Since last year, the WordPress themes market has grown incredibly. The reason? Great designs, of course, but also a lot of amazing new functionality. Top WordPress developers are always looking to get the most out of WordPress and use all of their knowledge to find ways to make their favorite blogging engine even more powerful.

In this article, we have compiled 10 useful WordPress code snippets, hacks and tips to help you create a WordPress theme that stands out from the crowd.

• 10 Useful WordPress Coding Techniques

The WordPress 5-minute install is great, nothing complicated about getting your blog up and running (most of the time). But once you install WordPress there are a number of other steps that you need to take in order to get the most from your blog.

Use the following as a to-do checklist for your future installations and you’ll keep yourself right.

• 5-minute install

• 10 Things to do After Installing WordPress

WordPress is one of the most popular CMS and blogging platform around, mainly because it is free and it is 100% customizable ( This blog is run on WordPress). Today, I will showcase 20 of the best WordPress Tutorial Blogs that have written many wonderful and insightful articles with various tips that either helped me optimize my blog for SEO, helped secure my wordpress installion from hackers, to finding the best WordPress themes , or even creating my own WordPress theme for my blog. As always, we have tried to collect the best resources for you readers, but there are too many high quality sources to list them all!  Please note they are not in any particular order. Enjoy!

• 20 Best WordPress Tutorial Blogs

Mobile technology is going big. Every other user is now viewing your website from their iPhone or other smart phones. It is essential that you create a mobile friendly version of your WordPress site. Majority of top sites and blogs have already made their sites mobile friendly, but there are tons of other sites and blogs that lacks a mobile friendly version. In this article, we will share some ways you can create a mobile friendly version of your WordPress blog for your users and for yourself.

• 11 Ways to Create a Mobile Friendly WordPress Site

Inspired by this popular post, guv’s WordPress 3 Ultimate Security, the first-ever book explaining in detail how to secure the popular blogging and content management platform, has been released. Here’s the detail:-

Having your blog hacked isn’t fun, and the standard WordPress installation is not impermeable. Not only does a hacked blog result in downtime, while you work with your ISP to track the problem and ensure it doesn’t happen again, it can also mean you spend time, for instance, getting your email client resolving properly once more. All in all, valuable time wasted.

• 10 Tips To Make WordPress Hack-Proof. The Ultimate Guide.

While I was building my first premium WordPress Plugin – the Avia Feedback Box – I needed to solve quite a few problems I have never encounterd when creating themes. During my research I stumbled upon several really cool wordpress functions that I want to share with you.

• 15 useful WordPress Functions you probably don’t know

Rooteto.com provides high quality and professional free WordPress Themes. 2012 Free WordPress Themes – High Quality Free WordPress Themes

Parallax

This free WordPress template has been designed to help you make your stuff look awesome, it’s focus is on clean, elegant looks and simplicity to allow your work to shine.

• Large Homepage Slider
• Portfolio Custom Post Types & Taxonomies
• Filterable Portfolio Template
• Custom Theme Options

Features » Demo » Download »

Maxy

Maxy is a theme that can do it all and still look good. This gorgeous General/Blog theme supports and comes with widgets, drop-down menus and an automatic slideshow.

• Easy to use options page
• Featured Image Ready
• 125×125 banners ready (easy editable from admin options)
• Compatible with latest WordPress versions
• Widgets Ready
• SEO Optimizedy
• Fixed width
• Gravatar on Comments
• Tested and compatible with all major browsers: IE, FF, Safari

Features » Demo » Download »

Famiret Mag

Famiret Mag free Cool, Magazine, Personal WordPress Theme

1. Content slider built in
2. 468 x 165 banner slot
3. 4 125 x 125 custom banner slots
4. Banner positions can be turned off
5. Theme Options
6. Flickr widget
7. Social buttons
8. 2 Columns
9. Pages menu
10. Post thumbnails (automatic image resizing)
11. Page navigation included, no plugin required
12. Google Analytics code script can be inserted
13. Widget ready
14. Readme included
15. PSD Logo included
16. Gravatar ready
17. Threaded comments, Trackbacks & Pingbacks are separated
18. WordPress 3.0 menu system supported + backwarkd compatability
19. Cross browser compatibility IE7, IE8, IE9, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera

Features » Demo » Download »

Jobpress

Jobpress is a very special theme from web2feel. I am very proud of it. I wanted to create a free Job board based on wordpress. I was not very sure of getting this done as a complete solution when I started.

