Today i am so happy to announce that we have secured an amazing deal with ultimatedesignertoolkit.com. They provide a massive 50% off the regular price ($99). What’s the ultimate designer toolkit you ask. Let’s see what they have in their bundle.

• 340 seamless vectors
• 27.000 Photoshop gradients
• 18.000 Photoshop layer styles
• 1545 vector illustrations
• 815 Photoshop patterns
• Ultimate CSS Framework
• 2986 Photoshop brushes
• 1105 Adobe add-ons
• 1129 Vector elements
• 1290 high resolution textures
• 512 vector icons
• 527 stock photos
• 902 Pixel Icons
• 82 Photoshop actions
• And more!

Amazing list, isn’t? So now you have one more good reason to join our club.

We have already sealed some more great deals for our members so make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed and receive all the latest deals first.

Today we decided to release for free the Photoshop file (PSD) of the homepage.  Here’s a preview:

Theme release day!

Also, just a reminder that Dionysus, our WordPress theme for music artists is coming out today so keep an eye on Twitter or subscribe to our blog feed and be the first to learn about it.

We tried to collect all those things a music artist needs while building a website and i think we did a really good job here. Tour dates? Discography management? What about Soundcloud integration? Biography? There are a lot of things to take care of.

As with every CSSIgniter theme, it’s really easy to adjust things like your logo, navigation, background colors and images or even the effects of the slider found in the homepage. Here’s a preview:

Dionysus is literally just around the corner so if you have any ideas that you would like to appear in this theme let us know!

Sure, you can create a button with a shortcode using our plugin or any other plugin, but how do you know it will look nice with your brand new premium WordPress theme? How do you know it won’t overlap or even break other shortcodes defined by virtually almost every other plugin? That’s right. You don’t.

That’s why we took the matter into our hands and created a set of beautiful, hand-crafted shortcodes, that work well with our themes. And yours. Now you know. Now you have a choice. Not only you can select ready-made shortcode themes and change the look and feel of your elements instantaneously, but you can also have compatible shortcode names by the click of a button.

Shortcodes preview & Reference

The following coloring options are available using the default theme. More (or less) options may be available, depending on the theme you choose.

Buttons

Buttons support three options, url, type and color. Their defaults are #, normal and grey respectively. You can use any option you need, and leave out the ones that you don’t want to change from the default.

[button]Button Text[/button]
or
[button url="#"]Button Text[/button]
or
[button url="#" type="normal" color="grey"]Button Text[/button]
etc… all give you:
Button Text

E.g., a button that links to CSSIgniter:
[button url="http://www.cssigniter.com"]Button Text[/button]
Button Text

Button Colors

[button color="grey"]Button Text[/button]
Button Text
[button color="white"]Button Text[/button]
Button Text
[button color="blue"]Button Text[/button]
Button Text
[button color="yellow"]Button Text[/button]
Button Text
[button color="green"]Button Text[/button]
Button Text
[button color="red"]Button Text[/button]
Button Text
[button color="black"]Button Text[/button]
Button Text
[button color="purple"]Button Text[/button]
Button Text

Button Types

[button type="normal"]Button Text[/button]
Button Text
[button type="download"]Button Text[/button]
Button Text
[button type="check" ]Button Text[/button]
Button Text
[button type="envelope"]Button Text[/button]
Button Text
[button type="cancel"]Button Text[/button]
Button Text
[button type="cart"]Button Text[/button]
Button Text

Combine types and colors for unique results:

[button type="download" color="red"]Button Text[/button]
Button Text
[button type="check" color="yellow"]Button Text[/button]
Button Text
[button type="envelope" color="green"]Button Text[/button]
Button Text
[button type="cancel" color="blue"]Button Text[/button]
Button Text
[button type="cart" color="purple"]Button Text[/button]
Button Text

Tooltips

Tooltips are a great way to provide supplemental information where and when needed, without the need to squeeze it along with the rest of the content. Just wrap your content with the tooltip and add the text you want to appear as the tip’s content. It’s that easy.

[tooltip contents="Test Tooltip"]Hover over me[/tooltip]
Hover over me

Tooltips are implemented using Brian Cray’s excellent tooltipsy plugin for jQuery.

