When it comes to the experience with the least friction, the most welcoming to a new user, and the least technically complex, I just don’t see anything beating a simple theme folder with a handful of template files and an image folder. Whether you’re adding something to the theme or just poking around a bit to see what your site’s theme is doing in there, it’s awesome to be able to open up a file called header.php that is, you know, actually representative of your theme’s header.

Not all bad, of course

I’m not saying that I think theme frameworks are bad. They aren’t, at all. But, you have to admit that the mindset they come from is one that’s focused on developers first — even very slightly first — and users second.

Frameworks make development faster and simpler in many cases, but if the end product isn’t a handful of template files in one folder it’s really not best for users.

Heck, I’ve used frameworks quite a bit. I actually really like a lot of things about Genesis, for instance, and don’t mind working on projects where it’s the required framework. It works great for me in a lot of ways. But I can’t help but think it doesn’t end up handing the best possible product over to the end user.

…if the end product isn’t a handful of template files in one folder it’s really not best for users.

Here’s the simplest way to illustrate what I’m talking about. Opening up Twenty Ten, Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen will all give you a similar greeting: somewhere around fifteen files, a stylesheet, and maybe an asset folder or two. Once you’ve opened up one of them, within reason, you know what will greet you the next time. And this is true of many, if not most, WordPress themes.

For a theme built using a framework, let’s say as a child theme which is a pretty popular way to go nowadays. Their theme folder might just contain functions.php and style.css files. If they are looking to tweak something about their theme, or learn a bit about how they might do that, they have a heckuva longer way to go than if they opened up a theme full of template files.

If a hypothetical user want to modify the way their category pages display, or at least look at the template to see where a certain phrase or heading is generated, in one case they’ll find a category.php or archive.php file. I bet they’ll look into that one. In the other, more complicated situation, I’m not sure what they would do next.

Best of both worlds

I’ve talked before about the different between a framework theme and what I consider a starter theme, but they are the type of theme I’m likely to start a site with if I have the choice.

After fooling around with Kubrick — and who didn’t way back when? — I remember working with Sandbox for nearly every WordPress website I made. It was nothing I didn’t need, but a lot of stuff that I found really useful. It even had stuff in it that eventually found its way into core WordPress template functions, which is about the best compliment I can imagine a WordPress theme receiving.

The next starter theme that really jumps out at me is WP Framework, by Ptah Dunbar. It was slightly more complex, in the sense that it contained a framework folder that provided some fancy functions to the rest of the theme. Really, looking back at it now, it was just a /library/ folder in hyperdrive.

For the last year or so I’ve been using Underscores, the starter theme built by Automattic and a handful of contributors. It’s one of the better options I know of right now when it comes to clean, efficient, out-of-the-way themes. Every site I build begins with it.

And one to think on

I realize this isn’t the most groundbreaking thing to write up and say. But it’s something I’ve been thinking about recently, particularly when building within different framework projects. And hey, I’ve got to come back and start writing with something, right? This seemed about as good a topic as anything else.

There’s usually a decent amount of discussion around the dashboard side of usability with themes, and I’ve definitely participated in those in the past. But how often do we really think about the file structure and code complexity of our themes, and what a new user looking to go digging around might find?

For a user looking into a framework-built theme, they will likely be peeking into a folder that looks very different than what we saw tearing into Kubrick years ago. Maybe that’s a good thing, but I’m not so sure it is.

The post It’s hard to beat fourteen files and an image folder appeared first on WPCandy.

This morning I spent some time investigating feed readers and services to replace Google Reader. A lot of internet users have been since Google announced Reader is going away this summer. It’s easy to pull up a list of possible alternatives, but ultimately I found it necessary to just dig in and try them out to see which works best.

I dug in, and here’s what I found out.

Where I’m coming from

In a replacement RSS reader, I’m looking for a couple of things. I’ve always liked the idea of hosting the feeds in one place and having my pick of applications for doing the actual reading. Reeder has been my go-to app on the Mac, and apps like Flipboard are fun to use on iPads.

And I’m not just looking for myself, either. Ashley has RSS subscriptions, though she does use them a bit differently than I do. Sync isn’t as important to her, but there is an account with subscriptions that we share from time to time. That’s one reason why Google Reader and syncing apps were so useful.

So ideally I’d like a service that will hold my subscriptions, but is also compatible with apps that might want to sync with it. Obviously this is a pretty tall order right now, so I’ve got to look for those services that look like they will offer the best options in the coming year.

After all, Google Reader has been the standard for so long it’s going to take some time for other services to really rise up.

I made a list based on what I’ve found recommended online in the last week or two. Then I just ran down the list trying things out. Here’s what I found.

(I should mention I’m a Mac user, so I really only look into apps that will work for me. That said, many of these options are web apps and should work no matter what platform you’re operating on.)

The Old Reader is pretty simple, but I’m still waiting

I don’t recall using Google Reader during its earliest days – though honestly I don’t have the best memory with things like that. The Old Reader claims to emulate that early Google Reader experience, which sounds fine to me. Simple and to the point sounds great to me.

Signing up was easy, as you’d expect. Once logged in, though, I found what what seems to be an unmovable “trending” section that sits below other options. I could care less what’s trending on the service. Ideally I could remove or hide that, which I don’t think I can, but at least it doesn’t look like it’s the default view when you pull the site up.

That said, I haven’t been able to spend any time with The Old Reader. It seems there are lots of folks jumping into the service, and my OPML file import file is behind a queue of over 12,000 other imports. Still is. Assuming I’m notified by email when the import is finished, I’ll give The Old Reader a proper shake.

Until then, let’s move on.

NewsBlur just doesn’t do it for me

I saw mentions of NewsBlur too, so gave it a look. The sign up process alerted me that free sign ups have been disabled, and prompted me to upgrade my account. I didn’t do that, since I wanted to check everything out and get a lay of the land before paying anything.

It seems the big increase in sign ups since the Google Reader announcement is what motivated NewsBlur to turn off free sign ups.

So at this point I moved on to try other things out. After returning to it later, though, I discovered what I thought was a partial sign up was actually a full sign up and was working. As far as I can tell the prompt to upgrade and the “free account sign ups are disabled” message is only to motivate upgrades, and not quite real. At least, in my case, my account is a free one and functions.

