Author: Tarique Sani

Minimalist WordPress themes – Premium version!

Recently I was required to search Minimalist WordPress Themes for a friend of mine. She did not mind it being a paid theme. Here are the ones which I shortlisted for her. These are all premium themes. If you want free themes you will have to wait for the next post where I will post the free themes which were shortlisted.

Purity: Responsive, Clean, Minimal & Bold WP Theme – $55

Purity: Responsive, Clean, Minimal & Bold WP Theme

Purity is a Clean, Minimal and Responsive WordPress Theme with a ‘BOLD’ feel that can be easily used as a personal portfolio or a business website. With an Extensive Documentation and a Demo Content it’s a matter of minutes to set your page up. Theme is fully compatible with the latest WordPress 3.9!

Demo & Download

Maktab – Business theme – $55

Maktab – Clean, Minimal and business theme

Maktab WordPress Theme is a fully responsive HTML5 theme that is ideal for Business, Corporate and Portfolio. Maktab Comes With a lot of features Custom page builder, custom posts, Bootstrap, Retina Icons, Contact Form, Woo Commerce integration, Unlimited Sidebar, and much more to help you create you next project.

Demo & Download

Good Space – $40

Good Space - Responsive Minimal WP Theme

Good Space Good Space is a WordPress theme especially for creative agency. It’s very clean, minimal with modern design. This theme is also has a responsive ability. Moreover, it comes with tons of features. Including our page items that can be managed very easily via our awesome tool, ‘Page Builder’. Admin panel in this theme is a real feature rich. You can also create unlimited sidebar, choosing over 450 fonts or if you want to use your own, we provide a cufon uploader. You can also translate each elements to your language via this admin panel.

Demo & Download

Minimal WordPress Portfolio – $35

Minimal WordPress Portfolio
This is a clean, minimal, timeless design for a wide variety of users. Designed to help you get your site up and running quickly by taking advantage of built in WordPress functionality and avoiding dozens of useless, complex option screens. Leverage the popular JetPack plugin for a custom Carousel, Galleries, Gravatar Hovercards, Contact Forms, Widget Visibility, Custom Add-on CSS, Extra Widgets, Infinite Scroll and more!

Demo & Download

Mokka – Minimal & Elegant WordPress Blog – $45

Mokka - Minimal & Elegant WordPress Blog
Mokka is a responsive, minimalist, flexible and modern WordPress Blog. From a clean white color scheme (with a accent color of choice) & multiple page layouts which all remain sophisticated and simple. Everything definitely brings a certain elegance.

Demo & Download

Casia – Minimal WordPress Theme – $35

Casia - Minimal Clean WordPress Theme
Casia is a clean and responsive one-page creative portfolio that is perfect to promote your work in a very professional and pleasant way. Casia was built in HTML5 and CSS3, with parallax image effects to make it even more appealing and dynamic. It is fully responsive; it looks stunning on all types of screens and devices (desktop, notebook, tablet and mobile). Casia comes in three versions:

Demo & Download

UniSphere Minim – $40

UniSphere Minim Corporate and Portfolio

UniSphere Minim is a WordPress theme designed with corporate businesses in mind. It has a custom CMS integrated into the WordPress administration area that allows you to build a fully functional professional website in minutes. The theme is also well suited for online portfolios and blogs.

Demo & Download

Rayleigh – $45

Rayleigh - A Responsive Minimal Architect Theme

Rayleigh is a minimalistic theme with clean and elegant design, made for architects, designers, and all-around creatives to showcase their work.
Demo & Download

Raiden – $40

Raiden - A Minimal WordPress Theme with Style

Raiden is an elegant personal blogging WordPress theme with refined typography and aesthetics. Offering support for all 10 WordPress Post Formats, this theme is ideal for your personal Blog. Raiden also has an optional View Mode Switcher that optimizes the reading experience according to the lighting conditions. Have a look at the demo!

Demo & Download

Basic Values and Goals Of REBT

Goals and Values of REBT
My previous post on ABC & D of REBT evoked a much more enthusiastic response than I anticipated with call for more information about REBT. I am reproducing here the basic values and goals of REBT (Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy) as espoused by Albert Ellis. Hope this will help in further realising what REBT is and aims for…