Columns

Sometimes it’s useful to display stuff side by side, to either compare or make more readable. Currently, there is no easy way in WordPress that you can achieve such an effect, without manually writing HTML markup and styling it with CSS. Messy. With our columns shortcodes, you can do it as easy as one-two-three. Just remember that your last column is the last. You’ll see what we mean in a minute.

Half width columns

Half width columns are what the name suggests. Take up half the available space’s width. Therefore, you can only have two side by side. Use [one_half] and [one_half_last] to wrap your first and second columns’ content. E.g.:

will give you:

Thirds columns

Just like half width columns, you wrap your content with the appropriate shortcodes. Only this time, the available options are [one_third], [one_third_last], [two_thirds], [two_thirds_last]. Mixing these shortcodes appropriately, you can achieve three distinctively different effects.

One, one and one thirds

One and two thirds

Two and one thirds

Separators and Blockquotes

Separators, as the name suggests, separate logically or structurally your content. There are three separators that you can use:

[separator] or [separator type="normal"]

[separator type="double"]

[separator type="lightning"]

Quotes

The quote shortcode takes two parameters. A title and a float. Float may be either left or right.

Somewhere in your content, write:
[quote title="A Quote" float="left"]This is my favorite quote by Mr. Smith [/quote]
or
[quote title="A Quote" float="right"]This is my favorite quote by Mr. Smith [/quote]

A QuoteThis is my favorite quote by Mr. Smith

A QuoteThis is my favorite quote by Mr. Smith

Boxes

Boxes can greatly enhance you website, by providing focus on solid positions. The box shortcode has only one parameter, type, which can be one of: normal, info, warning, download, error and success. Each type of box, comes with its own icon.

[box]Hello there, this is the default box[/box]
or
[box type="normal"]Hello there, this is the default box[/box]

[box type="info"]Hello there, this is an info box[/box]

[box type="warning"]Hello there, this is a warning box[/box]

[box type="download"]Hello there, this is a download box[/box]

[box type="error"]Hello there, this is an error box[/box]

[box type="success"]Hello there, this is a success box[/box]

Lists

Tired of the default lists that come with WordPress? No problem. You can re-style them, without having to change a thing. Just create a list from the WordPress editor (unless you already have one ready) and wrap it with [list type="check"] [/list] or [list type="check"] [/list]

Google Maps

Yes. It’s finally easy to integrate a map into a post. All you need is the googlemap shortcode. Go to Google Maps, find the place you want, copy the URL and paste it into the src parameter. That’s it. You may optionally set a width and a height in pixels.

No Shortcode

This one is mostly for developers / tutorial writers. Just like we did above, you may need to write the words [button]Button[/button] without actually becoming a Button . What do you do? You use [nocode][/nocode] shortcode. Just wrap the shortcode you don’t want to process into the nocode shortcode, and you are set. E.g.:

[nocode][button]Button[/button][/nocode]
will display:
[button]Button[/button]

Note: There is a way, native to WordPress, to escape your shortcodes, by enclosing them in an extra set of square brackets, e.g. [[button]Hello[/button]]. It has been reported by some users that this way of escaping doesn’t work for them, and this is why we decided to include this extra, utility shortcode. After all, that’s what this plugin is all about. Giving you shortcodes!

Themes

You (or anyone else confident with CSS) can create themes for use with the plugin. This is a powerful feature, as it allows you to differentiate your blog from the rest, or customize the resulting elements to match the look and feel of your website. Imagine you switch themes and your company redesigns its website, you wouldn’t want to also switch plugins and manually converting shortcodes. Would you?

Selecting a theme

Just log into your admin panel, go to Settings -> CSSIgniter Shortcodes, and select any available theme from the Theme name drop-down box. Click Save Changes and you’re done. Enjoy the new look.

Creating a theme

Creating themes for CSSIgniter Shortcodes is very easy. Navigate inside the themes directory located inside the plugin, wp-content/plugins/ci-shortcodes/themes/ and create a new directory. This will be your theme’s name (filename restrictions apply according to your operating system). In there, create a css folder where you must place all your css files. Note that all .css files in the css sub-directory are loaded automatically.

