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Justin Tadlock unveils big Theme Hybrid redesign

By 6 days agoFebruary 16, 2012

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Theme Hybrid, the WordPress theme club founded by Justin Tadlock, has a new look. Justin’s been teasing the new design for a couple of months, and it went live yesterday. It’s a lot more than a new design though, as he totally reworked the site, with documentation and usability in mind.

Justin has a slew of free WordPress themes and plugins that he maintains utilizing a $25 per year support / membership business model. As an unabashed fan of his plugins and especially his Hybrid Core theme framework, the new site really makes the documentation and tutorials shine.

The redesign includes revamped sections with post types for tutorials, code snippets, php classes, constants, functions, hooks, and shortcodes. In addition to the new site structure, he’s finishing up what he calls some “dark magic” with Gravity Forms to handle the site’s membership system. He’s also working out details to allow club members to submit their own themes to Theme Hybrid, which I find exciting.

One thing that intrigued me in the announcement post is a tease for an upcoming book he’s a part of. Many know him as a co-author of the Professional WordPress Plugin Development book, but his role in this book will be a bit different. He’ll be publishing it as an e-book, and not going through a publisher. Justin is also an editor for the upcoming, updated, edition of the Smashing WordPress book, written by Thord Daniel Hedengren, which will be released this spring.

If you’ve ever had a desire to learn more from Justin than you undoubtedly already have from his popular tutorials, then it may be a good time to check out Theme Hybrid. And you may see me scrounging around the forums as well.

Some screenshots of the new design are below:

WordCamp San Diego tickets available and going quick

By 7 days agoFebruary 15, 2012

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Earlier on today, literally hours ago, tickets for WordCamp San Diego (on March 24th and 25th) went on sale. Now if you’re not quick, then you’re going to be disappointed and (possibly) miss out completely. They started off with 200 tickets, and at the time of writing this only 40 tickets remain!

So I suggest you stop reading, go order you ticket(s), and then come back. Sound cool?

Right, got them? Good. Let’s continue.

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Automattic releases new _s starter theme

By 7 days agoFebruary 15, 2012

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The folks from Automattic just this week released the _s theme, pronounced “underscores”. It’s their team’s attempt at a better and more flexible starter theme. The new theme is a fork of Toolbox, which was the starter theme used to build the free and premium themes on WordPress.com.

Toolbox worked, but the fact that people had used it as a parent theme meant that making drastic improvements would break things up. As Theme Wrangler Ian Stewart explained, this meant a change was worthwhile:

Unfortunately, we wound up in a situation with Toolbox where we wanted to make some more drastic improvements to it as a starter theme but got a little stuck. We had people using it as a Parent Theme and that meant that the simplest id or class change could become a problem. Simply changing an id of #branding to #masthead in the template is enough to break most CSS.

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Obox Themes attempts to solve complex theme setup process with color-coded widgets

By 8 days agoFebruary 14, 2012

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Commercial themes are sometimes a bit on the complex side. WordPress theme shop Obox is attempting to improve their own theme setup process, or what David Perel calls “a nightmare“. Perel says Obox is working on a number of different ideas now, but their first is just recently out the door: color-coded widgets.

He explains:

Since our theme home pages use widgets for flexibility we have decided that that is where we should focus our attention. The result is color coding our widgets. […]

This way we can explain items in their simplest form. No longer do we have to come up with documentation to fix a fundamental problem in theme design. We can now say, “Put blue in the blue box.”

Perel and his team hope that color-coding their widgets (pictured above, larger version at Obox) will help reduce the documentation and steps needed to set up their themes. Right now they are available in their selecta, Casual, Handmade, and Handmade eCommerce themes.

Personally I’m not sold on the usefulness of this yet, but I’m intrigued by the idea. What do you think?

BuddyPress and bbPress Codexes see big updates

By 8 days agoFebruary 14, 2012

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Last weekend, when everyone else was taking a break, John James Jacoby took the time out to refresh the BuddyPress Codex along with creating the new bbPress Codex too. Both are running on WordPress.