So long story short, I was able to give it a trial. And I’m glad I was able to. The feel is very – for lack of a better word – Windows-y. It feels like a Windows explorer window, or a file structure in a web-based FTP app of some sort. In other words, not great. I’m not into the aesthetic at all, and I’m glad I didn’t need to spend twenty bucks to figure that out.

Moving right along.

Feedly was a bit confusing, but close

Next I tried Feedly, which I knew going in was a big favorite amongst those who’ve walked from Google Reader. It’s a service that, on first glance, seemed like it would work like The Old Reader and allow me to import my subscriptions in. But it’s not quite that.

On the Feedly homepage I was confused. In my mind RSS services tend to fall into two large groups: those where you read the feeds in a browser, and those where you download an app and use that. Google Reader is one of the former kind, and NetNewsWire one of the latter. On first glance, I wasn’t sure what the heck Feedly was.

Feedly homepage, before setting up the browser extension.

It offers three options: download for Safari (or Chrome, in the screenshot above), for iOS, and for Android. This makes me think it’s app based, right? After all, there are definitely iOS and Android specific apps. But the language download for Safari threw me, since I’m not sure what that means. I would expect it to say download for Mac.

Turns out that downloads an extension, which is what I did next. It acts like any other extension or bookmark in your toolbar, expect the only purpose it seems to serve (as far as I can tell) is to take you to your Feedly homepage. To put it in context, right next to the Feedly icon in my browser I have one for 1Password and another for iCloud tabs. Both give me enhanced functionality in the browser, and do what I expect them to do. The Feedly icon doesn’t subscribe to the current site’s RSS feed, which is what I expected, but just jumps me to the Feedly site.

Okay, whatever. So it’s a web-based service. Got it. Now I need to import my RSS feeds.

Feedly, after setting up the browser extension.

This was another confusing step, because I couldn’t see a way to create a Feedly account. Any service like this uses an account, right? I need to create a username, add my email, and maybe set a password. But the only option I had was to login or sync with Google Reader.

Maybe I’m making too big a deal out of this process, but I was hung up on it for a good minute. Because synchronizing with Google Reader is not what I’m looking to do at this stage. I’m looking to upload the OPML file I’ve backed up from Google Reader and transition over to something new. Synchronizing with the soon-to-be-dead Google Reader seems like a silly choice. Heck, I already have Google Reader synchronized with Reeder and NetNewsWire and I know that won’t work for longer.

Without any other option I could see, I went ahead and logged in with my Reader account and set it all up that way. Only after doing some digging did I discover, on the Feedly blog I believe, that synchronizing is the way to do it right now. By the time Google Reader closes down, they say, everything will be seamlessly ported over. So signing in with Google Reader info is the right thing to do, as odd as it seems to me to do it.

Now that I was actually into the service, I thought it was mostly neat. The design of the interface will take some getting used to, mostly because it always takes me some time to find my way around the really minimalist design aesthetics. The style carries over to the iOS apps, which I grabbed to try out as well.

While on the Feedly blog I also read a bit about their Normandy project. It’s an effort on their part to create an API to match the Google Reader API, to make it easier for other services and apps to offer Feedly synchronizing as an option sooner. It sounds like a neat endeavor and definitely weighs in on my decision as to which option to go for.

Alright, next up.

NetVibes seems like overkill

I actually ran a second Google search for NetVibes after arriving on their site, thinking there must be another one that offers RSS services. The NetVibes homepage emphasized what seems to be their core offerings: monitoring and analytics. It didn’t seem to be an RSS service, as far as I could tell.

But this was the correct NetVibes, the one that people had mentioned in a few Google Reader alternative roundups. So I dug in a bit more, watched their demonstration video, and signed up.

Or I should say, I tried to sign up. For the life of me I couldn’t get their sign up process to successfully send me an activation email. I tried a couple of times, and it just wasn’t sending. I checked junk mail, tried a different email and username, but it just wasn’t doing it. Since the service already looked like it wasn’t quite the right fit, I moved on. It just wasn’t worth my troubleshooting for that long.

Next.

Pulse isn’t aimed at me

First impression: I think I’ll really like the look of Pulse. I signed up without trouble (not normally something I would mention, but after the tough NetVibes experience it stands out) and took a look around.

It was frustrating trying to import my OPML file. My first impulse was to search out a settings screen or option to do it within a preferences menu or something. You know, like most apps and services would handle it. It still seems crazy to me now, but it seems the only way to import the file is to first sign out of the site, visit their homepage, and use their importer. Then, after the file imported, I could associate the feeds with my existing account.

Totally weird. But it worked, and then I had my feeds in.

But not quite. That was when I discovered that Pulse operates a bit differently – not bad differently, per se, but in its own way that shows a clear philosophy at hand. Pulse organizes feeds, or what they refer to as “content” throughout, into topics. But each topic can only hold a handful of feeds – which they call sources, I think. The end result here is that my feeds, which number in the hundreds and are assembled into meticulous folders, ended up in folders like My Folder Name 01, My Folder Name 02, My Folder Name 03, and so on. Pulse broke up my feeds into folders based on their folder limitations, which had the effect of destroying my organization method.

Which means I can’t use Pulse.

I still spent some time playing around with it. I tried out the iPhone and iPad apps, both in an attempt to properly organize my feeds. You know – rename folders, change the order, move feeds around, and so on. I couldn’t find a way to do it. Not in the web app, or the mobile apps. There may very well be a place to do it, but I couldn’t find it. So that’s no good.

But really, once I knew the folder limits were set in place and don’t seem to be changing any time soon, I knew it would never work for me. It’s not that Pulse is bad, really, it’s just that it won’t work for me. It has a different kind of reader in mind. Perhaps a more casual one. But not me.

Next is Fever.

Fever, hot but a bit more work

I enjoyed reading Ryan Markel’s reasoning behind his choice to go with Fever as his Google Reader replacement. It seems like a neat product, with a very pleasant aesthetic. But there’s no trial, and requires a purchase to then install it on my own server to use it.

