Justin has a slew of free WordPress themes and plugins that he maintains utilizing a $25 per year support / membership business model. As an unabashed fan of his plugins and especially his Hybrid Core theme framework, the new site really makes the documentation and tutorials shine.

The redesign includes revamped sections with post types for tutorials, code snippets, php classes, constants, functions, hooks, and shortcodes. In addition to the new site structure, he’s finishing up what he calls some “dark magic” with Gravity Forms to handle the site’s membership system. He’s also working out details to allow club members to submit their own themes to Theme Hybrid, which I find exciting.

One thing that intrigued me in the announcement post is a tease for an upcoming book he’s a part of. Many know him as a co-author of the Professional WordPress Plugin Development book, but his role in this book will be a bit different. He’ll be publishing it as an e-book, and not going through a publisher. Justin is also an editor for the upcoming, updated, edition of the Smashing WordPress book, written by Thord Daniel Hedengren, which will be released this spring.

If you’ve ever had a desire to learn more from Justin than you undoubtedly already have from his popular tutorials, then it may be a good time to check out Theme Hybrid. And you may see me scrounging around the forums as well.

Some screenshots of the new design are below:

In episode seven I share my thoughts on something I’ve tried to do on a daily basis to be more efficient when working in the WordPress dashboard. I’m curious what you think of this idea.

Have a listen:

If you would rather download it directly you can do that, or subscribe to this show via RSS or on iTunes. If you would prefer a written summary, you can also read that just after the jump.

Memorize dashboard URLs

If you’re anything like me, you spend a good deal of time in the WordPress dashboard. But also like me, you might be interested in being efficient and not wasting time. One thing I’ve tried to train myself to do is memorize the URLs for pages I visit within the dashboard, to entirely skip over the navigation side of things.

Or rather, not memorize, but commit them to muscle memory. For instance, one thing I’ll often do is log into the dashboard and start a new post. The standard way is to type in my dashboard URL, wait for it to load, then click the add new post link (either in the toolbar or in the menu) and then wait for the next page to load.

But I can skip that middle part, if instead of initially browsing to /wp-admin/ I also type in post-new.php. I skip the additional page load, moving the mouse, and clicking. I end up where I want to go right away.

It might seem like a small mental shift, but if you visit dashboard pages enough it might be worth trying it out. Pay attention to the full URLs for dashboard screens you visit regularly, and start saving a few moments here and there.

What do you think?

Earlier on today, literally hours ago, tickets for WordCamp San Diego (on March 24th and 25th) went on sale. Now if you’re not quick, then you’re going to be disappointed and (possibly) miss out completely. They started off with 200 tickets, and at the time of writing this only 40 tickets remain!

So I suggest you stop reading, go order you ticket(s), and then come back. Sound cool?

Right, got them? Good. Let’s continue.

Once you’ve got your tickets, you’ll need somewhere to stay. Lucky for you, the organisers highlighted six different hotels you can book your stay. Check the various options out if you’re stuck.

Unlike last years event, they’ve moved the venue to Thomas Jefferson School of Law. WordCamp San Diego is still a month away, but it’s looking to be yet another sell-out event. If we hear about the release of any additional tickets, you’ll be the first to find out!

So, did you act quick? Are you attending WordCamp San Diego this year around?

Jake Goldman and Brad Williams hung around for a few minutes after the end of WP Late Night episode 3, and we chatted casually a bit more. Aftertaste is, of course, our podcast for the after show. Listen to this one for episode title debates, some amount of inside baseball, and to find out why I start cursing at Brad toward the end.

Listen now, if you like:

If you’d like you can also subscribe to the show on iTunes or directly to the RSS feed.  If you would like to download the podcast in MP3 format directly, you can do so here.

In episode 3 of WP Late Night, the “BruddyPress” edition, Jake Goldman of 10up joins Brad and I as guest host. Dre Armeda was feeling under the weather this week, so we wish him well and a speedy recovery. In this episode we discussed upcoming WordCamps, the BuddyPress codex, version control, complex themes, and — well, at this point you’d be best just listening to the episode. It’s a good one.

Check out the various ways to listen after the jump, or get straight to listenin’ below:

You can also subscribe to this as a podcast on iTunes, or just download the MP3 directly. If you prefer you can also subscribe to the RSS feed itself.

