Pro Theme Design

Nominate, Social Voting Theme, Released

Ben — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 05:56:38 +0000

Nominate is a social voting theme designed to allow you to run a Digg style site on a WordPress installation. And it’s ready for action.

The theme started off as an entire website that I created called WPVote.com. The site allows users to register, and then submit articles and vote on their favourites. The idea behind releasing the theme is that anybody can set up their own voting site, on any niche they desire.

Nominate WordPress Theme Screenshot

Who is it for?

Nominate is for anybody who wants to create a user focused social website. It brings the interactivity of a social networks and combines it with the power of WordPress to give you software that is powerful yet easy to use.

The theme requires little technical knowledge and, provided you have a working copy of WordPress, should be easy for anyone to set up and use.

What can it do?

Nominate is an Elemental child theme (Elemental is included for free) which means it inherits all of the power of Elemental. On top of that it has:

Powerful spam controls
Custom user login and registration pages
Ajax voting system
Ajax article submissions (with captcha)
3 colour schemes
Custom widgets for displaying the latest content
Multiple Widget Areas

Nominate to be Released on Tue July 13th

Ben — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:15:37 +0000

It’s been a long time coming. I first released WPVote.com at the start of January, you can read about the development of WPVote.com on my personal site – Binary Moon, and the theme has evolved quite a lot since then.

Nominate WordPress Theme Screenshot

Nominate is the public version of WPVote.com, in fact it’s actually the exact same theme that is used on the main WPVote website. The only difference between WPVote.com and Nominate is that I am running a plugin on WPVote.com to give it a unique look.

To make things easier on me I have decided to release the theme in a staggered way, this will keep the amount of support I have to do to a minimum – once I am happy it’s working everywhere I will release it fully.

The initial release of Nominate will be limited to a small group of people so sign up to RSS updates using your favorite RSS reader, or the email subscription box on the right. Alternatively follow us on Twitter or Facebook to get the scoop as soon as it happens.

New WordPress Theme Updates

Ben — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 21:06:17 +0000

It’s been a while since my last official theme updates – and this is a big one. Elemental has received the most updates, but all themes have gotten some new additions and fixes. All the updates are ready now to download from the accounts control panel.

Elemental and Child Themes

To show off the new Elemental functionality I have created my first ever screencast. You’ll have to forgive the slightly funky editing and sound work. Also remember that all new functionality added to the theme will automatically copy over to the The Local and any other child themes.

A few notes on the video above:

Custom Menus: New in WP 3.0, I’ve added it to nearly all of our themes. This feature alone will make the update worth it.
SEO: I’m not an SEO expert, but I have been using the new features on my own website for a month or two now and with have seen an increase in my search engine traffic.
Custom Widget Templates: This was created from a desire to create a flexible page layout system that would let people create any layout they like without editing any code.
Thumbnail Options: TimThumb is quite an enjoyable hobby for me. There are some more updates coming soon. I will be writing about the changes and new features on Binary Moon soon.
Admin Customisation: This isn’t an essential feature, but I do think it’s a nice feature to have – in particular for sites where people other than you will be viewing the admin pages.

The list above showcases some of the features, but not all of them. There have been hundreds of tweaks and improvements, some more of which will be explained later.

Mimbo Pro 2

In all the excitement Mimbo Pro hasn’t been forgotten about. There have been a handful of small fixes and improvements along with the more exciting addition of custom menu integration.

Accumulo

Accumulo has had quite a lot of love sent it’s way. There have been a handful of bug fixes, and a lot of work on improving the caching and page load speeds, including a WordPress cron job that updates the feeds once a day to make sure you are always up to date.

Note that this updates ticks off 2 of the 3 ‘coming soons’ on our latest post.

Coming Soon on Pro Theme Design

Ben — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 06:03:41 +0000

It’s been a bit quiet here recently but there has been lots going on behind the scenes. I thought I would give you a little insight into what is planned in the coming months.

First up is an update for all of our themes. This will include some bug fixes, and new features. Elemental gets the most love, but there are fixes and changes for Mimbo Pro, Accumulo, and The Local as well
Next we have custom menu support. This is a fantastic addition to WordPress 3.0 and adding it to our themes will be a pleasure.
Finally (for the time being) Nominate will be released. Nominate is the public release of the WPVote.com code. You will be able to create your own Digg style site with your favorite blogging software. The code is almost complete so once the other updates are done this will come out.

I’m afraid I won’t promise any time lines for these updates but the first two should both happen in the next couple of weeks, maybe sooner.

WordPress 3.0 and Mimbo Pro

Ben — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 08:24:34 +0000

Last night WordPress 3.0 was released, it’s a fantastic update to WordPress and has added some great new functionality that we plan to add to our themes shortly.

