A few weeks ago I was approached by the manager of the tuts+ network of sites owned by Envato (the same folks who own ThemeForest and other marketplaces). I was asked if I’d be able to write a tutorial to contribute to a brand new site to be launched as part of the tuts+ network, called WPtuts+. It’s a tutorial site specialized for WordPress, and builds on the past success of the entire tuts+ network of sites. The site manager was looking for experienced WP developers to contribute some tutorials before the site launched so that when it did launch there would be some good content immediately available to users.

I was asked if there were any topics I’d like to write about, and I came up with 3 specific tutorials that I could write. The site manager picked the best one, and I got to work writing. It took about 2 weeks to write, but I was able to have it done before the site launched. It’s called Create A Tabbed Widget for Custom Post Types, and it’s the second tutorial ever published on WPtuts+. The site manager asked me if I’d write some more tutorials. I had to think long and hard about whether or not I’d rather write tutorials for WPtuts+ or create themes for ThemeForest. Personally, I enjoy creating themes much more than writing tutorials, but I suppose I could drop in a tutorial every few months. We’ll see…

It is truly an honor to be published in the same network of sites that I have learned so much from!

Our first theme was uploaded to ThemeForest on December 14th, 2009. Now, 1 year and 5 months later, we are celebrating 1,000 total theme sales! Check out our profile page on Theme Forest to see our stats. While you’re there, check out our updated profile page, and also take a look at the new Theme Forest site design.

Our newest theme, Continuum, is selling very well. In fact, it was the fourth highest selling WordPress theme on Theme Forest the first week it was released! We’re very glad that people are finding our themes useful, and it motivates us to get to work on more themes to come. In the meantime, we’re focusing all of our efforts on customer support for Continuum, as there have been a wealth of requests for features and modifications. Thanks to all of those who continue to support our little web design studio. Here’s to the next thousand themes!

After almost 5 months of development, Outer Spice is pleased to announce the official release of Continuum on the Theme Forest Marketplace! After just over 2 days it has garnered 41 sales and a five-star rating. We are also celebrating passing 800 total sales on Theme Forest, and hope to hit 900 very soon. Thanks for all your support during our development phase! Here are some Continuum details:

Stop fussing with lengthy setups; Continuum immediately works perfectly. Of course, with almost 200 theme options, you can customize it to no end. Continuum was designed an built by a die-hard blogger who has used magazine-style WordPress templates for almost 5 years. It is best used for newspaper and magazine blogs, but because of all of the custom widgets, shortcodes, page templates, unique sidebars, and custom menus, it can be molded into whatever kind of site you want, like a portfolio site for example. Continuum fully supports and was designed specifically for WordPress 3.0+. Continuum features an extensive Feed Framework which intuitively groups and displays your posts, and lets the user sort the posts several ways depending on which part of the site they are on.

Continuum is great for Magazine & News blogs, Gaming sites, Movie & Music review blogs, product review sites like Cnet.com, portfolio sites, personal blogs, and book review blogs. Continuum: Engineered for the pros. Crafted for the up-and-comers. Made for you.

View all the details of Continuum or play with the live demo here »

Envato is the parent company of many entities on the web, including Theme Forest and other such marketplaces, as well as the extensive and highly useful Tuts+ network of sites. They have their fingers in almost every facet of web development, including graphic design, website theme development, and coding. They used to have blogs associated with each of their 7 main marketplaces (Graphic River, 3D Ocean, Code Canyon, Flash Den, Audio Jungle, Theme Forest, and Video Hive), but they recently decided to combine everything into one blog called Envato Notes.

The posts are usually short and sweet and to the point. There’s not a lot of detailed content that development blogs like Smashing Magazine have. The posts are mostly about the Envato community, featuring authors’ workspace photos, interviews with Envato staff and successful authors, and my personal favorite, Friday Freebies, which usually contain a free set of files from each of the 7 marketplaces (and one commercial license for each of them!) I can’t tell you how many sets of icons and WordPress themes I’ve accumulated over the past several months.