  1. SELF-INTEREST: Sensible and emotionally healthy people tend to be first or primarily interested in themselves. They tend to put their own interests at least a little above the interests of others. They sacrifice themselves to some degree for those for whom they care, but not overwhelmingly or completely.
  2. SOCIAL INTEREST: Social interest is usually rational and self-helping because most people choose to live and enjoy themselves in a social group or community. If they do not act morally, protect the rights of others, and abet social survival, it is unlikely they will create the kind of world in which they themselves can live comfortably and happily.
  3. SELF-DIRECTION: Healthy people tend to mainly assume responsibility for their own lives while simultaneously preferring to cooperate with others. They do not need or demand considerable support or succoring from others.
  4. HIGH FRUSTRATION TOLERANCE: Rational individuals have the ability to tolerate or withstand a great deal of difficulty or discomfort in their lives without making themselves emotionally disturbed about it. From this perspective, they are prepared to tolerate frustration because it is worth doing so to obtain their goals. They are able to accept grim reality and seek to distinguish between adverse events they can change and those they cannot.
  5. FLEXIBILITY: Healthy and mature individuals tend to be flexible in their thinking and open to change. They tend to be unbigoted and pluralistic in their view of other people. They do not make rigid, invariant rules for themselves and others.

    6. Continue reading Basic Values and Goals Of REBT

Lycaon pictus, the African Wild dog.

Lycaon pictus

An endangered species, Lycaon pictus is a canid found only in Africa, especially in savannas and lightly wooded areas. It is variously called the African wild dog, African hunting dog, Cape hunting dog, African painted dog, painted wolf, painted hunting dog, spotted dog, or ornate wolf. I had an excellent opportunity to see these magnificent creatures for a long time when we were in Botswana. Spending almost 4 hours with the pack as they went about their business.

I got a whole lot of photos but this particular one of young adults galavanting around after a meal has a dynamic quality which i particularly loved. Unfortunately the species in under a threat due to various reasons. Continue reading Lycaon pictus, the African Wild dog.

ABC & D of REBT

I got on to Secret app a while ago. I did not expect to find anything unusual other than the rants about workplaces, brags about sexual escapades or vice versa. What disturbed me was the number of my friends who were posting distressing messages about being depressed, feeling sad or feeling hopeless. Some more serious than others. I have tried to suggest therapy to all of them but the most common refrain I heard was…

  1.  I don’t want to share my past and
  2.  It is a very slow process taking years.

No it is not so! It is not so specially if you go to a REBT practitioner.

REBT (pronounced R.E.B.T not rebbit) stands for Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy. Created and Developed by Albert Ellis, REBT does not focus much on your past events but more on your present state of emotions and disturbances. It has a very easy to understand model for psychological and emotional disturbances which is very aptly called the ABC of REBT. I first came across this model when I consulted Dr. Shishir Palsapure of MorphicMinds a couple of years ago for what I feared was a Major Clinical Depression (It was not. I was merely upset.) I was so blown away by the directness and effectiveness of the method that I started to study REBT as an interest to better understand how human cognition works and now I can apply its principles in almost everything I do.

So what is the ABC model?

A – Adversity or Activating event
B – Belief you have about the event
C – Consequence

Continue reading ABC & D of REBT

Using themes in CakePHP 3

Almost every application I code has themes which either the end user can change or the admin can set or can be changed on the fly. Doing all these things was easy in CakePHP 2.x. With the first alpha release of CakePHP 3.x I was naturally keen to try out how theming worked with V3.

Wrote about using themes in CakePHP 3 at the SANIsoft blog. Themes in CakePHP version 3 are now full fledged plugins. This allows for a lot of flexibility and helps in keeping your code DRY. I have added a step by step example where I use Twitter Bootstrap to theme baked Post views. The steps are simple and have complete code for your use for the layout and index.ctp

Read the blog post

eBird widget plugin for WordPress

eBird Widget plugin solves the problem of showing data from eBird on to a website which runs wordpress. First I should elaborate what eBird is – https://ebird.org is a website which has a real-time, online checklist program. It does so by providing Global tools for birders which help in recording birds sightings, keep track of your bird lists, explore dynamic maps and graphs, share your sightings and join the eBird community and some more. The problem is that the sharing part is not too well evolved.

Just released the version 1 eBird widget for wordpress and wrote a post about it on the SANIsoft blog. The plugin uses wp_cron to fetch the data from eBird site in the background, thus the page load times are not affected. Read the complete blog post

CakePHP 3 is coming

“CakePHP 3 is coming” I said, a colleague remarked,  “Why are you saying it like – Winter is coming?”.

We have been working with CakePHP almost since its inception nearly 10 years ago. We have survived the winter of converting from version 1.2 to 2.0 with great benefits and I am eagerly looking forward to using CakePHP 3 for greater benefits. The roadmap document clearly states that CakePHP 3.0 represents a significant break in backwards compatibility.

Wrote a short introduction about the upcoming CakePHP version 3 at the SANIsoft blog. The biggest takeaways for me are

  1. Installation via composer
  2. Complete rewrite of the ORM
  3. Validation is now a service
  4. Session no longer static
  5. Themes are now plugins
  6. Changes to FormHelper

Go ahead Read the complete post

Live forever Atul!