Features » Demo » Download »

Pronto

Pronto is a very clean and minimal jQuery Masonry WordPress theme that’s perfect for showcasing your posts in a grid like fashion, that will re-adjust depending on your visitors browser size. Everything is set to work right out of the box, simply install, add your posts and you are set. The theme includes an awesome notification region at the top for displaying important notices, a custom logo upload field, a custom flickr widget, threaded comments, light-box built-in…and some other sweet features.

• Masonry Powered Grid – items re-arrange depending on your window size
• Post-based theme – no custom post types, just use regular posts to create your structure
• Featured image support
• PrettyPhoto lightbox for single post featured images
• Notification bar area for putting important notices
• Custom logo upload field
• Flickr widget included
• Author pages
• Threaded comment support
• Works well with WordPress 3.3
• Free GPL theme
• Very clean and minimal design – easy to re-skin and customize

Features » Demo » Download »

Update Free

Hi today, we’re glad to release an update for our other popular free WordPress Theme that has released on Six Revisions. A personal blog theme style, and comes with 5 color schemes and 2 different layouts that you can set up on the theme’s options page in the WordPress Admin panel.

• Ready for WordPress 3.0 and above
• Support wordpress post thumbnails features
• Support for wordpress custom post types
• Support for custom background
• Other features, please check on SixRevisions

Features » Demo » Download »

GoGreen Portfolio

Go Green is a premium wordpress portfolio themes from ThemeForest. This is a clean wordpress theme, beautiful and modern design. The theme includes a shortcode, support your display, product, or a portfolio on his website. It’s an excellent design for business if you want a website to showcase products and services on display. If you are a blogging or a photographer, you can still use this theme to show and share your photos.

• flexible admin panel (unbranded)
• different sliders
• shortcode + button generator
• slider video support (only with anythingslider)
• different slider transition effects
• multi level dropdown menu
• contact form with input validation
• unlimited portfolio Sections/Pages
• unlimited sidebars for posts & pages
• unlimited fonts due font management
• unlimited colors
• full translation ready
• 50+ useful shortcodes to make unique designs
• custom widgets
• + 4 portfolio column layouts
• portfolio filter

Features » Demo » Download »

Platform

Designed in HTML5, Platform is a drag and drop framework that makes creating your ideal site a breeze. One of the best free blogging themes released in 2011.

Features » Demo » Download »

Busby

Busby is a clean personal blogging theme with it’s own options panel built with the UpThemes framework. I’ve been working on this for a while now, it’s quite a different experience building a theme which will be released publicly rather than one for my own or client’s use. There are a lot more things to take into account and lots more testing to do.

• 2 Column Personal Blog Theme
• Theme Options Panel
• RSS Subscriber number displayed using FeedBurner
• Twitter, RSS and Facebook icons
• Featured Post Slider
• Built-in SEO Options
• Import / Export Settings
• Upload logo or display as Text
• Built-in Pagination
• Insert Footer Text
• Insert Tracking code (analytics etc)
• Complete Typography control (size & font using Google Web Fonts )
• Dark and Light StyleSheets included

Features » Demo » Download »

Gazpo Mag

gazpoMag is a clean and featured-rich WordPress magazine style theme. It allows you to easily customize every detail of the theme to best suit your needs. The theme comes with the custom widgets to use in sidebar or footer.

• WordPress 3.2+ compatible
• Clean, scalable code
• Custom theme options panel
• Flexible homepage layout
• Custom slider
• Featured categories block
• Configurable menus
• Widget-Ready sidebar and footer
• Inbuilt social sharing buttons
• Threaded comments
• Gravatar ready comments
• No advertisement or encrypted links, aside of credit link to gazpo as the theme designer.

Features » Demo » Download »

Balita

In this post we release yet another freebie: the Balita WordPress theme, a theme dedicated to shops that sell products for children. The theme was designed by Tokokoo and released exclusively for Smashing Magazine and its readers. As usual, the theme is absolutely free to use for both private and commerical projects.

