Today Brian Gardner and team launched the official StudioPress Marketplace which will serve as a great place to purchase third party child themes. How cool is that?

We thought it was pretty cool and pretty exciting. We’re also excited to tell you that we had the opportunity to create a tumblog style theme for the launch.

Blingless is a Genesis child theme that leverages the native WordPress Post Formats theme feature. We added a few color options as well as a couple of layouts if you want a bit of flexibility, and you get all the Genesis goodness.

So, if you’re looking for a great way to share your content in cool way, check out Blingless. It’s simple, clean and ready to go!

Let us know what you think, and if you have ideas on what we should work on next, leave a comment

We are a project-oriented business, as such, we concluded that how we execute our projects had to be number one priority.

As Project Management Professional’s (PMP), we naturally steered to the guidelines in the PMBOK (Project Management Book of Knowledge) for insight. From that, we established our own methodology; one that fit our current model, and offers the scalability we require. That’s how “The 4 D’s” came into existence.

Our Methodology – The 4 D’s

The 4 D’s are:

• Discovery
• Design
• Development
• Deployment

All alone, there is nothing special about these elements. If anything, they can be considered to be over simplified. For us though, they are perfect – intuitive, easy to implement and more importantly, manageable. Each element could be easily applied to any of the various existing models like: Water Fall, Scrum, Xtreme Programming, etc…, which was another attribute we liked.

What is important to note is that The 4 D’s is structured around a collaborative model; it is facilitated through the integration of technology, specifically Basecamp by 37 Signals.

This is the first of a series; we will provide other posts that talk specifically to our methodology and the philosophical differences between it and other management models, while also providing deeper insight into the methodology elements (The 4 D’s).

As you know, the CubicTwo website launched last week. We’re a WordPress shop and one of our favorite frameworks is Genesis by StudioPress.

Naturally, we built CubicTwo using both WordPress and Genesis. When we set out to create our site, we wanted to ensure we leveraged the best of both, plus we wanted to extend the site into the future a bit.

Early on, we decided to build CubicTwo using HTML5 and CSS3 elements. We know it isn’t fully supported but hey, it’s time for antiquated browsers to catch up!

In any event, a few things need to be done for this to work, this is a quick post to show how we accomplished it. As an example, If you want IE to play nicely, there is a Javascript dependency, so keep that in mind.

HTML5 of course…

If you’re already familiar with HTML5, this part is easy. For HTML5 newbies, we recommend taking a look at 52Framework. It’s a great place to start, and it includes the necessary components to get you on your way to building an HTML5 page, site, and WordPress theme.

The risk: As stated earlier, IE doesn’t play with HTML5 yet. You’ll have to add a special javascript included in the 52Framework to ensure IE loads all of the HTML elements, IE doesn’t see them otherwise, go figure. Here is a great walk through of how the script is used, as well as a few bugs you may run into, and how to fix them.

If coded correctly, your site should degrade gracefully enough for Javascript haters to still navigate around. For us, this trade off was worth it.

Genesis Doctype

Genesis is a well documented framework, and a CubicTwo favorite! The StudioPress team has done a brilliant job enabling theme authors and developers to easily change things around to fit their needs. If you’re ever looking for extended documentation, go check out dev.studiopress.com. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, their support forum is a great place to ask questions.

While cruising the StudioPress developer site, we found a quick way to change the Doctype of Genesis. Unfortunately, the instructions do not cover HTML5, so we made some modifications to fit our needs.

It’s pretty straight forward. Open up your child theme functions.php and place the following code below init but before ?> at the end of the functions file (if it exists).

    #HTML5 DOCTYPE
    remove_action( 'genesis_doctype', 'genesis_do_doctype' );
	add_action( 'genesis_doctype', create_function( '', 'echo "<!DOCTYPE html><html><head>";' ) );

What this is going to do is strip out the default Doctype from Genesis, and load the HTML5 Doctype into your theme.

We can’t emphasize enough that using child themes with a framework is always better than editing the framework itself. You’ll avoid issues down the road when the framework is updated by using child themes!

Just in case: If you’re not sure what a child theme is, go read this post about child themes in Genesis by Brian Gardner.

In Closing

Genesis is flexible, it allows for a lot of great customization and this is just one example. We’d love to hear your feedback on how we accomplished this on our site, and any ways you think we can improve it.

If you have other examples of cool things you’ve done with Genesis, please let us know, we’d love to chat about it.

Cheers!

CubicTwo is a company that creates WordPress solutions. We formalized CubicTwo in December of 2009, 10 months later, plus a lot of fun, we’re here to say hello to the interwebs.

We dedicated 2010 to getting down to brass tacks. As a company, we wanted to ensure that all of our methodologies, business practices, and strategic approach was finely tuned and aligned.

How’d CubicTwo become CubicTwo?

I’ve been consulting in the web world for 10 plus years now, and have been working with WordPress since 2004 in one capacity or another. I’d been wanting to formalize my business, and had the name CubicTwo in mind since 2007. It was a matter of when and how, but I wanted to make sure I had my ducks in a row.

Over the last couple years, my brother-in-law Tony Perez and I had been toying with the idea of combining our experience and expertise to bring this concept to fruition, and we embarked to do just that at the end of last year.

Tony is a brilliant operational leader and the other half of CubicTwo. Tony is a project management ninja, and has complimented my experience to really make this happen.

Thanks a ton!

We’re very happy to bring a bit of what we’re doing out onto the site, and we hope you enjoy it as much as we did creating it. We appreciate all of the support along the way!

CubicTwo LLC is a veteran owned business that works with medium & large organizations to build sustainable WordPress based web solutions.

Be Bold. Square Up!