That made me think. Really, it just seems like too much work for a feed service. I’m all for owning my own stuff and having control over it, but there’s also some stuff I prefer not to have to think about.

In this case, I see the OPML feeds I’ve curated as my stuff. And I have those. Backed up and safe – even more so after the news about Google Reader. But where I put those feeds, and where I choose to read them, I guess I don’t feel like I have to fully control that. I’m happy to rely on a hosted service or application that isn’t going to make me handle everything.

The more I look at Fever, the more I wish it had a hosted version. Or at least a proper demo that would let me really play with it to see if it’s worth my purchase.

That said, moving on.

Vienna is a fun project to follow

I didn’t see many mentions of Vienna, but I wanted to give it a fair shake. It’s an open source Mac application that is being openly developed on Github. Fun side note: their site is using a fairly recognizable WordPress theme. Open source loves company, it seems.

So the app seems solid. Along with a now nearly useless Google Reader synchronization option, it allows you to dump feed subscriptions directly into it. This would be a solid option for Ashley if she wanted to ditch NetNewsWire, but it’s not great for me since I still want a service that will allow synchronization in multiple places.

I’m going to keep an eye on the project, of course. If it ends up with broader synchronizing options than Reeder does before Reeder does, I’ll likely switch over to it for a bit. After all, I still have a thing for desktop apps.

What I’m sticking with in place of Google Reader

That does it for what I spent time with today. Ultimately, I didn’t find exactly what I wanted: a subscription management service that can sync with multiple applications that I could choose from. But I knew from the beginning that I was likely asking too much. Until lately, development time with RSS applications seems to have been mostly focused on Google Reader integration. Now we need more options – any other options! – and it will take time for those to pop up.

So while I didn’t find exactly what I wanted, I think I found a horse worth betting on. I’m going with Feedly, for now. The design works for me, is an update to Reader while still keeping things fresh and new, and has a plan for the future that seems smart to me. Let’s say I’m cautiously optimistic about Feedly.

It’s possible I’ll switch over sometime – I still haven’t had proper time with The Old Reader yet – but for now I’m with Feedly. I don’t generally like just going with the accepted popular option. I prefer to try everything out myself and make a decision on my own. It just turns out in this case that what I like best and what it seems the internet at large likes best is pretty close.

I’m still a bit nervous – no, let’s say curious – about the more confusing aspects of Feedly. For one, I don’t seem to have a login with them aside from my Google Reader info. So when that goes away, what do I log in with? Will they just email me that information in time? I don’t know. We’ll see, I guess.

One last takeaway: I was surprised how many of my experiences finding the right service just weren’t pleasant ones. I still think there’s room to make this process a lot better, and probably room for better products and services. Heck, even Feedly, the service I ended up choosing over the rest, gave me about as much trouble getting started with as anything else did.

If you’ve found something interesting in your own search, feel free to drop your findings in the comments below.

The post My experience looking for an RSS service to replace Google Reader appeared first on WPCandy.

I’m happy to announce that we’re finalizing the second issue of The WPCandy Quarterly, in the last stage before sending it off to the printers. It’s an exciting — but busy! — time, and we’re most psyched to be so close to getting another issue into everyone’s hands.

We have an amazing roundup of contributors for this issue. We have David Bisset, co-organizer of the upcoming WordCamp Miami, WooThemes’ own Ryan Ray, total pro developer John Bloch and the creator behind Builder, Chris Jean, all on board. And that’s honestly just — to abuse a cliché — the tip of the iceberg.

We’ll be teasing the issue further over the next couple of weeks, and you can expect a final release date soon as well.

We’re also excited to have great sponsors on board for the issue. Special thanks to Pagely, BackupBuddy, Event Espresso, Shopp, ZippyKid, The Theme Foundry and WP Maintainer. We’re super thankful for their involvement, and also anxious to see their awesome full color ads in print.

We definitely fell off our intended schedule for 2012, but we’re back on it now. We learned a lot about printing and shipping the first time around, and are ready to take on the challenge again. Thanks so much for your interest and support in our indie project here — I can’t wait until you get to see what we’ve been working on!

The post An update on The WPCandy Quarterly #2! appeared first on WPCandy.

Photo courtesy of Dumitru BrinzanDumitru Brinzan, founder of Hermes Themes, rowing during a vacation in Romania.

$35, $75, $40, and $200. One of these doesn’t sound like the others.

Dumitru Brinzan, who has a long history in WordPress themes at WPZOOM, has started a new theme project called Hermes Themes. The shop offers strictly hotel themes, in contrast to WPZOOM’s more varied selection.

Interestingly, Brinzan is pricing his hotel themes at $200, well above the average cost of themes at the moment. It’s a bold decision, and not one that you see many theme shops making at the moment. I sat down with him to talk a bit about what motivated him to start Hermes Themes, and in particular to price his themes that high.

The pricing is very deliberate on Brinzan’s part. “To be honest, I thought about pricing for a very long time,” he told WPCandy. “I considered making it cheaper, or even more expensive.” His decision to sell themes for $200 wasn’t a simple one, and took his entire history selling WordPress themes into account.

Start by serving a real need

While the pricing is an intriguing aspect of Hermes Themes, it’s not why Brinzan started the new shop. He saw a need.

“Other options that hotels have right now are really expensive,” he told WPCandy. “This is why we still have hotel websites developed in 2002 and 2003.” Anyone who has ever booked a hotel stay can attest to that, no doubt.

Just a couple of days before our interview, Brinzan described seeing a luxury four star hotel with a website that hadn’t changed a bit since 2001. Well, aside from the addition of Facebook links last year. “Imagine that!” Brinzan said.

Many solutions for hotel websites are hosted and subscription based. This can cost hotel business owners anywhere from hundreds to four or five thousand dollars every year. That’s a good deal for a website, but even worse if and when they decide to move on they are left with nothing. No website to adapt and no content to work with (aside from scraping their own) leaves them needing to start over from scratch.

“Just imagine sinking in thousands in two or three years, and then you realize you have nothing, no website at all,” Brinzan said. “It’s a trap!”