• WordPress E-Commerce Plugin:
• jQuery Slider:
• Custom Shopping Cart:
• Product List With Grid View:
• HTML5 + CSS3 Optimized:
• Ads Banner:
• Product Slider:
• Zoomable Product Images:
• Search Products:
• Blog Integration:
• Related Products:
• Multiple Product Images:
• Multiple Widget Areas:
• Facebook Page Integration

Features » Demo » Download »

GameSpeed

If you want to create a website with wordpress platform, you can use the “Game Speed” WordPress Themes. “Game Speed” is amazing wordpress theme. It is perfect for website gaming review, news, blogs and others. This theme is free for download. Many features are included in this theme. Some features of this theme are as follows:

• Fixed width.
• Easy to install and customize.
• Adsesnse ready.
• Gravatar ready.
• Tested with all pupular browsers (IE 7, 8, 9, Firefox 3.6+ Chrome, Opera, Safari)
• Tested with the wordpress version 3.1+
• Video shortcode generator. Many video support (youtube, vimeo, wordpress, google video ect).
• 2 Bonus custom widgets (sidebar video widget, random sidebar video).
• Skin color.
• SEO (Search Engine Optimized)

Features » Demo » Download »

Submarine

Submarine WordPress Theme is a well-designed Magazine Style Theme that has unlimited Colors. Just set in the admin panel your own color preference for this theme. Theme also has Featured jQuery slider, Thumbnails on Posts, Widget Ready, Theme Administration Options and more.

• Easy to use options page
• Featured Image Ready
• 125×125 banners ready (easy editable from admin options)
• Compatible with latest WordPress versions
• Widgets Ready
• SEO Optimizedy
• Fixed width
• Gravatar on Comments
• Tested and compatible with all major browsers: IE, FF, Safari

Features » Demo » Download »

WP-Creativix

WP-Creativix offers a clean, business portfolio layout. Our WordPress Theme, has everything a good Business Website needs. It has a nice Javascript dropdown Menu – a predesigned Portfolio Page – Lightbox Support and a nice Javascript JQuery Slideshow on the Homepage.

Features » Demo » Download »

Mimbo Magazine Theme

MIMBO is a clean, customizable magazine-style theme for WordPress. It’s also a simple framework which can be modified with child themes, discussed further down in the documentation. Read more about the latest features.

Features » Demo » Download »

MusicLife

MusicLife is a free news WordPress theme with featured content option and options page. Supports post thumbnails. Suitable for any niche, especially for news or magazine sites.

• Easy to use options page
• Featured Image Ready
• 125×125 banners ready (easy editable from admin options)
• Compatible with latest WordPress versions
• Widgets Ready
• SEO Optimizedy
• Fixed width
• Gravatar on Comments
• Tested and compatible with all major browsers: IE, FF, Safari

Features » Demo » Download »

The New Year is a great time to either start a brand new blog or revamp your exiting website. One of the ways to improve your blog in 2012 is by using plugins that make it more social media optimized and SEO friendly.

Having the right plugins can give you an edge over other blogs and can also assist you in gaining the extra functionality you need for your WordPress-powered site, especially if social media is an important part of your marketing strategy. Let’s have a look at the top plugins that I recommend you utilize in 2012. There’s a few new plugins in the mix together with several plugins that I recommended in my Best 2011 WordPress Plugins for Social Media and SEO that you’ll want to reference if you haven’t done so.

• The 14 Best WordPress Plugins for Social Media and SEO Optimized Sites for 2012

If you read my previous post about the best SEO practices, I mentioned that one of the most important elements to search engine optimization is on-page (or on-site) optimization or, for the purpose of this post, the part of WordPress that deals with the “code”. WordPress is a great platform and takes care of about 80% of the mechanics of SEO according to Matt Cutts (Google Spam Chief). While this is true, it does not mean that you can’t improve it further and this is where the SEO plugins come into play. They help your site go that extra mile for added “technical optimizations”.

Note that there are many SEO plugins available out there, and you should always do some research for more information. The ones that I will be recommending here are all from credible sources (developers and on the WP repository), 100% free and tested. I use them either here or my other websites.

• The Best WordPress SEO Plugins For 2012 Part 1

Security is one of those topics that comes up time and time again. You hear the advice, you know you should do it, but somehow, you never get around to it.

The tips in this post are designed to help make your WordPress installation safer and less likely to be hacked or spammed. If you’re short on time, just start at the top and work down. I’ve (roughly) ordered them so that the most important tweaks come first.

We also have a great giveaway at the end of this post, from Sucuri.net and Appsumo. Check it out for the chance to win free site security monitoring for a year!

• 8 Tips to Secure a WordPress Site