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TheIndianStartup is growing steadily and we hope to hit 150 members soon. We now have several core blogs for startup interviews, startup tools, announcements and press releases etc. and the response from the startup community has been extremely positive.

This website has been an amazing project for me as I went from being a Wordpress newbie, to setting up a full fledged social network with several unique features. The learning process has been tremendous and has been made so much easier by the superb community and the great plugins that are available for free. However, I am fast approaching the extent of what I can achieve with free plugins and support. I could hire a pricey web developer and pay for plugins individually (both hard to do with no revenue stream) but luckily a much better solution is available: WPMU Dev Premium. This is a paid support website for WPMU & Buddypress developers. They also have over 72 premium plugins, & themes (infact they just announced a countdown to their 100th premium offering). Although the monthly charge can be high for amateur developer, the value that they offer is great. I have heard great reviews of their support forums and I look forward to implementing their plugins like AutoBlog and Domain Mapping once I am a member.

I had promised (weeks ago) to post a tutorial on how to add footer widgets to the Mimbo 3.0 theme once I figured out how to add them to http://www.recipemobile.com.  Although, I was able to make the necessary tweaks to recipemobile, I have not had the time to post a tutorial.  So, for now, I am publishing the code I have added to enable the footer widgets.  I hope to be able to update this post to a full tutorial soon.

You will have to edit 3 files in your theme:

Functions.php

In functions.php, add the following code under the existing widget code:
if ( function_exists(’register_sidebar’) )
register_sidebar(array(
‘name’ => ‘Mimbo Footerbar1′,
‘before_widget’ => ‘<div class=”clearfloat”>’,
‘after_widget’ => ‘</div>’,
‘before_title’ => ‘<h3 class=”widgettitle”>’,
‘after_title’ => ‘</h3>’,
));

if ( function_exists(’register_sidebar’) )
register_sidebar(array(
‘name’ => ‘Mimbo Footerbar2′,
‘before_widget’ => ‘<div class=”clearfloat”>’,
‘after_widget’ => ‘</div>’,
‘before_title’ => ‘<h3 class=”widgettitle”>’,
‘after_title’ => ‘</h3>’,
));

if ( function_exists(’register_sidebar’) )
register_sidebar(array(
‘name’ => ‘Mimbo Footerbar3′,
‘before_widget’ => ‘<div class=”clearfloat”>’,
‘after_widget’ => ‘</div>’,
‘before_title’ => ‘<h3 class=”widgettitle”>’,
‘after_title’ => ‘</h3>’,
));

Footer.php

In the footer.php file, add the following code right under the footer div definition:

Style.css

Now, all you have to do is edit your style.css files to add the appropriate styling to the footers.  This is the css code that I have used to get you started.

#footerbar {
        display:block;
        clear:both;
margin-top:-10px;
list-style-type: none;
list-style-image: none;
margin-bottom:15px;
}
 
#footerbar ul {
padding-left: 15px;
}
 
#footerbar h3 {
        color:#dadada;
        font-family: 'Tempus Sans ITC','Bradley Hand ITC','Comic Sans MS','Zapf-Chancery', cursive;
        font-size: 18px;
	letter-spacing:0.15em;
border:none;
margin:0px;
}
 
#footerbar h3.widgettitle {
        color:#dadada;
border:none;
}
 
#footerbar a {
display:block;
}
 
#footerbar1 {
        float: left;
margin-right:10px;
        }
 
#footerbar2 {
        float: left;
        }
 
#footerbar3 {
        float: right;
margin-left:5px;
        }		
 
#footerbar1, #footerbar2, #footerbar3 {
width:32%;
}

My regular readers – all 5 of them :) are probably wondering where I have disappeared over the past week so this is a quick update.  The fact is that I have been neglecting this blog and spending all my free time playing around with a new project involving the new community module released for Wordpress called Buddypress.  Buddypress is a basically an integrated set of components (plugins) that rides on top of a regular WPMU (Wordpress for multiple blogs) install to add all kinds of social networking features (mini Facebook). 

I was already looking at starting a community using Ning or a similar social network creation tool.  Just as I registered the community at Ning, news about Buddypress exploded onto the scene (ok well, it was not that big news but I frequent a very niche area of the web).  After reading up on the features and checking out some existing installs, I decided to go ahead with Buddypress instead for the following reasons:

1) It takes 5 minutes to set up a working network on Ning – Where is the fun in that?  Buddypress gives me the opportunity to take the skills that I am learning to run regular Wordpress websites to a whole new level and if I finally end up making a good website after all the intense research and work of the past several days, it will be an amazing sense of accomplishment.