Just take a look at their Freebies category to get an idea of the sort of content they give away. Probably the most detailed Envato Notes gets is when they do a case study, which usually highlights one of Envato’s own websites (they must have close to 40 all told). If you’re looking to get into the passive income retail web game, Envato Notes is a must have for your feed reader.

Caulk is one of our WordPress themes available on ThemeForest. There are hundreds of applications of the theme out there, and each one seems to be pretty unique. Today we’ll take a peek at the website of the UnitedHealthcare Pro Cycling Team.

They have modified the theme quite a bit, which is very easy to do with the Caulk framework since the code is well-spaced, indented, and commented, and the documentation is thorough. As you can see, the background is now a fixed image instead of the standard scrolling gradient. The featured slider also has been modified to incorporate a larger image with the title superimposed in an overlay instead of a smaller image with text to the right. They have also changed several of the colors to a dark orange, including title text, links, and featured area background in order to match their logo. Towards the bottom they have included a logo area just above the footer. There are also several plugins that enhance the site, such as the social media dock fixed to the bottom of the viewport. Overall it’s a nice custom implementation of Caulk.

Continuum Update: Continuum is the name of our next theme, and right now it’s about 65% of the way done. We still expect a late March or early April release date. Stay tuned!

It’s not hard to tell that Webdesigner Depot is a blog about design. Just look at the header, it’s full of vibrant colors and swirls and pencils and birds. But what really gives it away as a design blog is the abundance of Apple products nested within said colors and swirls. I count five total: a Macbook Pro, three iMacs, and an iPhone. You can never have too much Mac though, right? Yes. Yes you can. That being said, WDD is a great blog with a prominent spot in my Google Reader. It’s one of those blogs that inspires me and overwhelms me at the same time. And one of the benefits of being an avid reader is receiving the exclusive free icon sets from time to time, like Reflection. Here is an excerpt from WDD’s about page:

Webdesigner Depot is an exciting new platform designed to explore different web and graphic design techniques, great examples and best practices.

We love design and are passionate about it in all its shapes and forms. Our vision is to make WDD a great showcase for this passion and feed a worldwide audience of savvy designers eager to learn more and share their knowledge with the design community.

Undoubtedly the most valuable things that WDD offers me are the roundups, specifically WordPress, such as 10 Places to Buy Professionally Designed WordPress Themes, and 300+ Resources to Help You Become a WordPress Expert. This blog is of course geared more towards design than development, but the two are not mutually exclusive, and WDD touches on development from time to time. It’s probably an 80/20 ratio of design to development approximately. I’d recommend subscribing to WDD if you are at all interested in or currently part of the design industry. If you’re a Photoshop fan boy and you don’t read WDD, you’re not actually a Photoshop fan boy.

Socket is one of our WordPress themes available on Theme Forest. Linkwell is a custom steel construction hardware manufacturer located in Southern China. What do the two have in common? You have probably already guessed: Linkwell is using the Socket theme for their new WordPress-based website. It’s about 98% out-of-the-box with some custom modifications to the menu on the products page (multi-level drop downs were added). This is a good example of how much you can do with Socket without knowing any actual code. Linkwell uses a couple plugins, such as the contact form on the services and contact pages, but other than that everything you see on their website comes with Socket. Check it out! »

We’ll be posting more case studies soon. There are hundreds of good quality websites to choose from that are based on our Caulk and Socket themes, including some pretty creative uses for our themes. We’ve been impressed to see customers using our themes for anything from personal portfolios, to technology blogs, to corporate home pages, to community event sites. Even other web developer shops are using our themes for their home pages. Now that’s a compliment! Thanks again to all of our awesome customers.

Last bit of news: Outer Spice Web Company just acquired its first intern. Sam Wilson will be doing all the boring tedious stuff we hate doing. Just kidding, Sam Welcome to the team!