Sometime 1998/99: “Sweetheart Mr. Atul Chitnis himself replied to your email. You are going to write a review of GIMP for PCQuest!!”

This was our first contact with Atul, Swati was very unsure as to what will she write but another email from Atul and she was fine. Atul himself had edited the first draft of that review and had said it was good to go!

Atul, in his own words did not hack code – he hacked people. How he did it cannot be explained in words. It was something which was meant to be experienced.

The ITCom 2000: Aasim was 3 years old, could barely talk in Hindi and he would go up to Atul and just look up at him sitting in the corner chair, in turn Atul would look at him equally at loss as to what to talk. Aasim kept returning to him for next 12 years.

2001: An idea before its time – he trusted us to build it. SugarTrade did not take off but that taught us to think big!

He was a demigod for me, who became a friend. His style was brutally honest, no mincing of words but it always made sense if you heard him out. He would hear you out too if you had it in you! I have flamed and trolled Atul publicly at least 3 times but I can confess that on a personal level things never changed.

Atul trusted me, not only as a coder but as a doctor. That was a burden I gladly took upon…. that was the least I could do…

Atul they tell me you are no more!? WTF they are talking about, Yeah your physical self is not there with us anymore – you abused that kit too much for too long, something had to give way but no more? crazy people these – you will live forever Atul!!

Time does not change us….

Time does not change us. It just unfolds us. Max Frisch

Time does not change us. It just unfolds us. Max Frisch

Celebrating 19 years of marriage today. Chose to celebrate it in a quiet and relaxed way. We sat and talked for a long long time. The wnet to the garden to plant new seedlings that we had got and trim some of the plants. Evening was a dinner cooked at home with just the us. Nothing dramatic but it was very intimate. I chose the quote by Max Frisch because it fits s in many ways. We have grown so much in past 19 years together but still the core beliefs which got us to be one still remain the same. Things have been elaborated and experienced over the years and that is what I would call unfolding but nothing has really changed. We have matured learnt to look at things in a more empathic ways rather than just sympathetic. It was wonderful doing so together.

The author Max Frisch also fits best because – as stated on his wikipedia page

Max Rudolf Frisch (May 15, 1911 – April 4, 1991) was a Swiss playwright and novelist, regarded as highly representative of German-language literature after World War II. In his creative works Frisch paid particular attention to issues relating to problems of human identity, individuality, responsibility, morality and political commitment. His use of irony is a significant feature of his post-war publications. Frisch was one of the 22 founder members of the Gruppe Olten. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1986.

Marriage is indeed about human identity, individuality, responsibility and morality. With this thought we enter into our 20th year of marriage

P.S. Thanks to Shweta for this lovely capture

Some Premium WooCommerce themes that I like

WooCommerce is a WordPress eCommerce toolkit that helps you setup a WordPress e-com shop. While the plugin itself if free the add-ons to it are priced at various levels. There are several free extensions  for WooCommerce but when it comes to woocommerce themes I just did not like any. After some searching I found a few premium themes which I have recently referred to a client.

The Builder – $55

Premium WooCommerce Themes

The Builder is a Premium WordPress theme that comes with massive and flexible features. Focused on bringing easiest system for user to build and modify their own site, both on content and layout/design! Create an eCommerce, business or personal site with your own style!

Demo & Download

KALLYAS – $55

Premium WooCommerce Themes
Kallyas is an ultra-premium, highly-responsive WordPress Theme built for today websites. It’s super flexible, clean design (and code), without no modesty, one of the … without no modesty, one of the most complete theme ever created.

Demo & Download

Mearishop – $55

Premium WooCommerce Themes

MeariShop is a clean and flexible WordPress theme that utilises the powerful Woo Commerce plugins to create a versatile WordPress-powered shop, with unlimited layout options and unlimited skins. MeariShopis powered by the advanced Hana Panel, which provides tons of options to manage and modify any aspect of the theme – it is well suited for both beginners with no coding knowledge and developers.

Demo & Download

Xing – $55

WooCommerce Premium Theme

Xing is a clean and modern WordPress theme designed for corporate websites and e-commerce ventures. The theme can be used for small to large business setups, online shopping stores, personal portfolio, or as an editorial blog. Supported with custom templates, widgets, short codes, and customization options; the theme can be a suitable choice for your business/ecommerce projects.

Demo & Download

Shoppica – $55

Premium WooCommerce Themes

Shoppica WP is a guarantee for a professional online presence. The clean and modern look allows you to use the theme for every kind of online shop. In combination with the powerful option to change the color of all elements, you will be given the possibility to make an unique e-commerce website that stands out of the crowd!

Demo & Download