Around the Office: Google’s comment crawling, the business of themes, more

Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week.

Roberto found Sawyer Hollenshead’s tips on building WordPress themes as a business to be a great resource for developers who are considering getting into designing themes around the WordPress content management system and blogging platform. Among the important takeaways was to build a solid user base by prompting whoever downloaded his free themes to join an opt-in newsletter, to develop a list of people who might buy premium themes later on.

Brent found out that Google now indexes more comments and other dynamically loaded AJAX and JavaScript content. According to a Digital Trends report, website comment systems that use Facebook to sign in can now be fair-game for Google searches. This is bad news for people wanting to rant about their boss because comments could now be traced back to you, but it could be good news for search engine marketers because blog comments can now give a website a search boost.

Also, Roberto wasn’t surprised this week that crowd favourites WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal were among the top 10 content management systems according to web designer depot. What was interesting was the rest of the list, which features more obscure platforms that offer some advantages because of their support, feature set, and ease-of-use. This list is a good reminder not to overlook platforms like ExpressionEngine and Umbraco in favour of more conventional choices.

Daveed is excited about the latest release of jQuery, the javascript library behind many of the interactions and animations in some of the best websites. jQuery 1.7 sees the introduction of the .on() and .off() APIs, which make attaching events (such as “.bind ()” and “.delegate()”) to a document in jQuery simpler and shorter to type. It also offers built-in support for using HTML5 tags in browsers that aren’t compatible with HTML5, so that new HTML5 tags such as <section> work with older versions of Internet Explorer.