Automattic recently hired yet another theme wrangler to join their theme team that they are putting together. His name is Lance Willett. I’m stoked about my position as “Theme Wrangler” with Automattic. I’ll be working on web design and development projects, mostly revolving around themes and WordPress.com. I’m sure I’ll also use my Spanish and…
This episode was the first in a series discussing the commercialization of WordPress. Within this episode, we talked with three commercial theme authors who are in the midst of maintaining a successful business. Joining us on the round table was Jason Schuller of Press75/ThemeGarden.com, Brian Gardner of Studiopress, and Cory Miller of iThemes. Considering the…
Since this Saturdays show of WordPress Weekly will be focusing on commercial themes, I thought it would be a good idea to interview someone who is just getting their feet wet in the market. Brian Casel is a freelance web designer based in New York City. He’s the founder of ThemeJam and CasJam Media. Brian…
It’s officially happened. Classic and Kubrick have been removed from WordPress as per ticket 10654. We all know by now that WordPress 3.0 will ship with Twenty Ten which is the new default theme. Those who are upgrading WordPress either manually or automatically will receive Classic, WordPress Default and TwentyTen. Those who install WordPress 3.0…
This is a guest blog post written by Stephanie Leary, author of the blog, Sillybean.net. She is a web designer that has created numerous custom WordPress themes for clients. This Wednesday afternoon, I’m teaching a 3-hour workshop on WordPress themes. If you know HTML and CSS, or you’ve designed for another CMS, but you don’t…
I’m dedicating the entire month of April to the commercialization of WordPress through themes, plugins and services on WordPress Weekly. Each week will feature a round-table of guests in each field that is either currently in the market or has substantial experience in the market. Joining me to co-host these shows will be Jacob Goldman…
For those that follow Ian Stewart on Twitter, you know that he recently quit his job. He continuously hinted to something bigger happening in his life. Today, we learn what that something is. Ian Stewart has become the newest member of the Automattic team. Today marks the first day of my employment as a Theme…
Scribu who is the author of the Front-end Editor plugin that I reviewed in April 2009 has published some common mistakes found within themes. For some reason, themes sometimes don’t have the wp_footer template tag declared which is used by analytic plugins such as Woopra and by Front-end editor. The other problem deals with the_title…
In what I hope will be a regular occurrence, this is an interview with a featured member of the WPTavern forum. I hope to put the spotlight on at least one forum member per month. The member I choose to interview is random but in order to be in the running, you only have to…
In the past few days, I’ve seen a lot of discussions centered around author credits in themes and plugins. Part of these discussions center around this particular guideline in the plugin repository: The plugin must not embed external links on the public site (like a “powered by” link) without explicitly asking the user’s permission. Themes…
Thesis creator Chris Pearson was the special guest on last weeks episode of the WordPress Community Podcast with Joost de Valk and Frederick Townes. There is at least one sticking point in the conversation that I can readily agree with Chris Pearson on and that’s the lack of synergy between the front-end and back-end of…
While monitoring twitter today, I noticed a few prolific theme designers agree with a point that Chris Pearson made today. Now that I’ve built the platform, I see why Thesis can do plugins’ jobs more efficiently than the plugins themselves. There’s no comparison. – pearsonified I think I understand the reasoning behind the statement. Instead…
At A Glance: The Genesis Theme Framework is built on a simple vanilla blog-type parent theme, and can be extended with the use of child themes. Each child theme comes with its own home file, that makes extending the parent theme very easy. License: Genesis like all the other themes StudioPress.com offers is licensed under…
I was unaware that the U.S. with the exception of a few people were in front of their TV’s to watch the season premiere of LOST. Thankfully, I had Kim Parsell and Ryan Duff call in to make sure I wasn’t lonely on the show. We actually had a great conversation centered around the future…
Twitter, Facebook, WordPress.org. What do all these sites have in common? They are all successful and have pretty decent designs to boot. It’s no wonder that they are used as inspiration but what happens when inspiration goes to far and you can’t tell the difference between the inspired theme, and the original design? Confusion, that’s…