Also, because I know you love it, this is the time code breakdown of what we discussed in this episode:

• 00:00 Show intro, howdy everyone
• 04:30 Everyone’s week, WordCamp San Diego, WordCamp Phoenix, WordCamp Miami
• 10:00 Twenty Twelve default theme
• 14:30 Framework choices. Mentioned Genesis, Twenty Ten, _s
• 18:00 Git and SVN
• 26:00 BuddyPress Codex, Mediawiki, the state of the BuddyPress project
• 33:30 bbPress 2.0
• 35:00 Obox Themes color-coding theme widgets, the relative complexity of themes
• 44:40 Mailbag (or the Ryan Duff section)
• 49:00 Ecommerce options, legacy support vs. younger plugins
• 57:00 Just reminiscing

And just for the record, rejected titles for this episode included “Underscore underscore underscore Jake”, “Million Dollar Idea”, You’ve been 10up’d”, and “Nobody else drinks from the Batman mug”. Yup, this one’s a gem.

We’ll be recording future shows live as well, so watch this blog for news about when to catch our recording. If you’d like to get in touch with the show for the mailbag, or anything else really, here’s how:

• Leave a comment on this post, we’ll see it.
• Shoot an email over to wplatenight@wpcandy.com.
• Leave a voicemail for us at 815-322-WPLN.
• Tweet about us using the #wplatenight hashtag.

The folks from Automattic just this week released the _s theme, pronounced “underscores”. It’s their team’s attempt at a better and more flexible starter theme. The new theme is a fork of Toolbox, which was the starter theme used to build the free and premium themes on WordPress.com.

Toolbox worked, but the fact that people had used it as a parent theme meant that making drastic improvements would break things up. As Theme Wrangler Ian Stewart explained, this meant a change was worthwhile:

Unfortunately, we wound up in a situation with Toolbox where we wanted to make some more drastic improvements to it as a starter theme but got a little stuck. We had people using it as a Parent Theme and that meant that the simplest id or class change could become a problem. Simply changing an id of #branding to #masthead in the template is enough to break most CSS.

The _s theme comes with additional starter styles, a generic framework for adding your own responsive CSS, a script that handles menus on smaller screens, and sample theme options to customize.

Stewart said _s incorporates code and lessons learned from many of the best WordPress themes, and will continue its evolution incorporating things with each new default theme release. They have made it available for free through GitHub, which means any updates and changes to _s get pulled in from the same Automattic theme repository being used live on WordPress.com and pushed out to GitHub. Read more about the theme in Stewart’s announcement post on ThemeShaper.

You can be sure that I’ll be delving into it right away. Will you be checking _s out, or are you happy with your development theme?

The WP Late Night crew (that’s myself, Brad Williams, and Dre Armeda) are recording episode three of the show tonight live on the WPCandy Stream. The show will start at 8pm EST, so don’t forget to set those alarm clocks fancy iPhone alarm apps whatever the cool kids are using nowadays.

Until then, why not catch up on WP Late Night episodes one and two? Episode two is part of the current WPCandy Stream playlist, so you could just hang out there too.

If you have WordPress questions or comments to send in to the show, you can do so by:

• Commenting on a show post (like this one)
• Leaving a voicemail at (815) 322-WPLN
• Emailing us at wplatenight@wpcandy.com
• Tweeting using the #wplatenight hashtag.

Hope to see you in the chatroom tonight!

This Aftertaste episode was recorded after recording the first-ever episode of The Weekly Theme Show. It’s mostly a rehash of what was discussed, what could be done better, and a bit of thinking for future shows. It is just what the Aftertaste specializes in: casual conversations on any topic whatsoever.

Jump right into listening:

Subscribe to the show on iTunes (coming soon), or directly to the RSS feed.  If you would like to download the podcast in MP3 format directly, you can do so here.

With our ongoing clients we are commonly engaged in building new features and functionality while also needing to be able to make smaller changes (hotfixes) that are pushed up immediately. With Git it is easy for us to maintain development of more involved functionality in feature branches and still being able to push up quick changes as needed.

Alex King’s blog post explains their thought process, and a bit about their new setup.

This is the Week of New Podcasts^TM, is it not? The Weekly Theme Show is a brand new audio production featuring myself and two people you probably don’t know. This show will discuss WordPress themes, weekly, from a user’s perspective (and not a developer’s).

Justin Jones and Nicholas Weaver, who I can now proudly call co-hosts as well as friends, are both WordPress users here in my city. You’ll get to know them better as the show goes on and they post here more often, but right now all you need to know is that they use WordPress and WordPress themes a lot.

Jump straight into listening:

This episode lays the groundwork for the show, and we discuss the backgrounds we each have in WordPress themes. In list format, we discussed:

• WP Framework
• BioThemes (which is closed now)
• Moses Theme from Mint Themes
• Standard Theme
• Chunk by Automattic on WordPress.com
• TheCorporation by Elegant Themes
• Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven

If you’re into all of our podcasts (you crazy person) then there’s a master shows feed coming your way real soon. Otherwise, don’t let the slew of podcasts overwhelm you — if in doubt just stick to the WPCandy Podcast proper.