I must admit that when I started working with WordPress a few years ago, I thought of him the same way aspiring actors view people like George Clooney in Hollywood. Starstruck. Wow, that’s Chris Pearson, the WordPress guy. I suppose we all have people we look up to in our lives, and Chris and his accomplishments were something that drove me - I wanted to “be like Mike” as they say, and finally decided to contact him.

So I shot him a note through Twitter, and it was great to finally get in touch with him. In fact, Chris and I have had a number of conversations of late - mainly about the direction of WordPress and where themes are going, and we’ve shared strategies, etc. He and I view the blogging world and it’s potential in the same way, so even though we are “competitors” with our themes (thus the post title) we’re on the exact same page with our mentalities.

In a world where there is a lot of competition, it’s sad when you see things like this happen. I’d much prefer the route that Aaron Brazell went, which was to take Chris and I to a steel cage match, and let our themes bash it out. (fun stuff - thanks for that post Aaron!)

My point with this post is to befriend those who are in the same business as you, taking the high road and make communities like WordPress a better place. It’s easy to want to knock people down - but what good does that do? It’s been fun getting to know Chris, and to call him a friend (and not an enemy like my post title insinuates) is very much so a pleasure!

Having said that, Chris and I have some ideas on where we plan to take WordPress - although we probably won’t do them “officially” together, you can be assured that what Chris and I bring forward will have been thought out and brainstormed late at night on IM by the two of us!

* Special Disclaimer *
Although the post title is Sleeping With the Enemy, I do not consider Chris an enemy at all - we actually had a chuckle together last night when I told him I was going to make a post with this title. Thought you all would find it fun.

Well so far the feedback has been really positive, but I initially thought that developers would feel limited to using it ONLY for city or community type websites.

Then I received an email from a friend of mine named Rebecca - who incidentally is using the original Revolution theme for her own site. She contacted me to ask that the site she recently designed be included in the Revolution showcase.

From her email:

Woohoo…City theme up and running at Ginny Owens’ website - and she is so happy with it! Thanks for another great theme to work with

Then I clicked the link to Ginny Owens’ website, and nearly fell out of my chair. I could not believe what Rebecca had done with the City theme - she totally molded it into a beautiful piece of art!

So from now on, I won’t ever limit my thinking on what Revolution can do. I am continually amazed at the quality of sites that use Revolution as a base, and look forward to seeing many more to come!

Well done Rebecca!

With the development of BuddyPress kicking into gear, I realized how important it is that I start working within the framework of Automattic’s infratructure, and decided to start playing around with bbPress.

I began by checking out the theme that Matt Mullenweg coded, to understand how bbPress works - only to realize how simple the code and software actually is.

After a few late nights, I’m pretty happy to announce that it looks like Revolution bbPress themes will be released - one by one. Right now I’m in the middle of coding the Revolution Magazine bbPress theme, it should be released relatively soon.

Go ahead and take a look and let me know what you think - please understand that the Magazine forum theme isn’t done yet, as I’m working to include a few more functions!

Thanks God it’s done. Looks great, but thank God it’s done.

Tomorrow morning (Monday) I’ll be back at work, I promise. I’ve tried my best of the past few weeks to stay afloat in terms of answering emails, supporting and developing Revolution, and just trying to maintain my business as I’ve had to make decisions on what color paint, where walls should be, how to angle the ceiling… blah blah blah.

I miss being totally in touch with things on the internet, and I’m just happy that I’ll have more time to blog (so sorry I’ve been out of touch here) and just do the things that I used to do on a daily basis.

One of the things I want to do on my blog here is to address questions that you all might have about WordPress, blogging, theme design or anything to do with the internet - it will give me something to blog about on a daily basis, so I’m opening up the comments on this post to you for questions.

Ask away, and I’ll answer them in the form of posts this week!

Feel free to leave a comment with a question that’s you’re burning to know the answer to. Personal questions are welcome too!

I will sending out an email shortly for those who are All Inclusive members to download the theme.

This theme is perfect for those who want to publish a city portal website. It’s built for daily posting, displaying video and is monetized with ads.

Some of the features of the theme are:

• Featured tabber and thumbnail section on the homepage
• Dropdown menu navigation
• All 3 sidebar areas are widget-ready
• Theme options page inside WP dashboard
• Comments section coded for Gravatars
• Google AdSense integration in between posts and comments
• Blog page template