“That,” he explained,” is the problem with using proprietary content management systems.” WordPress, Brinzan believes, is a much better long-term solution for hotels, and he has tried to emphasize this by sticking to standard content types and a focus on portability.

Photo by Ryan ImelHermes Themes is a solo project by Dumitru Brinzan that sells hotel themes for $200.

Hermes Themes currently offers four different $200 themes, with live demonstrations of each as you might expect. My instinct, particularly with a $200 price tag but also with hotel themes in general, is that the themes themselves would be fairly complex. I expected complex sections where availability would be reflected in booking forms and choosing the size of room desired would weigh in too. But that’s not the case — Hermes Themes seem very simple, with basic contact information and assuming booking forms that don’t suggest the need for these more involved features.

“Just imagine sinking in thousands in two or three years, and then you realize you have nothing, no website at all. It’s a trap!”

Instead, he puts an emphasis on local attractions, photo galleries, testimonials, and layouts featuring large photos of the rooms available. Brinzan seems to suggest, both in the features offered in his themes and the marketing within Hermes Themes itself, that the problems hotels face has nothing to do with advanced website features, but the basics. In a blog post Brinzan wrote last month he runs down the most common mistakes he finds hotel websites making. The list includes sites that aren’t mobile-friendly, flash navigation and slide shows, missing contact information and (yikes) background music that plays when the page loads.

Perhaps simple, attractive, and focused is what hotel websites need more than complex booking forms. I’ll be curious to see how this approach works for hotels, and more specifically what types of hotels it attracts.

Brinzan isn’t the only one to determine a new WordPress option is a smart bet for hotel businesses. Others, like Brian Casel, have come to similar conclusions. Casel’s Hotel Propeller service takes a different approach, which is to offer a hosted service for $29 per month. The service is still built on top of the WordPress platform, though, and offers a handful of different themes for use by subscribed members.

There are also occasional hotel theme offerings from known theme shops, and at the moment a search for “hotel” on ThemeForest pulls up more than 60 WordPress themes. This doesn’t make hotel themes as popular a subgenre as certain others — business and portfolio themes, anyone? — it’s certainly a growing one.

Customer trends and selecting your own clients

Competition in this space may demand more time and focus from Brinzan over time, as any success Hermes Themes sees will most certainly lead to others jumping at the chance to compete with hotel themes at his prices. Right now, along with his Hermes Themes project, Brinzan is the co-founder and lead developer of WPZOOM. WPZOOM began as a popular WordPress blog in 2008, and grew into a theme shop in 2009 when it released its first theme.

Balancing the needs of two projects can be difficult, as anyone who has tried it can tell you. Brinzan admits to taking this into consideration with Hermes Themes.

“I’m trying to better manage my time,” he said. “But at the moment WPZOOM takes more time of course. Hermes still needs to take off,” he said with a smile.

His time spent with WPZOOM is in part what inspired him to make the pricing decisions he has with Hermes Themes so far — specifically, the time spent working with clients WPZOOM worked with.

Brinzan is still co-founder and lead developer of WPZOOM, and currently splits his time between it and his new project Hermes Themes.

“I sometimes provide customization services to our customers,” he told WPCandy, and said that in doing so he has worked with quite a few people. Brinzan explained that customers would regularly not mind paying $69 for a theme — the current standard package price at WPZOOM — and then an additional $200 for customization work.

“This made me think they wouldn’t mind paying $200 from the start, for a product that is very close to their needs.”

But it’s not all about pricing at what the customer will pay — though that plays big into the thinking here — Brinzan is attempting to select his clients too. “Again, from my experience with WPZOOM, we have discovered something very peculiar: clients that pay more are somewhat less needy, if I may say so.”

He explained that clients utilizing coupons and discounts are more likely to also utilize WPZOOM’s support system, sometimes firing off ten support questions in as many minutes. These customers also tended to ignore instructions, documentation, and video tutorials more often.

“So I am thinking that such a price would attract mostly people that really need a theme, and really like what they see,” Brinzan said. “No impulse shopping.”

Theme pricing comes up yet again

I’ve heard the idea of a thousand dollar theme discussed a couple of times in the WordPress community the last year or two. Usually it’s a heck of a conversation starter. What makes a theme worth that much money? Will we ever see that sort of thing available in the current theme marketplace?

Theme pricing, do’s and don’t’s, and the direction of the theme market is a topic that comes up often in the WordPress community. The earliest pricing milestone I can remember probably came in early 2008, when designer Tung Do — who at the time ran WPDesigner.com — announced a $5 theme club.

“This made me think they wouldn’t mind paying $200 from the start, for a product that is very close to their needs.”

Now, at that point in time, theme clubs were a bit of a new idea. Themes more often cost around ten times that price or even higher, and no membership system even approached a price that low. The themes Do was producing were of a solid quality. It was a mis-match of price and quality that was bound to stir pricing discussions.

A couple of years later, in 2011, Mike McAlister started a heck of a discussion around his analysis of the $35 theme, a standard price point on ThemeForest at the time. His essay was great, but the more than two hundred comments following it were even more interesting.

Last year Jake Caputo’s ThemeThrift project brought up theme pricing again, but this time with the onus on the customer. ThemeThrift customers could choose which price to pay, with even the option to pay nothing in the beginning. Caputo later adjusted the pricing options, removing the zero dollar amount, and adding higher tiers that offered a bundled plugin along with it.

We’ve seen prices on themes go low to test the waters and draw attention, but not nearly as often have we seen prices go high. Is it about time for a thousand dollar theme?

The evolution of the value of WordPress themes

What exactly does the future of theme prices hold?

I tend to think we’ll see even more pricing toward the middle amongst marketplaces and your average theme shops, with up selling to developer packages in many cases. Smaller shops and individuals are likely to get a bit more bold, maybe not quite to the extreme of a $5 theme club or a $200 theme, but daring nonetheless. We’ll also see more specialty shops like Hermes Themes pop up, I think, to cater toward the growing need for WordPress themes geared more specifically toward certain needs.

Another way to ask the question is: what is the true value of a theme? Serious people are using WordPress and looking for professional themes to make it shine. Seeing theme developers and business owners take on that challenge is exciting to watch.