You can now start customizing your theme. To kick-start your theme, you can just duplicate the default theme and start working from there. Just don’t forget to select your theme from the settings panel!

Compatibility Mode

It’s quite common for users to have installed more than one shortcodes plugins, or for themes to provide their own shortcodes. When this happens, chances are that some shortcodes overlap, and more often than not, you end up having shortcodes that you can’t be sure where are they getting their styles and markup from. That’s why we developed a compatibility feature into our own plugin. Just go into the plugin’s settings panel, check the Compatibility Mode checkbox and Save Changes. You’ve just future-proofed your posts! But keep reading…

It’s nothing fancy really. All shortcodes now get a prefix of “ci-” minimizing the risk of collision with other shortcode providers. For example, instead of [button]Hello[/button] you should now write [ci-button]Hello[/button][/ci-nocode]

Need to explain more? I don’t think so.

Happy ShortCoding!

Back in 2010 competition was already tough. New, really talented, providers were popping out like mushrooms almost every day while the big guns were already in a point where they were just adjusting things towards perfection. We also had one eye looking at the theme marketplaces where WordPress themes were (and still are) getting more complicated providing more features, more templates, more of everything. Scary times. I mean how do you enter such a saturated market and why? I will start with the why first.

Why we decided to jump in the arena of Premium WordPress themes

For me it was just the next logical step. Since 2008 i provide PSD to HTML/WordPress slicing/integration services to clients worldwide. With over 250 successful projects under my belt (projects where sliced/integrated by me, they weren’t outsourced) by the end of 2010 i felt i could deliver some really great themes. So, back in 2009 i started working on a site design that would host our themes, designed some wireframes for themes and met with Anastis to discuss the possibility to work together on that. As far as i can tell, he’ll probably post about it at some point, Anastis also wanted a turn in his career and the initial discussion about moving fast on the “Premium WordPress themes” project took less than an hour. To cut a long story short, it was that “we can do that, we definitely can” feeling that pushed us in this arena. Exciting (but still scary) times!

Fair enough, how did you go about it then and why was the project stalled all these months?

We designed the website, 4 themes and went live. That’s all. No business plans, no budgets, no cash flow projections, no marketing plans, nothing, nada, /dev/null. If there was a “You are doing it so wrong that i want to poke you in the eye with a sharp carrot” award we would definitely be a runner up (i am not saying a winner because there were other bigger players messing up big time as well). I can explain though.

Greece

Things are tough for everyone around here. Really, really tough. Without an initial budget, running CSSIgniter full-time wasn’t an option. We had to keep our daily (freelance) jobs and treat CSSIgniter as a side project. At least we were smart enough not to expose ourselves in any sort of agreements with investors or banks or whatever. Yes, we were afraid to take that risk. Personally i don’t regret it.

Shitloads of client work

For some strange reason our personal workload increased by 1000%. We couldn’t reject it. We simple couldn’t. Dealing every day with people who lose their jobs and houses made it impossible to spend energy on CSSIgniter. Priorities had to be set and surviving in this chaos was on the top of the list. Simple.

Not the type of projects that you run as a side project you fool

Let me put that in a context though. It’s not the type of projects that you run as a side project when you have to work for a living. If you don’t have the time and the budget needed, just do run something smaller as a side project. Write a css framework, put together an open source project, whatever. If you are willing to work 20 hours a day though, sure, go ahead, be my guest. I’d love your feedback on that though.

Before closing this chapter I invite you to watch the following music video. It describes precisely how we were feeling about CSSIgniter all this time. Then move on to the happy part.

Another chance (anyone?)

All this time, while CSSIgniter was always in our discussions, we literally couldn’t move on. Many things to do, less time to do them. Out of the sudden, after a discussion i had with a person who’s really close to me about giving CSSIgniter a real chance, life takes this funny turn. CSSIgniter gets funded. On the subject of this funding, i am going to write about a bit later. It’s a really great story and i promise to share it with you. The fact is that we are now playing ball as we should in a first place. CSSIgniter is our top priority and slowly it turns into a full-time job for some of us.

So, what’s the plan?