2) I didn’t like the fact that you have to start paying a monthly fee to Ning just to get their ads of your network and point your domain name to it.  Considering, that I am still figuring out what kind of community I want to build, I don’t want the bills to start coming in already.  Also, Ning pretty much owns the user profiles as they are part of their larger community.  Buddypress, like Wordpress is open source and completely free and lets me use my existing resources to launch a community website that I control completely.

All in all, working with Buddypress has been full of frustrations as it is very new code and still has a bunch of bugs and a lot of illogical default attributes.  But the potential!  I am really enjoying finding innovative workarounds to existing limitations and the support community is extremely helpful and responsive. 

I hope to generate fresh content for this blog from what I am learning while experimenting with Buddypress (I smell a new series of tutorials) but only if I end up creating something substantial with my endeavors.  I hope to also be more regular over here in the near future once I get through the launch issues of the new website.

You can test out my existing work at theindianstartup.com and please send me your suggestions, bug reports at kunal.jain (at) theindianstartup.com (Currently there seems to be some issues with user registrations from non gmail/hotmail email address but I am hoping to work that out soon.)

Introduction

I love blogs with interesting footers.  In a typical blog, the footer describes the bottom of the website below the dynamic content and sidebars.  This area often does not receive the attention it deserves and is often used only for copyright information or some navigation links.  

I believe that a well designed footer can greatly increase a blog’s functionality and visual appeal.  Consequently when rating Wordpress themes, I give more importance to those that allow you to customize footers easily by using footer widgets.  Footers can be used in a variety of ways.

Some of the ways footers can be used

Links to important posts, pages:  This will help expose sections of your blog that need more visitors.  I have read that this also helps in SEO (although how much is debatable).  Take a look at the footer of mint.com.  I am sure that all those key words and phrases have to be adding positive SEO value to their website.

Guide your visitors to their next destination: Users reaching the end of the content on a particular page are usually itching to find something else to browse.  Unless you provide them fresh content they might just jump to another website.  If nothing else, just put a PPC ad over there.  Google link units are another option but they can look ugly. 

Affiliate links & advertisements to your own products (and other blogs): It can be argued that a high percentage of viewers who have read your blog till the bottom of the page are interested in what you have to say and would be easiser to sell to.  Take a look at the above footer snapshot from Problogger.com.  Renowned blogger Darren Rowse uses his footer to list his ‘Recommended Money Makers’ which probably contain affiliate links.  Since he blogs about blogging and has a popular ‘making money through blogging’ section, these links are a perfect fit for his website.  

Visitors that like the look of your website often look in the footer for theme attributions.  If you use a premium theme that has an affiliate program, you should definately enroll and include an affiliate link to the theme in the footer.  A short positive review of the premium theme is also recommended.

Stash content that you need on every page but does not have to be immediately visible:  This may include reciprocal links to blog directories and other links that help to promote your own blog.  Also, a contact form can be included here as visitors that want to contact you will usually make an effort to look around for the form. 

Improve your blog’s looks: Most blog footers load last and so do not interfere with the accessibility with the rest of the blog’s content.  This means that all that cool art and images that you have been hesitating to put on your blog because you fear increased load times can go in the footer (Ofcourse this does not mean you do not web optimize the images.)  If done in the right way, this can do wonders in adding personality to your blog. 

Conclusion

I am really glad the theme I am using currently for this blog came with footer widgets.  This helped me get started with using the footer effectively before I learned how to customize footers myself.  Unfortunately, the Mimbo 3.0 theme I recently switched Recipe Mobile to did not come with footer widgets.  I will try to add these myself over the weekend and will post details on this blog.  Eventually, I would also love to add some image elements there (if somebody would only help me with the art!)

Have you used footer on your blog in interesting ways or have seen it done on any other blog?  Do you believe that footers should get the same attention as sidebars and mastheads?  

Please subsribe to my RSS feed to receive updates of more articles like these.  If you find these articles useful please spread the word by using the Digg, StumbleUpon or Twitter buttons.

This article is part of an ongoing series where I share my experiences with modifying Recipe Mobile to use the Mimbo theme.  You can see the related articles here.

Introduction

In this article, I will show you how to change the hover states of important objects in your Mimbo theme.  These include:

1. The page navigation bar link hover color
2. The category bar link hover color
3. The hover effect of the lead story background
4. The default link hover colors (continue reading…)

The links below point to a series of articles on my blog about modifying the popular Mimbo 3.0 theme for Wordpress.  These posts come from my experience in changing the wordpress theme on my food website Recipe Mobile.  The reasons why I decided to change the theme are detailed here.  These are the reasons I chose to go with the Mimbo 3.0 theme and this is why I recommend using child themes to make design tweaks to your Wordpress blog.