The post The true value of a WordPress theme: Hermes Themes and a $200 price tag appeared first on WPCandy.

In our second Theme Show episode of the new year, “The Compliment Sandwich”, we stick to our new format and dish over four new themes and pick one to rule them all. Well, for another seven days that is.

As a reminder, each episode of The Theme Show we tear apart four different themes — one for each of us to spend time with and properly review — and at the end of the show decide which one deserves the highest regard. Some weeks that might mean the best of the worst, and others it might be a really, really tough decision.

This week we review and discuss the Bloggit theme by WPExplorer, BlueBird by Just Good Themes, Identify by ThemeBros, and Soundstage by Mint Themes. Of course only one theme could be the supreme winner this time around — and you’ll just have to listen in to find out which one did it.

Episode #12 Show Notes

• 00:00 Introduction
• 02:00 Bloggit theme review by Ray
• 15:20 BlueBird theme review by Justin
• 23:20 Break: Splinters, hot dogs and screenshots
• 26:53 Identify theme review by Ryan
• 41:44 Soundstage theme review by Nick
• 55:45 Final debate and a winner is chosen!

• MP3 file – 1:01:25 and 29.8 MB
• Subscribe on iTunes
• Audio RSS Feed

The post Theme Show #12: “The Compliment Sandwich” appeared first on WPCandy.

Let’s start this review with an honest admission.

While in the 90s I collected (and read, mostly) tech books like they were going out of style. These days I barely get my hands around a book, let alone consume it.

Frankly, I don’t have the time. I have three kids (two are twins) and a wife. I have a mortgage. I co-organize WordPress meetups, and head up a WordCamp committee. That’s not including the remaining bits of time i form together to approximate a “life”.

But what’s the point of this admission? To prove to you that I only have time to devote to reading books that meet a certain level of quality and useful content – not to mention only those that age well. And I am confident in saying that Professional WordPress Design And Development is one of those books.

Great for budding developers

It’s difficult to understand why this book wouldn’t be on any WordPress developer’s shelf. If you haven’t installed WordPress before, for instance, the first chapter guides you through it pretty well. There’s not much to the infamous “5 minute install” but the authors do provide great screenshots and cover some of the potential problems that could arise even in that seemingly easy procedure.

Soon after that, the book jumps into file structure and covering important points like the precious wp-config.php. What I appreciated is that they didn’t gloss over this — and if you’ve seen any documentation online (especially from some hosting companies) you know glossing over wp-config.php is commonplace. They actually took the time to review almost every line of code and why you would want turn certain settings on or off.

“It’s difficult to understand why this book wouldn’t be on any WordPress developer’s shelf.”

For beginning developers, it’s nice the book discusses WP_DEBUG. It’s embarrasing how long it took for me to learn about that after I started developing with WordPress.

And being a more seasoned developer, it’s great that they include reminders of WP_POST_REVISONS and SAVEQUERIES. Thanks to this book, I can quickly skim over a few pages when a particular wp-config setting slips my mind. That will be my method, at least until I can find better memory medication.

I love that the book covers local WordPress environments so early on in the book — as early as Chapter 3. Many developers today still use the old fashioned “edit-save-upload via FTP-check the site-repeat” as their core development process. Why anyone would want to do this is insane to me. I like that Professional WordPress addresses the “why” and then talks about how to configure your stack and WordPress for local development.

The quality here is equal to that of some of the best WordCamp talks given on the same subject.

My favorite parts

I’ll admit, I‘ve yet to read the whole book from cover to cover. But the beauty is you don’t have to. Like most well written technical books that cover a wide range of information, you can jump directly into the section that you need to know on the spot.

I do, however, have some favorite parts. One of them is Chapter 7 which deals with custom post types, custom taxonomies, and metadata. There is plenty of information about these topics on the web today, but I liked how the book made understanding the concept and the use of custom post types a breeze.

Professional WordPress even reminds you to flush the rewrite rules in WordPress when registering new custom post types, which some miss. Often the “have you flushed your rewrite rules” question in WordPress development is, I think, equal to the “did you turn it off and then turn it on” from the greater IT support world.

Brad Williams, David Damstra, and Hal Stern collaborated on Professional WordPress Design and Development.

I also liked Chapter 8, which focused on plugin development. Anyone eager to create WordPress plugins would benefit from this section immensely. If we could start all new plugin developers on the right path using nonces, validating and sanitization of content, and so on, then the world would be a better place.

I’m talking rainbows and unicorns. Or something like that.

Finally, I also appreciated that the book covers some popular filter and actions hooks, not to mention a little further in you’re walked through creating an example plugin yourself.

Going above and beyond

Finding a great hotel that’s clean, affordable, and reliable is always a plus for a traveler. But finding the same hotel that leaves a mint on your pillow is golden.

While Professional WordPress gives you the full course of WordPress development, it’s the “mint on the pillow” that shows they put some extra love and attention into it, and didn’t just stop with the more common development topics.

For example, in Chapter 11, there’s some great tips on advertising and monetizing your site. Chapter 12 covers principles of user experience, usability testing, and even how to optimize your site for search engines. Granted these subjects can be books in themselves, but the authors give you just enough practical tips and tricks to get you moving in the right direction. There’s so much misinformation on the web and in printed form, that I’m glad to see these smaller subjects were included.

I also found the sections on caching, scaling, and securing your WordPress site to be equally as informative. Seasoned WordPress developers would also appreciate their coverage, however brief, of the WordPress community.

Complaints!

“My only complaint is that they didn’t mention BuddyPress enough.”

What? There are complaints? Does this mean I’ll have to hide from Brad Williams at all future WordCamps?

Easy now, brothers and sisters. My only complaint is that, as a BuddyPress developer, they didn’t mention BuddyPress enough. And I know, you can’t fit everything into the book. I get that. But I figured I would throw that bone out there for consideration.

And if you think that’s bad, you haven’t heard the moaning from those dedicated bbPress developers. Oh boy.

In conclusion…

Brad Williams, David Damstra, and Hal Stern are all excellent developers. You can tell they put a lot of blood, sweat, and spilled beer into this book.

