Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
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WP Remix (http://wpremix.com)
—Aimed at supporting WordPress as a full-fledged Content
Management System (CMS), WP Remix gives you a WYSIWYG editor for page templates, color
schemes galore, and out-of-the-box support for many popular plug-ins. The theme and site were
sold by the original developer to a company called R5, Ltd in April 2009. We hope this will
expand support and development for this theme.
The process of shopping for and buying premium themes are as easy, and as varied, as buying most
things on the Web. Some shops use full-blown e-commerce vendors to handle the sales, others just
a shopping cart application leading to a simple download. Transactions are by credit card and/or
PayPal. Many developers offer subscriptions to all their themes for a monthly fee; a bargain if you're
in the web design business, but overkill for just one blog.
Themeforest, serving as a middleman between designers and users, does things a little differently.
You sign up for a free account that allows you to buy and sell items. To buy something, you have to
first deposit at least $20 US into your Themeforest account via PayPal (either directly or through a
credit card) or another firm called MoneyBookers. If you have enough money in your account, you
can purchase and download the theme of your choice.
No matter where you bought your premium theme, when you have completed your purchase and
downloaded your theme, you have to install the theme manually. We've come to the point where we
tell you how to do that.
Installing and Activating a Theme
When you've picked a theme (or even a few finalists), installing them into WordPress is a fairly
straightforward process. We've already covered the simple process for themes selected from the
Free Themes Directory. For all other theme sources, including the commercial themes, it's a little
harder, but it's still not rocket science.
Installing Your New Theme
All themes are mostly composed of a set of PHP scripts and Cascading Style Sheets, with occasional
ancillary files. This collection of files is gathered together and compressed into a Zip archive. To
install these files, follow these steps:
1.
Download the
*.zip
archive to your computer. In most cases, this means clicking the Download
link, then saving the archive anywhere on your computer (but most often in the Downloads
folder).
note
If you're a Windows user, all ver-
sions of the OS from Windows XP
on up come with a built-in file
decompression utility that can
access Zip archives, so you don't
necessarily need one of the pro-
grams listed here.
2.
Use a decompression program like PKZIP, StuffIt, or Ark to
extract (unzip) the archive on your computer. In nearly all
cases, this creates a new folder with the name of the theme.
3.
Use an FTP program to connect to your web server, assum-
ing you're not hosting your blog on your own computer, and
transfer the entire
<theme-name>
folder to
/wp-content/
themes
in your WordPress installation folder.
