin allows publishers to collect membership fees for WordPress blogs via PayPal, Authorize.net, and YourPay, with additional payment gateways in development. Membership fees can be collected via recurring payments, with multiple subscirption levels, various subscription lengths and pricing options. Free and paid trial options are also available, as are page-by-page options so that certain content can be free while other, “premium” content can be fee-based.
WP-Membership is available for $35
Features
- Responsive & Ajax
- Translatable
- 11 language files can be found in language directory inside the plugin. Files: Russian, German, Japanese, Spanish, French, Chinese, Portuguese, Italian, Turkish, Dutch, Swedish
- Payment Gateway
- a) Paypal [Express Checkout]
- b) Stripe [ Full synchronize with Stripe Plan ]
- c) Woocommerce Payment
- Mailchimp to store Email for new registrants
- Membership Type
- a) Free Account
- b) One time Payment
- c) Recurring Payment
- d) Free Trial
- e) Paid Trial
- e) Variable Payment Package
- 7 Pricing Tables
- 2 Signup styles
- My account
- User Setting
- User Social Profile
- User privacy setting
- User Change Password
- User All Post
- User Post: Custom Fields
- User Insert Post
- User Edit Post
- Subscription upgrade
- Subscription downgrade
- Subscription Cancel
- Coupon
- User Role creation by Package
- Overriding templates
- Page Redirect
- User Public Profile Page Redirect
- User My Account Page Redirect
- User Registration Page Redirect
- Page Setting
- Email Templates
- User Welcome Email template
- User Forget Password Email template
- User Order Email template
- Admin Order Email template
- 5 User Public Profile
- Payment History
- Report
- 3D Pic charts
- Line Chart
- User Public Profile Page Redirect:
- Hide Admin Bar
- And Lots of other settings..
- 2 type of User Directories
- Content Protection Setting
- WP User Setting Module for Admin
- Subscription Reminder Email Module
Properly configured, WordPress can be an extremely effective way of designing, maintaining and managing your site. Not only that, but sites using WordPress tend to rank well organically within the top search engines, once properly configured. However, neglecting some critical configurations can cause pages and posts that make up your site to not even be indexed by the major search engines.
Because WordPress is open-source, thousands of developers are constantly releasing updates and plugins to enhance the functionality of the platform — many of which are free. And some of these plugins are essential to properly optimize sites for top organic results in the most popular search engines. My two personal favorites are Headspace2 and Google XML Sitemaps.
To prevent pages of your blog from appearing to be duplicates of other pages, it’s essential that each page and post have a unique meta title and meta description. Otherwise, only one page or post with the same meta title and meta description will make the cut. Headspace2 adds a widget inside the WordPress edit page/post screen where you can easily fill-out a unique meta title and meta description on a per-page or per-post basis.
The most recent release of Headspace2 has even more essential SEO features, such as the ability to no-index pages that you don’t want to be included in search results — a contact form or privacy policy, for example. More information about the Headspace2 plugin can be found at the WordPress.org plugin directory or at UrbanGiraffe.com.
Google XML Sitemaps will generate an XML-compliant sitemap of your site each time you add a new page and/or post. It also pings Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask.com whenever your sitemap has been updated so they can index the latest version. Although this hasn’t been proven to affect organic rankings, it can certainly speed up the time it takes for search engines to index your new information. More information about the Google XML SiteMaps plugin can be found at ArneBrachhold.de.
Of course, neither of these two plugins alone will cause your content to soar to the top of Google. There are literally hundreds of other on-page and off-page factors that go into determining how your pages rank. However, these plugins will help, and they are very easy to install.
WordPress.org or Your Own Domain?
People often wonder whether it’s better to host a WordPress site on WordPress.org or install and host WordPress on their own domain. Aside from the benefit of not having any out-of-pocket expenses to start, there’s really no other reason to use WordPress.org. If this blog is going to become a source of income, not having full control over the future of it is a big mistake.
For example, suppose the people responsible for running WordPress.org decide to terminate your account for some type of inadvertent violation? Or if the taxonomy of your URLs changes because of a major restructuring that the developers decide to take? Countless hours of your time would be wasted as all of the other external SEO factors such as article backlinks, press releases, social bookmarking, and comment links would no longer point to valid URLs.