Over the last 2 months (since we got funded) things have changed dramatically. First and most important is the team. 5 people working hard to establish CSSIgniter as a reliable provider of WordPress themes. If you want to know a bit more about the team, be my guest.

Website, as you can see, got a facelift, we released two brand new themes (Lucullan & Aphrodite) and 8 more themes (most of them already designed) will be released within the following month or so. After that we will be moving to a steady monthly cycle of 2 releases.

Here’s a preview of our upcoming themes:

Unbelievable

I still can’t believe that we spend most of our time working on CSSIgniter. I also can’t believe that so talented people like Anastis, Vassilis and Thanos support this effort with all their heart giving their 101% so thank you for that guys. Also thumbs up goes to Georgios who decided to join our little team and make sure that every penny goes to the right place.

Last but not least i would like to say a big thanks to Helen, my partner in life. She designed our beautiful logo but above all she put up with me those 2 months of working on the re-launch of CSSIgniter.

On behalf of the small but so powerful CSSIgniter team, we provide beautiful and functional WordPress themes for a price you can afford.

All Ithaca users affected by the bug, are advised to update their theme to this latest version.

It took us a while to get things straight but now it seems that we have a solid plan in our hands. So here’s what to expect from cssigniter during the following couple of months.

New subscription scheme

We provide our themes for one fixed price per year and this is how we will move on. Thing is the price will be a bit different (it will blow your mind actually) but with a few changes in our core product. Now every theme is available in 4 different flavors. WordPress versions in both xhtml and html5, plus static xhtml and html5 versions of our themes so you can use them in the CMS of your choice. Also, let’s not forget about the newsletter templates available with every theme.

While this sounds like a great deal, after collecting feedback from the community we think that we should really concentrate on the actual development of one version per theme and not 4. Still, the way we develop our themes (design them in Photoshop, slice them to html/css, integrate them to WordPress, apply custom options where needed) will give us the option to provide a static html version of our themes. So from now on, all of our themes will be available in 2 formats: HTML5 WordPress & Plain HTML5. Our current themes won’t be affected by this change.

New themes

Some really cool themes are on their way. Next theme to come is “IgniterApp“. A theme for those who develop mobile applications and they want a website to support / promote their product. From there we move to “Lucullan” a theme dedicated to bar / restaurant owners. According to our plan these 2 themes will be available in mid September. “Aphrodite” is next, a really beautiful portfolio / business theme and our last theme currently being developed is “Dionysus“, a WordPress theme for DJs, singers, bands and everyone in the music industry. Sneak peek? Sure.

So yeah, stay tuned while we prepare the themes and also let us know if there’s something else that you would like to see in our themes catalogue.

After the release of our first free theme, Euclides i am happy to announce that we are about to release 2 more themes.

Reposado

Our dear friend Yiannis Konstantakopoulos designed for us a tumblr like theme for WordPress. What makes this theme unique is its responsiveness (call me media queries) which means each device gets the version that can handle! We are super excited about this theme and can’t wait to release it. Here are a few screenshots:

SmartDevice

One more theme is coming along and this time it’s all about Iphone, Android or Ipad applications’ websites. Pick your device, define screenshot sizes, write your content and start selling:

Stay tuned! Any suggestions while we prepare these themes for release are more than welcomed! By the way, that’s not an April’s fools day joke

I am really excited today as i have just finished a mock-up.  The one for our first WordPress theme. While Anastis is putting his magic on Artemis, a product / business theme that will be released really soon, i thought it’s time to discuss our second release for November. As we have promised our free themes will be subjects to critique and dialog with you guys. So, here’s Euclides. A free WordPress theme for tutorial writers. With this theme we are targeting web developers who don’t want to spend time on building a visually appealing website but concentrate on their tutorials. It could work for web design tutorials as well, but we do know these guys prefer to build everything from scratch.

Here’s a small list of things that we think this theme should have:

• Demo template
• Demo and Download buttons
• Icons of the most popular scripting languages and technologies (frameworks etc)
• Icons of the most popular web design tools
• Syntax highlighter

Preview

So what do you think? Any ideas? Any features that we should include? We will be keeping an eye on this post until next Friday, November 19th. Click on the image to view an actual size version.