Tag Archives: Theme

The Best Service Marketplace Theme In 2021?

[ad_1] Want to build a task marketplace like TaskRabbit, Airtasker, or Thumbtack?  Great idea! In just a decade since its inception, TaskRabbit has empowered 148,000 individuals to grow their income and skills. Airtasker creates over 1.4 million tasks each year. And Thumbtack is doing its own thing to help local professionals find work. ExpertHive is a clean, modern WordPress theme that wants to make it easy for you to launch your own on-demand task marketplace – one that offers a similar experience and functionality as these task sites.  The theme’s developers claim that it’s already packed with all the features needed to build an on-demand services marketplace, so you won’t have to buy anything else to get your site going. This made us curious to try it out ourselves. Is ExpertHive as complete as its creators say? Does it deliver a marketplace with all the necessary bells and whistles? Can it really help me build a site like TaskRabbit?   We’ll be answering these questions and more in this comprehensive ExpertHive Review. ExpertHive On-Demand Services Marketplace Theme Review ExpertHive is a lightweight yet feature-rich WordPress theme for building a two-sided services marketplace. It allows you to create a site where buyers can post their job requests and sellers can list their services. The theme is powered by HivePress, the multipurpose directory plugin that’s already used by 3,000+ active WordPress sites.  Key features include: Requests & Offers to facilitate customers in posting their requests and enabling experts to list services they offer. Commissions & Payouts for setting up a default commission rate and a payout threshold for taskers and experts.  Messages & Reviews to help customers communicate with taskers and leave reviews about their services. Custom Fields & Categories that make it easy to customize the marketplace to your liking. WooCommerce integration to help you process payments.  And more. Besides, you can use any of the premium or free add-ons available for HivePress to expand your marketplace’s functionality.  Article Continues Below Unlike other themes, ExpertHive saves you the need to download expensive third-party extensions or plugins. You can combine different HivePress extensions to create a niche marketplace with unique functionality.  ExpertHive costs $79 for a lifetime single-site license. The purchase also includes 12 months of premium support, automatic updates, and a 30-day money-back guarantee. For the sake of this review, we purchased ExpertHive so that we can give you a full scope of what it’s capable of.Easy Installation and Handy Plugins  ExpertHive installs the same way as any other premium WordPress theme. You simply go to your WordPress dashboard, select Appearance > Themes, click Add New > Upload Theme, and then select the ZIP file. Once installed and activated, ExpertHive will suggest installing some plugins, such as HivePress Blocks and HivePress Messages. We installed all of them, as they’re meant to complement the site-building process.  And to further simplify things, ExpertHive developers have recorded a screencast about how to import its demo content. Although it’s possible to start designing your marketplace from scratch, we actually recommend using pre-made content so that your site starts off looking exactly like the live ExpertHive demo. ExpertHive suggests using the free one-click demo import plugin for importing demo data. After installing it, navigate to Appearance > Import Demo Data and then click the Import Demo Data button, as seen in the screenshot below. Site Customizations Being a modern theme, ExpertHive is fully compatible with the WordPress block editor and customizer. Know what that means? It means you can tweak everything using drag-and-drop and the familiar WordPress blocks. Also, whatever you edit will reflect on the front-end of the site.  With the WordPress customizer, you can switch fonts, change the main colors, background images, customize menus, and so on. Additionally, ExpertHive allows you to build your own layouts depending on the page functionality and purpose. You can do this by adding a new page from your WordPress backend. The theme offers the following blocks by default: Article Continues Below Listings Listing categories User registration form Vendors Vendor search form Requests Requests search form Listing tags Reviews ExpertHive also offers shortcodes for those using the Classic TinyMCE editor. These give you more control over your site’s design. If you’re a more advanced user, you can customize ExpertHive directly from the CSS. Marketplace Features Although ExpertHive’s site customization features are great, it’s the marketplace features and monetization capabilities that make it truly stand out. For example, ExpertHive and HivePress plugins combine to offer you: Listings Allow any registered users to list their services and feature specific listings on your homepage, as well as add, edit, or remove the existing listing categories. Paid Listings With the Paid Listings extension, you can create and sell various listing packages with different options so experts can pick the best option for listing their services. Vendors Manage individual expert profiles, including adding new custom fields and search filters (such as location). Requests Allow customers to create their own requests with extra details like budget, due date, and time range. It’s also possible to add custom fields and search filters in the same way as for listings or vendors. Messages Let buyers and experts communicate with each other. Tags Allow experts to create category-based tags to make it easier for buyers to find relevant listings. Favorites Enable customers to compile a list of their favorite listings so that they’re encouraged to come back and order services from the same taskers Article Continues Below Testimonials Display testimonials from experts to grow trust in your marketplace. WooCommerce ExpertHive is integrated with WooCommerce for processing payments and managing orders, so you can use any of the payment gateways available for WooCommerce. There are also more free and premium ExpertHive extensions, but these nine should be enough for incorporating key marketplace functionalities into your website. Commissions & Payouts One of ExpertHive’s best features is that it allows you to apply a default commission rate. You can set one overall commission rate for all experts or offer a slightly higher commission to taskers