First of all, we forgot to toot our own horn when we hit 700 total sales on Theme Forest. We have 733 to be exact. Caulk seems to be the winner of our two themes as far as the long haul goes. That sucker will not stop selling. We’re so glad people are finding our themes so useful! We’ve got a new theme in the works that we can’t wait to finish and release on the Theme Forest marketplace. It takes full advantage of all of the WordPress 3.0 features, and it’s by far the most complex and interactive theme we’ve designed. The last theme we released was in May, 2010, and we had hoped that we would have released another theme during 2010, but the business that the release of Socket brought us has been overwhelming and we’re just coming out of the other side of it. Finally.

So, our new theme, to be titled “Continuum”, is a magazine style WordPress theme with multiple jQuery enhancements including four different featured sliders, comment sliders, breaking news sliders, fancy hovers, fancy drop downs, as well as four unique home page layouts to choose from. This is going to be a theme for content-heavy magazine sites that need to display as much as they can on the page without over-crowding it with the purpose of keeping the readers’ attention for as long as possible. Look for a release date sometime around early to mid March.

Very rarely I’ll get an email from a client who has purchased our Caulk theme on ThemeForest stating that they cannot get their sticky posts to display correctly in the top right panel. I check out their settings and sure enough everything is set correctly, and they have exactly two posts marked “sticky” in the WordPress admin panel. I still do not know exactly why this happens, but I think it has something to do with a problem originating in their database from a previous theme and actually has nothing to do with the Caulk framework itself. In any case, here’s what’s wrong and here’s how to fix it:

Caulk grabs the first two sticky posts, and ONLY the first two sticky posts, and puts them in the top right panel. Sometimes only one post will display there (or no posts) despite the fact that there are indeed two and only two posts marked sticky. Well, at least it APPEARS that there are only two posts marked sticky. In reality, the database actually has more than two posts marked as sticky in the wp_options table. The reason they aren’t showing up in the blog is because the other sticky posts don’t exist in the wp_posts table. For some unknown reason, when the posts were originally deleted, the “sticky_posts” option in the wp_options table was not adjusted to reflect this.

If you have two and only two posts marked sticky in your WordPress admin panel, then the database value should correspond by storing an array of two post ID’s. If the array is longer than two, Caulk will not display the sticky posts correctly. Here’s an example of a value I recently found in a client’s database:

That value indicates there are four sticky posts (“a:4:”) instead of two. I checked which two posts the client wants marked as sticky and found those two post values. In this case, the client wanted post ID’s 475 and 506 as sticky posts (803 and 289 didn’t even exist in the wp_posts table). So, here is what I manually changed the value to in phpMyAdmin:

Note: make sure you set the “i:0;” to the correct index (i.e. the array inside the brackets must start at 0). Hope this obscure solution can help someone out there!

We’ve been busy in our little corner of the galaxy over the past year. We know that you spend every waking moment anxiously wondering what we’ve been up to, so we’d like to show you some projects we’re finishing up, and tell you about some projects we’re working on right now. 2010 has been an exciting year for us. We’ve learned a lot about how to run a web development company. We’ve also learned that the more you make, the more you have to pay in taxes. Simply put: taxes suck. They’re almost enough to make us want to quit working at all. Almost.

Check out our home page to get a quick look at some of our newest projects. To get a more detailed look at these projects and more, see our portfolio. Some noteworthy recent projects of ours include a “he said/she said” social site where the community uploads stories that get voted on and bumped up based on popularity, an eCommerce site specializing in recreational sporting goods (e.g. beer pong), a landing-page style site for an advertising company, and a corporate prospect follow-up service marketing site. You’ll have to look at our portfolio to see which is which. We like to keep you guessing. It helps us be lazier.

Got some neat stuff coming up on the horizon as well, including an eCommerce marketplace for a record label to sell music and merchandise, a non-profit neighborhood community and historical website, and some new Theme Forest WordPress themes coming in 2011! Keep checking back to see our progress on these exciting endeavors.