May
1
Facebook has over 500 million users, with 50% of those users logging in on any given day. Wow.
If you don’t have a Facebook like button on your site, you should. A like button allows your content to show up in your customer’s feeds, the next best thing to actually “friending” them.
So how do you add a Facebook like button to your WordPress theme? Funny you should ask…
Read More
Mar
31
If you want to make WordPress submit to your web-design whims for world-wide-web domination, now is your chance!
We’ve just released a free HD video tutorial series that covers everything from basic setup of WordPress to Search Engine Optimization and Child Themes. We are also going to moderate a community forum if you have any questions about theme customization, or anything WordPress related.
It’s completely free, check out the details here.
Mar
4
What’s the big deal with WordPress themes? How do they work, and why should you care?
If you are new to WordPress, here’s a crash course on why you should love WordPress themes as much as we do.
WordPress is open-source website software, created by lots of smart nerdy people who love taking pictures of food and bad computer jokes.
Over 25 million people, including the New York Times, eBay, and People Magazine use it. It is constantly being developed and improved, and it is quickly becoming the most popular software on the web.
Translation: it’s really cool and you get it FREE
WordPress is like the skeleton of your site
Without boring you with too much detail, WordPress allows you to create an infinite number of pages, blog posts, images, videos, and lots more from a cool admin area in your browser.
It’s very user friendly too. For example, to create a new page, you login, go to Pages, then click “Add New.” It’s a no brainer!
No special program needed, it’s all controlled in your internet browser
You can think of WordPress as the skeleton of your site (maybe the entrails too). It handles all of the internal processes that you don’t really see, and it holds everything together.
If WordPress is the skeleton, then themes are the skin and clothing.
Themes vary just as much as clothing does: some themes look like your mom still dresses you, and others will get you phone numbers!
Along with the look of your site, themes change what your site can do. They add functionality to WordPress by extending it. For example, the default WordPress theme, Twenty Ten, adds the ability to easily change your header background image.
One of our themes, FitPro, adds a membership area that is not normally available. This is just an example, there is really no limit to what themes can do.
Themes are like little custom websites that make WordPress even more powerful
Many WordPress themes make setting up and customizing your own website incredibly easy. The designer will take pains to make everything n00b proof, like adding the option to change the colors of the site in a single click.
Plugins plug-in cool new features to your site
Plugins are cool little software add-ons for your site that plug-in to WordPress.
For example, need a contact form? Just download the Contact Form 7 plugin (free) and voila, you have a professional contact form!
Plugins are developed by smarty pants developers (like this one) that know a lot more than you and I do about the interweb. The cool part is that most plugins are free, although there are some fancy premium plugins you can get at very affordable prices.
Plugins are usually free, and there are over 13,000 of them and counting!
WordPress is king amongst popular open-source CMS website software
Here’s a snapshot of WordPress and competing software on the web:
WordPress sites: Over 25 million (not counting the 18+ million on wordpress.com)
Joomla sites: ~ 14 million
Drupal sites: ~ 8 million
*Disclaimer: These numbers are rough estimates, meant to give a relative view of competition, not exact numbers.
You can give WordPress a test drive before committing to anything by going over to wordpress.com and creating a free site. Just play around with it, you won’t break anything (TWSS).
If you like the way it drives as much as we do, pick a great theme and start blogging!
Feb
27
For our second commercial WordPress theme we are putting together a specialised small business theme. Its early days but we already have a good idea of the general structure of the theme. However, it is crucial that it has the all the features in there that YOU want to see in a theme of this type!
The target audience for this theme is going to be the small/medium business market who are looking for a CMS type site. If you have an interest in this type of theme then please leave a comment, we would love to hear your thoughts.
Have you previously searched for a small business theme but didn’t really find any with a suitable feature set, or had other aspect(s) that were missing/lacking? If so, then here is your chance to let us know!
Any ideas and suggestions we receive will be carefully considered, and added to the list of theme features as appropriate. If a particular idea is quite involved, or complex then we still may be interested in it but it may be held off until a later release. This is so that we can get the theme shipped to an initial user base in order for the theme to be put through its paces as soon as possible.
Scott, our lead designer, is currently busy testing different designs for the new business theme, but the current front runner is based on the screen shots shown below. These are home page mock-ups only, so let us know what other page layouts/templates you would love to see for a small business theme.
To give you an idea of Scott’s design talents take a look at his bespoke design portfolio, where you can see some great examples of his previous work.
The current initial list of features is specified below. This will undoubtedly grow as people give their feedback. Why not leave a comment now and tell us what feature(s) you would most find attractive in a small business theme? 
Jan
28
We would love to hear feedback from you concerning FitPro, our first commercial theme. What are your favourite features, what would you like to see us add next? You tell us! We have put together a special form to leave feedback just about our themes.
Please fill out the feedback form here.
If you haven’t already taken FitPro for a spin then you can view the live demo here.
We want to hear your thoughts about the theme, what features really stood out for you, how do you think we could improve it to make it even better? Perhaps you loved the theme demo, but thought the theme information was too technical for you? Could you find all the details you were looking for, and was everything clear etc?
