Trend #1 - Tabbing System

Wordpress Tab System
Tabbing systems are becoming increasingly popular in all forms of web design, not just Wordpress. This is expected, as they are a very unique and effective way of displaying alot of content in a small amount of space. Common uses of tabs in Wordpress include displaying popular posts, recent comments, post categories, etc, etc... You get the idea. Here are some of the more popular solutions to getting yourself a fully-functional tabbing system in just a few minutes:

  1. StereoTabs - Simple tabbing system that I use, part of the scriptaculous library.
  2. DOMTabs - I've heard good things about this system.
  3. TabMenu - Another great and lightweight tabbing system.
  4. Tabifier - Another lightweight javascript tabbing script.
  5. UI Tabs - Powerful tabbing system run off of jQuery.

Trend #2 - "Featured" Post Display

Wordpress Featured Post
With blogs becoming more and more user-friendly everyday, the need for a "Featured Post" display became a necessity. Say, for example, you begin a free giveaway on your blog on Monday. By Friday, if you had posted everyday during the week, that giveaway post from Monday may be on page 2, never to be seen again. This is where a "Featured Post" display comes in most handy. It appears that the use of jQuery to implement a very eye-appealing animated "Featured Post" display is becoming more and more in demand in the world of Wordpress themes. Here are some of the most popular javascript plugins to get the job done:

  1. s3Slider - One of the most common types of "Featured Post" displays (and the one I use).
  2. JSGallery - Maybe you want no words and only the post thumbnail images to display.
  3. Agile Carousel - Another powerful jQuery slideshow-like plugin.
  4. jCarousel Lite - Very lightweight javascript carousel plugin.

Trend #3 - Post Thumbnails

Wordpress Post Thumbnails
What are blog posts? Blog posts, when you really look at them, are nothing but walls of text. So what separates them from a page from a high school textbook? Blog posts have personality. You gain readers by being able to implement your personality into your posts. You have to make them feel comfortable, reassure them that they're reading your posts for pleasure, not because they have to. Post thumbnails in Wordpress help to give a spark of life to your posts. Here's a quick tutorial on how to use Custom Fields in Wordpress to display a post thumbnail next to each post:

Step 1

Go into functions.php and paste the following in between the php tags:

/*Custom Field Images*/
function image_attachment($key, $width, $height) {
	global $post;
	$custom_field = get_post_meta($post->ID, $key, true);
	if($custom_field) {
		echo '<img src="'.$custom_field.'" alt="Post Image" width="'.$width.'" height="'.$height.'" />';
	}
	else {
		return;
	}
}

Step 2

Add the following where you want the image to be displayed (somewhere in The Loop in single.php, for example):

<?php $thereisimage = get_post_meta($post->ID, $rs_image_key, true);
if($thereisimage){ ?>
	<div class="post-image">
		<?php image_attachment($rs_image_key, 512, 200); ?>
	</div>
<?php }?>

What this does is first check if there is an image applied to the post. If $therisimage=true, then the image is displayed. Note, you can change the "512" and "200" to whatever the desired width and height of the image is.

Step 3

To actually get an image associated with a post, when writing a post from the Wordpress Dashboard, go down to the Custom Fields area and input "image" for Name and the url to the image for the Value. Then click "Add Custom Field".

All done.

Trend #4 - Cross-Browser Transparency

Wordpress Cross-Browser Transparency
Internet Explorer 6 has ruined web design for years. With it's countless quirks and bugs, Internet Explorer 6 has plagued good web designers for as long as it's been around. One of the biggest nuisances about this browser (aside from the fact that it is still one of the most widely used browsers) is that it is the only "modern" one that does not support .png transparency. There are simple ways around this, one of them being using transparent .gif's instead. The thing is, .gif's can't hold the same amount of quality that .png's can, so most web designers give up at trying to implement transparency in their designs. The good news is, you don't have to:

  1. IEpngFix - By far the best solution in my opinion.
  2. jQuery IEpngFix - Another solution, powered by jQuery.

Trend #5 - Animated Dropdown Menus

Wordpress Animated Dropdown Menu
One of the newer trends in Wordpress themes is dropdown menus for pages and categories in the navigation menu. Well, this isn't entirely true. What I mean to say is that animated (and jQuery-powered) dropdown menus are becoming more and more popular. Here are simple tutorials and jQuery plugins to help you achieve this effect in your theme:

  1. CSS-Tricks.com Tutorial - Very in-depth and useful tutorial to introduce you to jQuery dropdowns.
  2. Superfish - Popular and easy-ti-use jQuery dropdown menu plugin.
  3. Simple Dropdown - Another jQuery-powered dropdown menu.

Trend #6 - Modal Boxes

Wordpress Modal Boxes
Modal boxes are those animated popup boxes that are used for countless numbers of things, like displaying pictures, video files, and flash animations (to name a few). Common features for modal boxes include the dimming of the background to give a "cinematic" feel, animated "growing" of the popup, and slideshow functionality. Here are common solutions to getting your site set up with user friendly and eye-appealing modal boxes:

  1. ShadowBox JS - Wordpress plugin that is simple to use and very effective.
  2. Facebox 1.2 - Lightweight modal box plugin.
  3. Lightwindow - Typical modal box.
  4. FancyZoom - Very unique modal box in terms of presentation, run on jQuery.

Trend #7 - Theme Options Pages

Wordpress Theme Options
Face it. We're practically in the world of Web 3.0. If you are currently developing a Wordpress theme for public use, I severely recommend you look into creating a Theme Options page for it. Not only does this add incremental value to your theme, it also improves user-friendliness by a good amount. For those of you that don't know what a Theme Options page is, in a nutshell, it's a control panel for a Wordpress theme. You're in luck, too, because they're not hard to create at all. Here are some great tutorials on how to get one set up all by yourself:

  1. Tutorial from ForTheLose.org - Recommended for obvious reasons.
  2. Tutorial from ThemeForest Blog - Another great and detailed tut for creating a theme options page.

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