If my house was on fire — assuming my family is safe, duh — and I had to save one book, it wouldn’t be this book. It would be the book filled with my life’s memories, photos, and cash. Maybe if I could take two books. Okay, If I could grab three books, then Professional WordPress would definitely make it out of the fire with me.

I highly recommend Professional WordPress for any WordPress developer – new or experienced. It’s worth having on your shelf.

This review was completed using a copy of the book provided by the publisher.

The post Review: Professional WordPress Design and Development, 2nd Edition appeared first on WPCandy.

About two years ago (yeah, really!) I reviewed the WP-Table Reloaded WordPress plugin on our show The Sweet Plugin. After a rebranding and reworking of the code, WP-Table Reloaded is now TablePress. The developer Tobias relaunched the plugin, renamed it with a much better name, and revamped a number of the plugin’s features.

One of the biggest improvements has to be the all tables view, which feels almost exactly the same as the edit posts and pages WordPress screens do. Honestly, the closer any plugin or theme can get to WordPress core UI, or feeling like a real part of WordPress, the better it is.

Adding and editing tables feels better too. A lot of what was there before is still in place, but nicer. Manipulating table content feels much better; you can drag and drop rows and columns around and change the display order of table cells with one click. This sort of table manipulation would have been much more time consuming under the old WP-Table Reloaded plugin.

TablePress makes the table shortcodes much more obvious too. Each table management screen includes the table’s shortcode at the top of the screen, and they’re quickly available from the all tables screen too.

TablePress also implements something I don’t remember seeing in WP-Table Reloaded, and that’s the ability to choose where in the WordPress dashboard the TablePress menu is located. This is one of those options which I could see popping up in any of the more complex WordPress plugins out there. Let users choose whether the menu item displays right below comments, at the bottom below settings, within the tools menu, and so on. I think this is an approach I can get behind — again, only in plugins that potentially warrant prominent menu placement in the first place.

Where to grab TablePress

You can download TablePress from the WordPress.org plugin directory, and based on everything I’ve seen there’s really no reason to hold back. Your tables will need to be exported from the old plugin and imported into the new plugin, but really that seems like a pretty seamless process.

Tobias also runs TablePress.org, a nice resource for using the plugin.

Have you switched over to TablePress yet? What do you think of the new, rebranded, and updated WordPress plugin?

The post Sweet Plugin: TablePress, the successor to WP-Table Reloaded appeared first on WPCandy.

Reader is a theme by new theme shop WP Minima, a brand which sells entirely on ThemeForest at the moment. They’ve released two themes so far, one free and one paid. This is the paid theme, which costs $35.

Reader, being both new and minimalistic, caught my eye last week. A lot of the time, theme designers will put something together and call it minimal, almost as an excuse to not put much thought into what’s designed. Or to leave things kind of plain. At least that’s the impression I get when looking at some WordPress themes that get released.

In this case, I think it’s clear that WP Minima put time into Reader and made real decisions. I don’t agree with all of them, but there’s a consistent, strong design aesthetic here that doesn’t come across as what I’ll call “lazy minimal”. It’s minimal, in a good way.

Digging further in

Digging further into the theme, there are design decisions I like as well as those I don’t. The first subtle bit I liked was the fuzzy hover effect on the blog’s title. It’s a neat, happy effect that makes the title of the blog a little more interesting. A lot of themes will make their titles and site headings interesting by dropping in a logo – a logo, of course, that won’t make any sense on a user’s site once they get rolling with the theme. This design touch makes any blog title interesting, just be tweaking the text itself a little.

When rolling over the title of the site, it gets all fuzzy. Is it weird that I find things like that really nice?

That said, some of the interactions aren’t as great. There are two sliding effects worked into the theme that bug me. Reader hides things behind a click-trigger, which requires the visitor to click to view (what I consider) important information.

These triggers are in two places: the site description in the header, and every post’s date and comment counts on archive pages. In both cases, as a visitor, I’m not very likely to click to see that information. That information is something I’ll see and will catch my eye as I scroll down the page. Requiring user action in these areas is really the biggest detractor toward using this theme, in my mind.

Plugin included with the theme

The Minima Shortcodes plugin that came along with the theme is half good and half “meh”. Obviously dropping shortcodes into a plugin is a big plus, and that they seem intended to work with any Minima theme when it’s installed is a great idea.

The plugin’s positive offerings include a few nice call-out styles. There’s a message box, an intro, some highlighting, and so on. With these classes matched across their offering of themes it has its usefulness. I would also like to see the plugin with an option to drop in minimal styles (no pun intended) so the shortcodes can maintain their general look and feel even when other themes are active.

The intro and message shortcodes in user within a post. They’re subtle, but noticeable.

Then there’s the less exciting side of the plugin, which is a set of shortcodes clearly included for average users. There’s one that forces line breaks so they aren’t stripped out by the WordPress editor, for instance.

I should say these types of shortcodes aren’t exciting to me, but might be a breath of fresh air to users who have complained about the WordPress WYSIWYG editor before. So I don’t really consider these a negative inclusion, but more of a “meh”.

What Reader really gets right

Some of my favorite things about Reader, honestly, are things that it just gets right. There aren’t any nasty theme settings screen with the WP Minima branding on it, which is a relief quite honestly.

In addition, the theme acts as you’d expect it to when it comes to basic WordPress features. Sidebars, widgets, menus, even background colors and the theme customizer operated exactly as I would have wanted. It sounds silly, both when discussing that and writing it down here, but it’s truly shocking how many themes out there just fall apart under these basic sanity checks.

Seriously, more theme developers should really dive in and make their themes work with the theme customizer. It makes working with themes so much better.

I also really like the implementation of the featured images. Having them fit across the post block gives it a good feel, and would keep me excited to find – or take, rather – images to fit with each post.

Post formats in Reader seem to each be styled uniquely, which is great to see any theme doing. I’m also partial to theme-specific WYSIWYG editor styles, which Reader pulls off near perfectly.

Final thoughts

Reader is a solid minimal blogging theme, and has gone on my list of themes to recommend to anyone looking to just get a site up and get writing. It’s not a perfect theme, but I think I would still rank it up there with the solid simplicity of the default Twenty Ten through Twelve themes, albeit with its own style.

