Tag: themes

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WordPress Products and Demos

Last year at WordCamp Sofia I gave a talk named "Choosing the right WordPress theme". Contrary to the first guesses title-wise, since I'm not a designer at all, my topic was focused on the different sources to find a theme, based on a given set of requirements. [slideshare id=36183038&doc=choosing-a-wordpress-theme-140623021748-phpapp01] Few of my slides were referring to the product piracy - the humongous number of products being pirated. Or probably the high percentage of users using illegal products. I know of thousands of people using non-licensed operating systems or other cracked products. It's a painful experience really, and it's hard for a product company to… Continue Reading
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Choosing the Right WordPress Theme

My talk at WordCamp Sofia two weeks ago was related to choosing the right WordPress theme. Slides are available here. The gist of the talk was making users cautious about their WordPress sites and managing their stack properly, especially in the WordPress context. I find it quite common for users to browse for random, free hacked themes and get their servers attacked from the inside, or becoming a part of a botnet. That is one of the reasons why I'm quite sensitive when it comes to the WPTRT work. Users choose from several options for picking a theme for their… Continue Reading
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Theme Reviews, Guidelines and Community

I've accidentally started a long discussion due to a small and fairly insignificant bug that turned out to be more than enough for several major theme authors, reviewers and theme lead devs to chime in and share their thoughts. I usually try to avoid those scenarios, but every now and then the tension needs to be released. These are my observations, thoughts and ideas based on my experience over the past 2.5 years with the theme directory. Theme Reviews in 2011-2012 I have joined the WPTRT in 2011, after doing a dozen reviews as a "candidate reviewer" before getting my… Continue Reading
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On WordPress and Release Cycles

The annual State of the Word session by Matt covers the latest updates on the platform - usage, coming updates and new features from the past year and other valuable stats so that WordPress experts could see their place on the map and see if there are any business decisions to be taken for the next few months (or a year). The platform/application direction makes sense for the next level of growth for the WordPress platform. Matt had a great slide for the structure and architecture of WordPress as a framework for building various components and extend in the future: [tweet… Continue Reading
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WordSesh overview

Last week we had the first large WordPress 'meetup' online called WordSesh. It was an incredible event that was yet another proof for how awesome the WordPress community is. I had the chance to speak at WordSesh and I presented the WordPress.org Themes Directory and the process of reviewing themes. The video is embedded below + slides here.   There were several remarkable topics from the ones I was able to watch personally (a few I had to miss due to the urge to sleep), but my top three were: Shane's Managing Distributed Code Teams. That's probably the most inspiring… Continue Reading
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The 3-Hour Theme Experiment

As a former ThemeForest author and a WPTRT member, I'm intrigued by all the fuzz about parent-child theme relations, theme frameworks, premium themes using the same infrastructure, startup themes and so forth. I remember my positive impression towards Genesis and their hooks model (even though pretty hardcore for customization in practice) and WooThemes and their internal framework, distributed flexibly within their themes. Last month I decided to set 3 hours straight and turn the _s theme by Automattic into a regular blog theme. By default _s comes with almost no stylesheets, or rather nothing than a white board with text… Continue Reading
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ColorScheme Designer

I've been doing software and web development for many years now, but my design skills are pathetic (and it's an euphemism for them). However, I've tried an amazing tool a few times for color schemes for my WordPress themes that is absolutely amazing - called ColorScheme Designer. A number of color options are left for the user to pick from: Mono - a single nuance color scheme that focuses on a single color and it's derivatives Complement - an opposite color to the one you pick as a secondary color in addition to the main one (from the color palette) Triad -… Continue Reading
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Theme submission steps – presentation

The WPORG theme reviewers' mailing list got an interesting email from Chip where he shared an awesome SlideShare presentation. The WordPress.org reviewers are volunteers and they help each other with technical and philosophical questions on the WordPress platform, best practices designing and structuring a theme or a framework, obsolete and modern functions, security and more. It's a great pleasure getting in touch with these guys and sharing experience. About the presentation - an anonymous (at least not popular reviewer or theme author) speaker has shared on SlideShare this great walkthrough for creating a theme from scratch and all the important steps… Continue Reading
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How to Start a WordPress Project?

Starting a new WordPress project requires some initial planning to avoid some common mistakes. Failing to adhere to an action plan may easily incur technical debt (with an unpredictable setup, libraries, and plugins). The WordPress Theme Industry There are tons of themes available - free or premium - and lots of theme markets for premium resources. I even mentioned a script for running your own theme market - that's how popular it got recently. Anyway, as a WordPress developer and consultant I try to select the best options for my clients. And I have some difficulties on the choice of… Continue Reading
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WordPress custom pagination

When designing a theme pagination is required for listing of posts on the index page. WordPress, by default, presents only the ability of one to use "Previous page" and "Next page" - which might be enough to navigate through the archives but is however incomplete and annoying. The standard navigation has <<, >> and numbers for the current page and the pages before and after (at some range). One of the best solutions I have used is the Kriesi Pagination. Kriesi is one of the top sellers on the ThemeForest market with over 25 thousand sales at the moment of… Continue Reading