Any comments would be most appreciated and will help us to develop FitPro further and add all the whizzy new features we know you want to see!
Thanks for supporting us..
Jan
19
Update: Just posted a ticket to core trac. Response was that new JavaScript libraries tend to only get included if they are used in WordPress core, which explains why it isn’t added (yet). I think that it should be considered though because of its usefulness, and tiny file size!
There seems to be a bit of a shake up in the jQuery UI files included with WordPress 3.1. Firstly there is a new UI version (1.8.7), rather than 1.7.3 which was included in WordPress 3.0.4.
Also, the jQuery core files have been broken out of the single ui.core.js file into four separate files: ui.core.js, ui.mouse.js, ui.position.js, ui.widget.js. This makes it a little clearer what core UI components are included with WordPress. You can see this more clearly in the screen shot below. The core files are outlined in red.
There are two new UI widgets available in jQuery, and one of these, the button widget, has made it into WordPress 3.1. The autocomplete didn’t make it in. This is not a surprise as this might not be required that much at the moment, but users may need this as more autocomplete examples pop-up around the web.
I am a little disappointed though at the lack of inclusion of the accordion widget which has been around for a while now, and is a very useful addition to your web pages. There may be a good reason for this, that I am not aware of, but at just 9 KB it is very small and could be included without anyone hardly even noticing!
I use a lot of jQuery accordions for theme/Plugin options pages and find it a hassle to have to add in the accordion widget manually. It is not really a big issue, but it’s conspicuous by its absence. Anyone else know why it is not shipped along with the other WordPress jQuery files? Let me know in the comments if you do.
Oh, and the datepicker widget would be nice too. However this is around 35 KB so might be seriously considered for now. Anyway, just imagine being able to pick the date from the nice jQuery datepicker rather than have to manually enter the date/time as you do now. 😉
Jan
18
The other day I was looking for a way to get the URL to the installed WordPress admin folder. I was almost certain that I would have to ‘construct’ this URL manually. This wasn’t a problem I had done similar tasks many times before.
But to my pleasant surprise I found a nifty little function called get_admin_url(), which I didn’t know existed. This is probably as it is a new addition to WordPress 3.0. The function can be found in the /wp-includes/link-template.php file at line number 1950. You can see the full source code here.
Looking at the core code it is obvious that this function was written with a more general purpose in mind. In fact it returns the WordPress admin URL of multi-site blog with a specific ID. If you don’t specify a particular ID then it returns the current blog admin URL.
Interestingly, there is another closely related function called admin_url() which returns the admin URL of the current blog only. The difference between the two is that you can’t specify a blog ID with this function.
If you only need to get the admin URL of the current blog (as I did) then you can use either function with no parameters, and they will both return exactly the same result. It’s just a matter of preference.
Looking through the /wp-includes/link-template.php file I noticed that there were a few other new functions added to WorPress 3.0 for returning WordPress links.
Here is a quick summary (including links to the source code) of all the new link related functions in link-template.php:
Jan
16
Now available to download from the repository.
OK, it’s been a while since our last Plugin release, so we are pleased to announce a brand new one hot off the press! What does this one do? Well, if you have used a beta version of WordPress 3.1 you will know that on the front end of your blog pages you now have displayed, by default, an admin bar. A screen shot of this is shown below.
The admin bar gives you a menu full of quick links to your WordPress admin panel. A lot of users don’t seem to like the admin panel displayed at the top of every page, and so seek ways to disable it or remove it. You can easily disable it on a per user basis via a users profile page, as shown below.
However this is not that useful if you want to remove it site-wide. The Admin Bar Minimiser Plugin was written to help users keep the admin bar active but be able to minimise it at any time to make it less obtrusive. You can see a demo of the Plugin in action in the following video:
As you can see, the Plugin works by allowing you to minimise the admin bar from view via a single click. You can bring it back just as easily. This also works for the admin bar displayed on the WordPress back end too.
Don’t forget though, to be able to minimise the admin bar on the WordPress back end too, you will need to enable it for the currently logged in user. This is because the admin bar is not enabled by default for WordPress admin pages. However it is for front end pages.
The Plugin will be live in the WordPress repository soon, we are just waiting for the Admin Bar Minimiser SVN repository to go live.
Since the demo video above was recorded I have added an options page for the Plugin. This allows you to set whether the front end, and back end shows the admin bar maximised by default. I would love to hear what you think about the Plugin, and how useful you think it is going to be to you once WordPress 3.1 is here.
Jan
13
For the last few months we’ve been busy developing our first commercial WordPress theme, FitPro. It was designed from the outset to be the ultimate website solution for fitness professionals, but at a fraction of the cost you’d normally expert to pay for such a website.
FitPro is much more than just another WordPress theme. It is basically an online business in a box for fitness professionals. It is a custom website solution with advanced functionality built-in that can be easily moulded to suit your needs. FitPro can be installed in just a couple of clicks, and quickly configured to give you a beautiful website in no time at all. And all for less than $250!
Click here to read more details about the full range of features available in FitPro, and why you should be using it on your site TODAY!