Most of our themes seem to be working perfectly (at least as far as I can see), however unfortunately the release broke the carousel in Mimbo Pro. The error is actually to do with the version of jQuery bundled with the latest version of WordPress. I haven’t had a chance to update the files in the download area but if you have upgraded then to fix the error you should:

Copy the new (fixed) version of jCarousel from the jCarousel download page and add paste it in to ‘js/jquery.jcarousel.pack.js’

Edit ‘css/carousel.css’ to reposition the carousel. The change is to replace

.jcarousel-skin-tango .jcarousel-clip-horizontal {
    width:  820px;
}

with

.jcarousel-skin-tango .jcarousel-clip-horizontal {
    width:  820px;
	position:absolute;
	top:15px;
	left:70px;
}

If you haven’t yet updated to WordPress 3.0 then I would suggest holding off until Mimbo Pro has been updated. I will get the official release updated this weekend.

New Moderators Hired to Pro Theme

darren — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 21:24:26 +0000

Traffic has increased greatly since the launch of Elemental, The Local and Accumulo in the last 6 months, so Pro Theme has decided to bring extra help to the forums to make your support experience better and more reliable.

Give a warm welcome to Dustin Ward and James Morrison, 2 talented consultants who make their living off WordPress and have done extensive work with theming. They will continue getting acquainted with the particularities of Pro Theme products while Ben and I will continue to oversee things and concentrate on future plans.

Ultimately we could only afford 2 moderators who met all the criteria, but we were pleased and impressed by the volume of applications we received and want to thank everyone who showed interest!

Pro Theme Seeks to Hire Forum Moderators

darren — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:53:48 +0000

Business at Pro Theme continues to grow! And this means more questions to answer in the forums. Ben and I would like to spend more time on development so we’re looking to hire a forum moderator to help out, for an hour or so each day, Monday-Friday.

What are the requirements? You must be talented and experienced at using CSS, PHP and general WordPress theming. You must also be familiar with the workings of all Pro Theme products, which you will receive for free including upgrades. Priority #1 in the forums is solving potential bugs, and Priority #2 is helping with customization.

Sounds interesting? Drop us an email for more details about pay and support policies.

WPVote – new site from Binary Moon

Ben — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:13:45 +0000

WPVote is a new WordPress voting site that I launched early last week.

WPVote

The site is a Digg style community voting site built on the WordPress platform. Not dissimilar in function to software such as Pligg or Drigg (notice a pattern in the naming of these things?) it focuses on the WordPress community and promoting peoples content.

There is a full run down of the WPVote development on my personal site, Binary Moon.

WPVote.com was originally developed by Jean Baptiste Jeung, and he sold it to me late last year so that I could continue the development of it. As well as giving back to the community (by promoting peoples content) my hope is that I can eventually release the theme as a premium theme here on Pro Theme Design.

New Features Added to Accumulo

darren — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 02:53:30 +0000

We got a lot of great feedback when we launched the Accumulo theme last week — thanks to everyone who offered comments and suggestions.

It’s not a conventional WordPress theme for blogging, but it does come with its own custom Blog page template (live example). The problem is that some users wanted to merge the blog with the homepage feeds so that it wasn’t obscured.

Blog option for the homepage

So what Ben did was to add an option that lets you assign which tab will display the blog on the homepage:

New homepage blog option

In the same Options panel, you can then name that tab whatever you want (ex: “Blog”):

Assign a tab to your blog

As you can see on the live homepage, you can now display the blog in whatever tab you choose:

Optional blog tab on the homepage

Caching

By nature Accumulo is intended for aggregating outside content which means there must be some restrictions on caching or else the page-load would get very slow as it struggled to collect all those feeds. To give the user more flexibility, Ben added some caching options that can be adjusted depending on your preference:

New caching options

Massive Upgrades to Elemental

darren — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 21:48:46 +0000

The Elemental framework for WordPress continues to be a hot-selling theme. According to the changelog, it received 396 code changes this month! Some were bug fixes and some were feature additions, but overall it continues to grow simultaneously more powerful and more clean, code-wise.

Noteworthy changes:

Widget area descriptions, per WordPress 2.9
Google Analytics code changed to Asynchronous method
New header-image upload method. Reduces reliance on problem-causing legacy code. Note: if you use the old header image method, it will be reset and you’ll need to re-upload the image. This is a one time deal, and won’t be required again. Apologies for any problems it may cause
New favicon upload method
New admin panel branding abilities. You can now add your own header image and footer text. Perfect for designing sites for clients, or for websites that require public accounts logins
Calendar added to Archives page to enable easier traversal of historical content
TimThumb updates to latest version which featured stack of bug fixes and improvements
Improved custom post options which allow for filtering via plugins or child themes
Fixed Google maps widget (they changed the API which broke the widget positioning – doh!)
Major improvements and code clean-up added to Sitemap page template
New page numbers layout for paged content
Option to hide the home link
Subtle improvements to caching system
TimThumb shortcode (more) can now dynamically resize images in posts. Example: [thumb width="" height=""]http://image/path[/thumb]
New option for “Post Details”s widget so author details can be displayed on pages OR posts OR pages and posts – it’s your website so your choice
Improved admin bar for logged-in users which includes gravatar and link to user account. Allows for good integration for community sites (such as the upcoming WPVote.com redesign)

In general if you’re looking for information about updates, you can log into your accounts panel and view changelog records there. We are also working to sync up the custom Elemental dashboard widget with the Pro Theme blog. Stay tuned.