WPMU’s Best in WordPress Nov. 26 – Dec. 2, 2012

In this week’s episode of Best in WordPress, we bring you a variety of posts, including a tutorial on theme creation, turning RSS feeds into content, official WordPress news, and a cool new way to add pull-quotes in your articles.

So let’s get started, shall we…

1. A Quick Method for Creating WordPress Themes (WPhub.com)

This post from WPHub gives you a great checklist for the required items of creating a new WordPress theme – including all the files you need to create, and the ones you don’t.

2. Turn Your RSS Into Content (SpeckyBoy)

This post is not for the faint of heart – it’s a fairly involved tutorial, but the results are fantastic. Basically, it teaches you how to take a plain RSS feed from another site and turn it into usable content on your own.

It breaks down parsing that content, turning it into usable actions in WordPress, and then adding it into your templates for modification and styling.

It’s a great post for developers and designers who want to make magazine-style themes for clients who pull content from various sources on the web.

3. How to Force Users to Reset Passwords every 30 Days (WPMUDEV)

Security is always an issue when dealing with user-based systems. On a site with a large base, just one corrupt user can bring down the whole business. One way to keep security fresh is to force your users to change their passwords at a regular interval.

This post shows you how to do it with a simple plugin and a few admin settings.

4. Coloring Posts in the WordPress Admin Panel (WPExplorer.com)

You can get bleary-eyed quickly browsing through post admin panels with dozens of pages of posts. This article from WPExplorer shows you how to color-code your posts inside the WordPress admin section to make finding and reading your titles easier on the eyes.

5. WordPress’ New Restaurant Templates (WordPress.com)

WordPress recently put an initiative in place to highlight the lack of good user experience on restaurant websites. Their solution was to create a few new templates for restaurants to improve design, aesthetic, and make it easy for people to find what they need quickly – be it menus, reservations, reviews, or directions.

We’re super excited about new the focus on restaurant sites, and we think you will be too – especially when you see our forthcoming Bookings Plugin, which will help restaurant owners (among other types of businesses that use bookings) take reservations, plan seating, and even charge fees directly on their sites. Look for that plugin in the coming months on WPMUDEV.org.

6. The Ultimate Guide to Setting Up a New WordPress Site (Blondish.net)

This is an entry from a new site on the Best in WordPress list – Blondish.net, and it gives budding designers a good workflow and checklist for the process of planning and creating a new WordPress website.

7. Pinterest and Quote Images (WPMUDEV.org)

This post from our site highlights a new plugin intended for Pinterest users, but it actually works great for anyone who wants to show off quotes in his or her posts. The plugin allows you to take a quote and display it as an image in your article. You can choose from dozens of images from the plugin’s creators or opt to use your own images as the quote background. You can use any custom quote text, even call out the quote’s author.

That’s it for this week – we’ll see you again next week with a brand new batch of the best content in the world of WordPress.

As we head into the holidays we’d love to hear from you on any special holiday-themed WordPress posts you’re planning – so, send us a note or leave a comment below!