Quantify is a clean, well-styled WordPress theme focused on usability and readability. Quantify is the base theme used for my new design, built with HTML5, liberal doses of CSS3, and a few jQuery snippets thrown in for good measure. Here is the demo, and here is a quick run-down of the features:

Regular updates keep WordPress secure and expand the feature set, ensuring the platform meets both the developer’s and their client’s needs.

The flipside of regular updates is the maintenance of WordPress installs. Once you start maintaining more than a few installs for your clients, keeping both plugins and WordPress up to date can become a bit repetitive.

I posted a little tip on CSS-Tricks the other day about how you can load only parts of other pages on a site via Ajax, and how to do that without needing additional HTML wrapping elements to keep it clean. A common criticism of this is that the Ajax request still loads the entire page, using all that bandwidth, it’s just that it only places onto the page the part you specify via CSS selector.

Sometimes it’s hard to have discussions like this without looking at specific use case, but I see where they are coming from. Loading content you aren’t going to use is a waste of bandwidth. It does make progressive Ajax enhancements a lot easier though. And in fact, that’s how our All AJAX theme works.

Looking for WordPress developers and designers? So are many people. Time is scarce these days, and we get quite a few folks asking about where to go for help with their WordPress site. Most of the WP peeps that we know are just as busy as we are, so it would be helpful to have a nice, healthy list of WordPress designers and developers all in one place that people could check out and find some good candidates. That’s exactly the point of this quick DigWP post (and the following comments thread).

A common question for new WordPress designers/developers is how to handle plugin upgrades and upgrades of WordPress itself. To illustrate the meaning behind this question, consider the following real-life example. I recently logged into a client site for maintenance to find that someone had “attempted” an upgrade of WordPress, but that it had failed:

While manually upgrading a bunch of old WordPress sites, I realized that the WordPress htaccess rules for permalinks had changed. For many years and versions, the htaccess code that enables WordPress permalinks went unchanged, resulting in an almost sacred set of htaccess directives. Here are the original permalink rules as currently provided at the WordPress Codex:

The default URL for logging into your WordPress powered site is: http://example.com/wp-login.php. Or if you’ve installed in a subdirectory, something like http://example.com/wp/wp-login.php. I’ve wished that was a little cleaner, especially when you are doing something explaining to a client where to log in over the phone. Fortunately changing this can be very easy.

In this DigWP post, we transform three slices of code into a clean & stylish tabbed menu that visitors can use to login, register, and recover passwords from anywhere on your site.

There are too many features and details to explain up front, so take a moment to check out the working demo to see the finished product.

Have you ever wanted to close a comment thread, but leave a note to communicate why the thread is closed? Many blogs will just update the content of the blog post to say that comments are closed and why. That’s better than nothing, but that puts the message in a bit of an awkward place.

The ideal place for that custom messaging is after the comment thread, where the comment form would normally be. After all, that’s where it makes the most sense.