Given that Reader is only the second theme to come out of WP Minima so far, I’d say it’s a shop to keep an eye on.

Oh, and if you’d like to hear further thoughts on Reader — and other awesome and sometimes-not-so-awesome WordPress themes — listen to the latest episode of the Theme Show podcast.

This review was completed using a copy of Reader provided to WPCandy by WP Minima.

The post Reader theme review: Minimal, but not in a lazy way appeared first on WPCandy.

Photo and graphic: Michael Kimb Jones

Michael Kimb Jones — or Kimb, as he prefers people call him — sat waiting for his time to stand up and speak. There he sat, on the ground floor of Surgeons Hall at the Royal College of Surgeons, running over the things he was about to talk about. His presentation was for WordCamp Edinburgh in 2012, the largest WordPress unconference event in the UK.

The slide sitting behind him on the projector, waiting for him to start, read “How I Made WonderThemes.” His pitch on the WordCamp Edinburgh wiki said that his presentation included the initial concept for WonderThemes, cost breakdowns, development struggles and how he sometimes felt like he was “punching [himself] in the face.”

Because this presentation wasn’t all positive. In it Kimb would tell his WonderThemes story, as well as the various elements that contributed to him closing his WordPress theme marketplace down and moving on.

It was just three years earlier, in July of 2009 at the WordCamp held in Cardiff, Wales, where Kimb first remembers drawing the inspiration for a theme shop of some sort. The drive to the conference from his home was eight hours, he said, but was “well worth it.”

In 2009 the state of the WordPress industry was quite different from today. Brian Gardner’s Revolution theme had only recently been brought under the new StudioPress banner. Thesis, ThemeForest, and WooThemes had each existed for only about a year. Heck, there weren’t even 50 WordCamps taking place that year. WordPress was in a crucial place, and poised to grow in big ways.

And Kimb found himself driving home from WordCamp feeling inspired. He had an idea. Seeing so many people in the community pulling together a business and selling their work — particularly seeing Tung Do, then known primarily as Small Potato, build and sell his blog for more than $60,000 — Kimb saw a theme shop in his future. After all, he had designed and built WordPress themes as a freelancer for some time.

He would need to build the business part time, however. Kimb worked as a web and digital manager for a hospital in the National Health Service. With a busy nine to five, his theme business would need to come after work wrapped each day. And so that’s what he did.

From a theme shop to a theme marketplace

The initial idea was a theme shop reminiscent of WooThemes. Kimb simply wanted to make and sell themes. He’d put together his own branded shop and sell his work. After he started digging into the details, however, Kimb noticed the process itself was pretty difficult. Putting up a store and selling to customers elegantly was easier said than done, particularly for someone like he that was less a developer than a designer.

On top of that, Kimb wasn’t satisfied with the terms he saw at ThemeForest. He disagreed with the percentages the marketplace took (anywhere from 30% to 50% or more) and the non-GPL nature of their licensing. Both seemed wrong to him, and he wanted to make something better. Smaller, perhaps, but ideologically better.

With these thoughts in mind, Kimb started down the road toward building and launching his own WordPress theme marketplace.

Being primarily a designer, Kimb found himself spending time up front initial design and branding work. The WonderThemes superhero mascot — which we’ve featured a couple of times in posts on WPCandy — was one of the first elements to come together.

Photo and drawing: Michael Kimb JonesKimb says the mascot was one of the earliest pieces of the marketplace to come together. As a designer, he was most comfortable starting there.

Kimb chose the name and purchased WonderThemes.com about six months after his inspirational WordCamp experience in Edinburgh. At the time Kimb and his partner Jonny Allbut — who has since moved on to other projects — planned on building the marketplace around their theme framework, appropriately titled Wonderflux. The idea was for the themes sold on WonderThemes to all be built on top of the WonderFlux framework.

As time went by, however, they ironed out the marketplace concept just as much as the code behind the platform. Before long their marketplace concept expanded to allow any framework theme, and later any theme at all. Wonderflux was less and less important to WonderThemes, though it is still under active development, for those interested.

“It was more of a long slog.”

After spending some time in beta, the WonderThemes marketplace fully launched in May of 2011. After that it took about two months for their store to list nine themes from seven different theme authors.

“It took a long time to get out there,” Kimb admitted. “It wasn’t a lean startup. It was more of a long slog.” He attributes a number of things to the delay in launching, the biggest reason possibly that he was not a strong enough developer to build out the marketplace himself. Instead, he bootstrapped the development of WonderThemes using what was available and by hiring work out to a more competent developer.

The final site ended up built on WordPress Multisite, using the MarketPress plugin, Gravity Forms and bbPress as the support system. “It was cobbled together and it worked,” Kimb said.

“It was cobbled together and it worked.”

The WonderThemes system wasn’t without its hard edges, though. Kimb hired a developer to build in the digital downloads capability to the plugin he was using, since it didn’t yet support it. This was great, in a sense, because it worked exactly the way he wanted: instant PayPal transfers to vendors when customers made theme purchases, while automatically removing the WonderThemes percentage.

This was before plugins like Easy Digital Downloads existed to make this process so much simpler, Kimb said.

Technical issues aside, Kimb found it difficult to bring in real revenue with the terms he had set. “One of the stupid things, although at the time sounded like a good idea,” he told WPCandy, “was to give every early adopter the maximum rate of 95% per sale.” In other words, for any vendor who joined WonderThemes early on, every sale netted them 95% of the theme’s cost.

This, of course, left only 5% of each sale for Kimb.

Graphic: Michael Kimb JonesKimb used this graphic to show the progression in the thinking behind WonderThemes. What began as a theme shop became a very open, and very generous, theme marketplace.

Difficulty gaining traction

“Whenever a sale would go through, and I’d get my three or four dollars in payout,” Kimb said, “I’d think if this was just a little bit more, than I could at least reinvest that.”

Kimb also discovered that many vendors would sign up and then leave. They wanted to check the place out a bit, he explained, but then left when they weren’t “feeling it”.