Making parent theme modifications: This is the first part of the posts where I detail what parent theme modifications I made to the Mimbo theme.  Future posts are pending.

Modifications using the child theme:  This is the first part in the series of posts where I show what modifications can be made using a child theme.  Part 2 of the child theme changes deal with modifications of the hover state of theme items.  Other posts that deal with modifying the child theme are still to come

Please subsribe to my RSS feed to receive updates of more articles like these.  If you find these articles useful please spread the word by using the Digg, StumbleUpon or Twitter buttons.

This article is part of an ongoing series where I share my experiences with modifying Recipe Mobile to use the Mimbo theme.  You can see the related articles here.

Introduction

I apologize for the delay.  I work on many project at the same time and though most of the updates to the new Recipe Mobile website are in place, I have not had a chance to publish details in this blog as I had said I would.

Anyway, here is a start.  The last article in the Modifying the Mimbo theme series dealt with making certain changes to the index.php & header.php template files in the parent theme itself.  Now, this section is the first that will talk about modifications that can be made using a child theme.  I have already written about the advantages of styling Wordpress blogs using child themes and today I will show you how.

While the functionality of the Mimbo theme is great, I am not a fan of the greyish tones used in it by default.  The first theme I used on the Recipe Mobile website had a strong red background with green elements.  Initially, I was unsure that it would look good, but Deepa loved it and so I let it be.  Eventually, it grew on me andI realized it gave the website a unique look.  I wanted some continuity by maintaining a similar color scheme after the theme change. For that I had to change the colors of several elements of the Mimbo theme.  

In this article, I will be focusing on the major areas, where changing the color completely changed the look of the theme.  These areas are:

1. The website background
2. The category bar background, and 
3. The lead story background.

(continue reading…)

After several weeks (if not months) of speculation, Entrecard has finally announced that members will be able to cash out their credits immediately (starting today).  The initial cash out rate has been set at $1/1000 credits.  This rate is about midway in the range that people were guessing ($.20 to $5).

The issue here is that currently, the money available to cash out is only enough to cash out a small percentage of the outstanding credits.  The cash out system will prioritize members that actively support the community by letting them use the cash out system first.  Community support is determined by factors such as:

• Drop frequency
• # of paid ads approved
• # of credit based ads approved
• Market listings
• Credits transferred to others
• Credits spent on ads

I assume that if you see a cash out option on your dashboard, you are one of the prioritized members.

Also, the cash out rate is likely to change in the near future.  Whether the rate increases or decreases depends on a variety of factors.  If the cash out is able to remove enough credits from the economy so that the value of credits increase, and Entrecard gets consistent revenues from paid ads then the cash out rate may increase.  If the Entrecard member community is unhappy about the majority of the members being excluded from the cash out option, then the rate may have to be decreased to allow a larger percentage of users to cash out.

Do you think the the rate and the cash out prioritizing system is fair?  Is there any other way Graham (Entrecard’s founder) could handle the cash outs?  Please let me know your opinion.

If you usually post across multiple topics and sort them by category, you might want to highlight a few categories so that your readers can easily find them.  One way of doing this is to create page tabs (like the ones saying ‘Home’, ‘About’ towards the top of your Wordpress blog) that link directly to the category page. Wordpress makes this extremely easy.  

All the categories pages are automatically built.  You can access these category pages by clicking on the category name on your blog (if you have the category widget displayed) or from your Wordpress dashboard.  Copy the URL of the particular category page you want.

Once you have the URL to the category, create a new page in Wordpress and add a link tag in the title.  The syntax will be <a href’=”URL”>Page Title</a>, where URL is the url of the category page and Page Title is the text you wish to appear on the tab.  Save the page.  Refresh your blog and you should see the new tab.

Categories like ‘how-to’, ‘tips’, ‘news’ particularly can benefit from this.

Having finally decided to go with the Mimbo Wordpress theme for Recipe Mobile, it was time for me to start customizing it.  The themes author, Darren Hoyt, recommends that style customizations should be made using child themes so that changes can be retained across future upgrades.  I have heard mention of child themes several times before but have never delved into it before. 

Luckily, Darren provides a child theme called Vintage Green on the same download page to help get started.  Installing a child theme is similar to installing a regular Wordpress theme.  You unzip and upload the theme folder to your ‘wp-content/themes’ folder and activate it from Appearance-Themes on your Wordpress dashboard.  Make sure the parent theme folder is also present in the themes folder. (Note: The child theme folder does not go into the parent theme folder but within the Themes folder itself.)  The child theme contains references to its parent theme already so every thing should happen smoothly

I have been customizing Mimbo using a child theme for only a few hours now and have already seen the benefits of using a child theme.  The only code changes that I have had to make in the parent themes files were to: (continue reading…)