In the announcement made on the BuddyPress.org blog Jacoby said:

You may not know it but we’ve had a codex here at BuddyPress.org since the early days. It’s mostly made life really difficult and forced everyone into the forums or to other sites for help. Today, I’m really happy to report that the core team has spent some time this weekend to finally refresh the BuddyPress Codex.

No official announcement was posted on the bbPress blog, but it was mentioned on Twitter.

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PliablePress closes its doors

By 8 days agoFebruary 14, 2012

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Michael Martin, founder of PliablePress, announced that they’ve closed their doors. Martin didn’t provide a reason why they are closing their doors, but said:

I’m sorry to say that PliablePress is now closed. If you’ve been with us for a while, this likely comes as little surprise. It’s been a long time since I was able to put a lot of time into our themes, and lately, even the support has suffered badly.

I think that’s the clearest sign that it’s just not fair to keep accepting new signups, so PliablePress is closing down for good now.

Martin has offered up some “lite” support for any users that are having major issues. Additionally, he is refunding anyone that made a purchase in 2012. Lastly, he’s also made all affiliate payments to make right with them.

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WordCamp Seattle 2012 date and location announced

By 8 days agoFebruary 14, 2012

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It's official, Seattle WordCamp 2012 will be May 19th at the Seattle Art Museum @, registration, etc. coming soon!
February 11, 2012 2:10 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@wordcampseattle
WordCamp Seattle

Are you in Seattle, or looking to travel there anytime soon? If so, you’ll want to plan to be there in the month of May to attend WordCamp Seattle. The event is officially confirmed to take place on May 19th at the Seattle Art Museum. Keep a watch on the WordCamp Seattle 2012 website for further details on this year’s event.

Who’s planning to go geek out for a day with others just as obsessed with WordPress as you?

The first WP on Tour was a huge success

By 16 days agoFebruary 6, 2012

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WP on Tour Crew 2012

The 15th of January through the 22nd finally saw its first WP on Tour go live. WPCandy mentioned WP on Tour here before, but it’s basically a bunch of WordPress developers (of all shapes and sizes) sharing a working space for a week.  This first edition saw 10 of us — yes, I was fortunate to be among them — in a beautiful house in Sitges, Spain having fun and co-working for 7 days.

You can find the full list of WP on Tour attendees on this Twitter list, You might have noticed some of your WordPress buddies on Twitter mentioning the #wpontour hashtag and you might have concluded that we had a lot of fun…

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Envato removes price adjustment tool from their Elite program

By 19 days agoFebruary 3, 2012

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This morning Collis Ta’eed announced on the Envato Notes blog that their price adjustment tool, previously available to Envato Elite authors on their marketplaces that reached $75,000 in sales, is no longer available. Normally prices on the Envato marketplaces are set by Envato during the product review process, and not by the author of the product. The price adjustment tool, announced last year, allowed certain authors to test out different prices for their products beyond what the marketplace would set for them.

The change, Ta’eed said, comes to prepare for the next major change to Envato’s pricing strategy. The introduction of variable pricing for certain elite authors was Envato’s first step toward dynamic pricing. “While it has had some success,” he said, “it’s become clear to us that it’s not the long-term solution.” The updated pricing solution — while what it is isn’t exactly clear yet — is slated for release “later this year”.

With the pricing tool removed, any marketplace products with modified prices will be left at the last price their author left them at. This affects 160 current authors who have already reached the $75,000 Elite level.

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Envato offers bounty to get more e-commerce plugins

By 20 days agoFebruary 2, 2012

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E-commerce is becoming more of a hot topic within the WordPress community. Given this realization, we’ve seen plugins like WooCommerce be released free of charge, among other great e-commerce plugins.

Envato, the company behind ThemeForest and CodeCanyon (just to name of a few of their properties), put up a bounty to plugin developers. They see a need for more e-commerce plugins to be available in their marketplace and they’re willing to pay to get those plugins up there.
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