$20 for Lots of Themes / Graphics / Goodies

The latest Digital Trends Bundle from Envato is quite tempting. You get more than 40 files with value over $500 for just $20. To be exact, this digital bundle consists of 16 GraphicRiver items, 4 ThemeForest items, 8 PhotoDune items, 5 AudioJungle items, 9 VideoHive items, and 1 CodeCanyon.

The items that most interested me are the 2 WordPress theme items - Presso, clean & modern magazine theme and Ubergrid, responsive grid wordpress theme, and the CodeCanyon item - Digital Paybox. Presso and Ubergrid are listed as two of the popular themes recently, you can't go wrong with them! And Digital Paybox seems to be quite useful as a payment processing tool for any WordPress sites, it works with a number of payment gateways including PayPal, Payza / Alertpay, krill / Moneybookers, Authorize.Net, InterKassa, EgoPay, Perfect Money, Credit / Debit Cards (via Stripe), Bitcoins (via BitPay).

Everything sounds good, I was about to order it, but then I noticed the bold sentence in the bundle description, "Due to the exclusive nature of the Digital Trends Bundle, the Bundle items are purchased ‘as-is’, meaning no Bundle files are eligible for item support or updates." So, that's the catch eh? It's a bit scary to buy a theme which does not provide supports and updates. Maybe this package should be renamed as "Trial Bundle", then prospective customers could expect that they would need to pay later to get supports and updates. But of course, if you find other items (those that most likely don't need updates) useful, $20 is still a good deal for this trial bundle.

How to add a sidebar to Sentinel WordPress Theme frontpage

A friend of mine also bought a copy of Sentinel theme and wondered how to add a right sidebar to the frontpage. Indeed, many people would like to have such an option so to display a pretty AdSense 300x600 vertical ad or other stuff on the sidebar. The latest update has not yet solved this problem. So here is some more detail.

You might have tried all the options in the page editor or theme settings page, but the sidebar just never show up. Take a look at the source code, and you will notice that there is a comment "<!-- No sidebar -->".

Open page-1.php in templates/home, and page-1-sb-right.php in templates/page.

Replace line 15 "<div class="grid">" of page-1.php with line 17 "<div class="grid sidebar_right">" of page-1-sb-right.php

and

replace line 30 "<!-- No sidebar -->" of page-1.php with line 36 "<?php get_sidebar(); ?>" of page-1-sb-right.php.

Of course, you can modify, add or delete other items for your frontpage as well.

Just received an update notification from the plugin Visual Composer, hopefully the coming Sentinel update will include a working Visual Composer as well. That's about it for now.