Socket is a very powerful and flexible CMS for corporate and/or portfolio use. It was developed using the latest technologies and web coding standards, and employs state-of-the-art features such as jQuery enhancements, font replacement, AJAX contact forms, social media integration, and more. Here are a few of the most notable features:

• Over 30 page templates (6 different portfolio layouts)
• 9 gorgeous professional skins
• Unlimited widget combinations using 15 distinct widget panels
• A huge, beautiful featured area to showcase your work
• Tons of back-end theme options

To really get a feel for everything Socket can do, check out the live demo and explore all the pages. The features are described on each page, and you can also see the different skins. Here is a list of each skin with a link to see it in action:

Skins (click to see live)

• Slate
• Aluminum
• Epoxy
• Carbon
• Neoprene
• Iron
• Brick
• Malachite
• Magnet

You can create 2 websites that look completely different from each other using Socket, since it has so many options for arrangement of widget panels, number of columns, colors, styles, and page templates. It truly is a premium theme by any and all standards. Here is a full list of features:

Features

• Over 30 page templates
• 6 different portfolio page layouts
• A unique theme design not yet seen on ThemeForest
• 3 separate content sliders
• 15 distict widget panels
• 9 gorgeous professional skins
• cufon font replacement
• superfish drop down menus
• 2 AJAX contact forms
• JQuery enhanced elements including multiple jQuery sliders
• Organized and easy-to-use theme options page
• Twitter & Flickr integration
• Slick “more” panel slides out to expose non-critical content from under the menu
• The best free template icons out there
• Valid XHTML and CSS, and compatible with all modern browsers
• Forward-engineered to work with Wordpress version 3! (currently tested with Wordpress 3 beta 2)
• Integrates with post thumbnail featured introduced in Wordpress 2.9
• No plugins required
• Nested and paged comments
• Related posts underneath blog posts
• Lots of white-space and modern styling techniques
• Indented, spaced, commented, and intuitive code (HTML, CSS, and PHP is all commented in-line)
• Superb, prompt customer service
• Lots more!

This is my second edition of T.I.D.B.I.T.S., and you’re probably still asking yourself what they are and why I do them. Here’s the deal: I don’t read very much. I’m probably in the lower 25% of all readers (and consequently the upper 25% of all TV watchers). So you can rest assured that what I do actually spend my valuable time reading is pretty dang good. Using that same logic, the amount you read is somewhat proportional to the quality of things you’ll read, and that explains why you’re reading our blog. Now we come to the reason for T.I.D.B.I.T.S. Since we’re not real good writers ourselves, the least we can do is point you in the direction of good writing and great resources for your development. Today’s tidbit is one of my personal favorites.

Smashing Magazine is a tremendous web design & development blog based out of the UK. I’ve been reading it for over a year and it has absolutely been the reason for my success and continued skill progression as a web developer. You can find anything from Photoshop tutorials to developing custom Wordpress plug-ins. Smashing is very heavily Wordpress and open-source based, and consequently you’ll often see posts showcasing free Wordpress templates, fonts, and icon sets. The editors of Smashing have a keen eye for beautiful modern web design and spend their time scouring the web for superb websites to include in their showcases. There’s an average of about 2 posts per day – plenty of content but not enough to overwhelm you.

I bring this up now since they recently released a book and redesigned their website, creating a “Smashing Network” of other design blogs and featured posts from the cream of the crop around the web. I can’t tell you how many free icon sets, fonts, and themes I have acquired via Smashing – and most of them are licensed for free commercial use, which is MONEY for a web developer. I highly recommend this blog. If you are at all in the design or development industry, and somehow you have not heard of Smashing, check them out as soon as you can!

Let us apologize right up front for the acronym. There is something so appealing about using acronyms, even though most of the time they are inappropriate (see this article’s title (S.T.A.T.)) Anyway… we’re putting a blog in the spotlight today because we feel it is a great resource for fellow web & software developers, and we want you to know about it. Pay no attention to the banners promoting Outer Spice Web Company – we have no idea how they got there. This is a purely objective write-up.

Chomper Stomping is the blog of fellow software developer Christopher McCulloh. He has been developing professionally for seven years and has co-written and edited a number of development resources. His specialties include AJAX, Javascript, CSS, HTML, Flash game development, iPhone app development, Java, PHP, Python, and ActionScript. Quite a mouth-full, we know. Check out his about info:

E-Commerce developer at Finish Line Co-Author of HTML, XHTML and CSS All-in-one Desk Reference for Dummies Graduated from IU with a Bachelors of Media Arts and Science and a Certificate in Applied Computer Science. Tech Editor for Building Facebook Applications for Dummies and Building Websites All-in-one for Dummies 2nd Edition. Creator and maintainer of the Status-bar Calculator Firefox Extension Three years professional experience in Java E-Commerce Development and four years professional experience with PHP for a combined total of seven years professional JavaScript/HTML/CSS experience

He’s got a couple of creative software projects he’s been working on, including his latest: ShoutMote. He mixes in good resources for development with a little bit of humor to create a blog that is worth having in your reader. If you are a software developer, Chomper Stomping is worth a look.

Stay tuned for future T.I.D.B.I.T.S.!