Hosting WordPress on your own domain gives you much more control and isn’t that expensive. You can easily register a domain with any one of several registrars for under $10 (search online for coupon codes) and many of these registrars will offer low hosting fees as well. Some will even offer free add-ons and most will have a control panel that includes an easy way to install WordPress.
WordPress 2.7 Beta 3 has been released for your testing pleasure. Here are some of the changes since Beta 2 (over 160 changes in total):
- Numerous style improvements and refinements.
- All admin notices now go under the page title.
- PHP Notice fixes.
- Dashboard widget options now properly save.
- Menu fixes.
- New design for Quick Edit.
- Canonical feed URL fixes.
- Walker fixes.
- An update for Hello Dolly.
- Plugin installer updates.
- Numerous font updates.
- Updated login logo.
- Switch position of “Save Draft” and “Preview” buttons in publish module.
- File upload support for MS Office 2007+ file formats.
- Media upload buttons won’t show if the user doesn’t have the upload capability.
- Canonical redirects only do yes-www or no-www redirection for domains.
- Shift-click checkbox range selection improvement.
- Add New User page now separate.
- Tag suggest only suggests tags (not other taxonomy terms).
- QuickPress shows “Submit for Review” if user cannot publish.
- Private posts/pages, and password-protected posts/pages are rolled into new “Visibility” section of publish module.
If you have already installed Beta 1 or Beta 2, you can update to Beta 3 via the Tools -> Update menu. If you have problems, or if this is your first time in the 2.7 beta ring, you can download and upgrade the old fashioned way.
WP-Membership
WordPress has emerged as not only a leading blogging platform but also a content management system for many Web publishers....
Simple SEO: WordPress
Properly configured, WordPress can be an extremely effective way of designing, maintaining and managing your site. Not only that, but...
WordPress 2.7 Beta 3
WordPress 2.7 Beta 3 has been released for your testing pleasure. Here are some of the changes since Beta 2...
How to: Add a contact me via Skype™ button
This little trick is really simple and easy. All you need to do is plug this line of code anywhere...
Sandy Mahl Net Worth: How Rich is Garth Brooks’ ex-wife?
Sandy Mahl is an American businesswoman. She is known to many as the ex-wife of country music star Garth Brooks. As of 2019, Sandy Mahl net worth is estimated to be $125 million. Sandy was born on January 16, 1965, in Tulsa, Oklahoma to parents John Mahl and Pat Mahl. Sandy is now a wildlife […]
Brandi Redmond Net Worth: How Rich is Brandi Redmond Actually?
Brandi Redmond is an American reality television star best known for being a cast member of the show ‘The Real Housewives of Dallas’. As of 2019, Brandi Redmond net worth is estimated to be $4 million. Brandi was born on July 10, 1978, which makes her currently 41 years of age. She was born and […]
Matt Higgins Net Worth: 5 Interesting Facts You Should Know
Matt Higgins is a celebrated man, who came from the downsides of life to the upper echelons of the world. An investor, businessman, innovator, top executive, and business advisor. Although he had a hard early life at the beginning, he never let background shackles deter him as he steadily moved his way to success. He’s […]
Dorian Rossini Net Worth: How Rich is Dorian Rossini Actually?
Dorian Rossini is a singer and an internet personality. He is best known for being a viral sensation on the internet for the controversy of taking Selfies with him. One moment in an interview would roar the internet on fire as the incident made him famous almost overnight. As of 2019, Dorian Rossini’s net worth […]
-
Tips & Tricks1 month ago
WordPress Security Hacks
-
Pages4 months agoWrite For Us – Guest Post
-
Showcase4 months ago
StylizedWeb.com
-
News4 months ago
How to: Show/Hide any div box with jQuery in WordPress
-
Tips & Tricks3 months ago
Remove the title attribute using jQuery
-
Tips & Tricks1 week ago
How to: show/hide a widget in WordPress with jQuery
-
Plugins3 days agoTop Membership plugins
-
Tips & Tricks4 months ago
Limit the characters that display on the_title
Pingback: WordPress 2.7 Release Candidate 1 — WPCult