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WordPress Theme Development: Core Concepts (Full Guide)

[ad_1] Welcome! WordPress themes are one of the most important topics that one must understand to be good at WordPress development. Themes underlie the entire visual half of WordPress sites, but often grow to do even more. Because of the visual importance, they’re a great place to dive in if you’re interested in getting to the “code-side” of WordPress. I myself “cut my teeth” on WordPress themes back in 2007 and 2008. WordPress themes were where I started to come to grips with the power (and limits) of PHP, CSS, and HTML. So this course is great for newbies, and those just looking to confirm their understanding of the whole system. An editor’s note before we dive in: 2021 is an exciting year for the future of WordPress themes. For the first time since… kind of forever (that is: the start of WordPress itself)… what themes look like could change pretty dramatically. But today, in April 2021, that future is still a little unclear. And even when that future is clearer (and less likely to change) it’ll still be vital that WordPress developers understand “classic” WordPress themes for a long time. After all, as seasoned WordPress freelancers are well aware, WordPress sites can live for a long time with little more than security updates. So we’ve updated our classic and still vital little free course on WordPress themes as they are in early-2021. Enjoy! Understanding this Free WP Theme Development Course This is an brief introduction to the core concepts of WordPress theme development and comes from the Third Edition of our “learn WordPress development” course Up and Running. We’ve worked hard over the years to write some of the best tutorials on WordPress development, and give them away to readers here at WPShout. Up and Running is our effort to consolidate all that teaching into a single step-by-step resource for people new to the world of WordPress coding. Hopefully, it’s also a little easier to navigate than the mess of links that is this (or any) modern website. This post consolidates a few of that chapters from Up and Running together. While the course is much more exhaustive on both WordPress theme and plugin development than this is, we’re sure this will give you a very solid foundation to start from. The three important concepts of WordPress theme development we’ll cover here are: The WordPress Template Hierarchy Processing Posts with The Loop Adding Functionality with functions.php We’ll take you through each one on the linked articles at the bottom of every section. Those are a very accurate representation of what you’d find in Up and Running. Although on the real course site, it’s a little easier to keep your place. We have a completion-tracking WordPress plugin for that 🤓. Like you’ll find in Up and Running, all of the linked chapters here have a Summary Limerick and Quiz to reinforce what you’ve learned at their end. 🙃 Core Concept 1 of WordPress Theme Development: The Template Hierarchy The first thing that’ll help you get a sense of WordPress theme development is getting a sense of what all those theme files do. Some of them may be obvious to someone who has done a fair amount of web development, like style.css being the place for your CSS styling rules. But most the work you do in WordPress theme development comes down to understanding the WordPress template hierarchy. WordPress template hierarchy underlies a lot of what’s useful and complicated about WordPress. WordPress themes involve a bunch files. And understanding those files is the key to understanding WordPress development. All the files in the template hierarchy have a few things in common: They have names that end with .php They contain a version of “the Loop” inside of them (see the next section for more about that) They mostly contain HTML and some PHP code Those three bullet points are the core of what makes up the WordPress hierarchy. But there’s a lot more to understand. And that’s what our article all about it tries to help you with. Reading it will get you along the way to being a full-fledged WordPress theme developer: The Template Hierarchy in WordPress Core Concept 2 of WordPress Theme Development: The Loop in WordPress and What it Means For this one, we’ve taken the time to create a custom post. Like the other of these post’s, this is a chapter from Up and Running. The Loop is one of the things that first scared me (David writing this) about WordPress development. The core thing was that it all sounded so ominous. Whether people called it “WordPress loop” of “The Loop”, I knew that WordPress had that complicated concept involved. Later, after I’d programmed more, I realized that this was just a basic “while” loop, a common construct in almost all programs. But before that, it really intimidated me. If you feel like you’ve got it from that description alone, you might not need to read our full article about what the WordPress Loop is and what it means. Other than the syntax which is distinct to WordPress, it’s not much more complicated than that. But if you’ve never done much coding, you probably should be sure to read the whole article. WordPress theme development is really dependent on getting a handle on how “the Loop” works in WordPress. You’ll hear people talk a lot, as you get into theming, about being “inside the WordPress loop” and outside of it. The article covers all of that and more. If you’ve not read it yet, please do: Understanding The Loop: WordPress’s Way of Showing Posts Core Concept 3 of WordPress Theme Development: Adding Functionality with functions.php Plugins are a big topic in WordPress, and I’ve sometimes heard people describe this next focus as “the plugin of a WordPress theme.” I don’t necessarily agree with that description. I also think it actually add confusion to the issue. That said, inside of your WordPress theme’s functions.php is indeed where you write

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