These theme developers proved very difficult to sway over to WonderThemes. “Vendors are always going to go where the market is,” Kimb told WPCandy. “It’s because people use it, it’s not just because it’s marketed to the hilt. People would say if you want a WordPress theme, go to ThemeForest. ThemeForest is the place where a lot of people start their journey into WordPress themes. A lot of people haven’t heard of branded theme shops but have heard of ThemeForest.”

Customers proved equally difficult to bring to the site. Kimb reached out and was a sponsor for two WordCamps in an attempt to grow his customer base.

His tone sharpening, Kimb said, “Never buy t-shirts by the way. They’re the worst decision.” He purchased shirts to hand out to attendees at the event. “I would ask people afterward, oh, you got a free t-shirt, did you buy a theme? Nope. It was just a terrible idea.”

A screenshot of the WonderThemes website, in the beta period leading up to having themes to list there.

A year after launching, stepping in front of the room at WordCamp Edinburgh, Kimb told much of this story.

“It’s been a year now,” he said thinking back, “and the site’s not getting any traction. I can either kill it off, I can re-engineer it, or I can continue with the current system but invest more time and money and maybe get a partner.”

He said, “The ultimate outcome was to turn it off, because I didn’t have any more cash to invest in it.”

WonderThemes closed its doors. During the six months it was active 215 users registered, 150 of which were vendors wanting to potentially sell products. Just fourteen vendors became active, which a combined total of thirty themes at its most active. Some were free themes, but most were commercial.

WonderThemes saw 17 sales during its operation. Kimb made about $50. The site itself cost upwards of $10,000.

Lessons learned

At WordCamp Kimb presented on the lessons he learned, and told the attendees that even though the business failed it doesn’t feel like that much of a failure because of what he learned along the way.

“I think offering a 95% cut of sales was a mistake,” Kimb told WPCandy. After building a bit of an audience he fully intended to reign back the high vendor cut and offer more reasonable rates. The more extreme deal was simply to bring in vendors early, he said.

Kimb also regrets not implementing an affiliate system, which he says was mostly coded before he closed the marketplace down. He would have built the marketplace itself quite differently if doing it again, as well — likely not on top of the WordPress platform at all. At the very least, he said, he wouldn’t have waited until WordPress and WordPress MU merged into one system before really building out the WonderThemes platform.

In reflection, though, Kimb recognized that all things considered, particularly nowadays, the technical side of a marketplace built on WordPress really isn’t that difficult. Managing the marketplace after launch, he said, is really the important and difficult part.

It would be understandable, particularly after all the effort spent on the project, that Kimb would have his own frustrations with that part of the industry. It turns out that’s not quite the case.

“It’s funny,” Kimb told me. “I was incredibly cynical before. I remember signing up for ThemeForest and thinking this is terrible, for the terms and the percentages.” But after seeing the other side of the marketplace coin, so to speak, he feels differently. Envato isn’t the only company out there pursuing a stable marketplace model.

“The management of the marketplace after launch is really the important and difficult part.”

“Apple isn’t evil, and Envato isn’t evil. They just want to be in a position where they can bring enough money in to keep the business going and grow the business. And that’s what Envato has done and I have a lot of respect for them.”

And Kimb said as much during his WonderThemes story at WordCamp Edinburgh in 2012. Three years earlier, in Wales, he had presented a slide deck titled “WordPress in the Health Sector”, based on his experience with WordPress in the hospital he worked in. Now his presentation covered the building and eventual closing of his WordPress business — quite a journey, really.

After reminiscing with me for a little over an hour, Kimb sort of chuckled to himself. “I always anticipated that I would set up the marketplace,” he said, “and then take a couple of weeks coming up with some new and fresh themes, and sell them myself. I would sell them on the marketplace that I built. Then I would get 100% of the money and it would all be great.”

All said and done, WonderThemes was open for about six months. It brought in around fifty dollars and a handful of vendors, and Kimb ended up printing a lot of WonderThemes shirts. And he never did get around to releasing a single theme of his own.

Kimb is still an active WordPress user, designer, developer and evangelist. He runs a local monthly meetup in Sheffield, and plans to speak at WordCamp UK in June and the Edinburgh WordUp in April. Since closing WonderThemes he has refocused on building his freelance client base while also moving into the event and education space with the MAKE DO Initiative. All of this, of course, while still working nine to five for the National Health Service..

You can follow Kimb on Twitter at @mkjones.

The post The Story of WonderThemes: Why starting a WordPress theme marketplace isn’t easy appeared first on WPCandy.

Let’s talk about WordPress meetups! On this episode of The WPCandy Roundtable Podcast, I asked four awesome WordPress meetup co-organizers to chat about what makes a quality meetup and how they do what they do. We also went over what they would recommend to new WordPress meetup organizers.

Joining me on the podcast are Angie Meeker (Columbus, Ohio WordPress Meetup), Brian Richards (Grand Rapids, Michigan WordPress Meetup), Steve Zehngut (Orange County WordPress Meetup) and Aaron Jorbin (Washington, D.C. WordPress Meetup). These folks know what they’re talking about.

Still not sure about listening? Steve Zehngut and Aaron Jorbin each co-organize events with a full roster count of over 800 and 1,200, respectively. That’s a couple of times the size of most large WordCamps, folks.

• MP3 file (27.2 MB)
• Audio RSS Feed

We discussed a number of issues that will face new meetup organizers. Some of my favorites this episode were:

• What’s the best advice for brand new meetup organizers who haven’t started their event yet?
• What sort of format does your meetup use?
• Where do you find your meetup speakers?
• How do you keep your community involved when not meeting?
• When does your group meet? Do you find weekdays or weekends to be best for meetings?

We talked for about 50 minutes and had a great time. If you’re interested in running — or improving — your own WordPress meetup I highly recommend this podcast.

What about your WordPress Meetup experience?

I know for a fact that plenty of you organize the meetups in your city too. I’d love to have your comments on these topics as well. What did you find helpful when you started your event?

If you aren’t organizing your meetup, and also don’t have a meetup in your area, what’s  holding you back? Have you ever considered running it for the community in your city?

The post WPCandy Roundtable #3: WordPress Meetup Discussion with 4 co-organizers appeared first on WPCandy.